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Re: Whirlpool American Fridge Freezer broken down – help!

dufferuk wrote:Hi All,

Thought as this forum has been useful to me in the past I would shed some light on this problem. My machine suffered from this exact problem this weekend and I have found what fails on the board and fixed mine.

Over time it appears that the capacitor that makes up part of the firing circuit to the Compressor relay fails. There are four relays on board, three black, one orange (its the orange one that we are interested in as this enables the compressor). The relays are enabled from the microprocessor on the board via a triac controlling the switching of live onto a diode bridge and through a resistor and capacitor on the neutral side. Over a period of time the capacitor will break down and won’t be able to hold enough energy to fire the relay (door water solenoid problem) or enabling the cooling via the compressor.

The capacitors are four on a row, white in colour and have written on them .22/10 1.70MKP 250V~ this means that they are .22uf (micro farad or 220nf nano farad) with a 10{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} tolerance and are rated to 250vac.

What I know is that holding the PCB upright with the three black relays furthest from you, the four capacitors will be nearest to you. The far LEFT capacitor is to do with the icemaker ice eject mechanism, the far right capacitor is for the compressor. To test that this is your problem swap these two capacitors (outer two) and see if you machine starts to cool and that the compressor cuts in and out.

If this works for you replace the bad capacitor with a new one either from RS components or maplins (http://www.rswww.com or http://www.maplin.com). Make sure that you get the same capacitance but the voltage can be higher without any effect (I replaced mine with a 500vac one)

Please ensure that whislt working on the fridge that you have isolated the power supply and if you are not qualified call an engineer!! You will need a soldering iron and some solder to fix this.

I hope that this is helpfull to someone and should save you alot of money.

THanks for the help you’ve provided in this forum, it’s been of great use.

I’d have changed all 4 of the capacitors as illustrated in the instructions above, as I thought it’s just as easy to change 4 as it is to do just the 1.

Unfortunately after all of that it is still faulty, the symptoms of my freezer is that the panel display is permanently flashing approx 2 time a second and when you try to opperate the the ice dispensor the motor and lights pulsate approx 4 time a second and generally no ice is dispensed.

My model of freezer is a whirlpool S20B RSB21 American fridge freezer

Service codes 8586 151 15001
11 0409 021362

Now I did notice that there are simular capacitors on the panel pcb, is it worth replacing these to try and cure the problem, or is it more complicated than that?

Any help in this matter would be much appreciated as I don’t fancy shelling out £200 for some boards that could be easly be repaired.

Thanks for your help Mike

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