Samw happened to me on Thursday. I was (figuratively) shocked when I bought the capacitor, though. I bought the same one for another unit back in 2021 and it was $11. This one was $32. Same brand. Same supplier. It felt criminal but it was better than hiring it out and being put on a two-week waiting list!
I’ve owned a manual for every car I’ve owned for the past twenty-five years and keep an OBDII scanner in all of our vehicles. General curiosity and concern for being broke down at an inopportune time makes it seem like a no-brainer. I have also made most of the repairs on my vehicle thanks to Haynes (and YouTube).
But then I have friends that couldn’t jump start if life depended on it. Seriously. They connected the cables to two random pieces of metal in the engine compartment and fried the whole computer and electrical sub systems. Over $12K in damage.
They don’t get a manual and they don’t want it. Even if you’re well off enough to pay for towing and hire out repairs, it absolutely blows my mind to think people wouldn’t want that security.
It’s tangential, but why Nintendo made the Switch without a quick and easy to access brightness setting is beyond me. Is it really so impossible for one of the biggest game console companies in the world to add a drag-from-edge brightness setting into their OS?
I love the games and really like a lot about the console but their software has almost always felt like it was at least a decade behind the rest of the world.
Okay, sorry. Done ranting.
I fix a LOT of random things for myself and as a side hustle. Google is sometimes good for that sort of thing but but adding “reddit” into the search field generally yields far better results.
I don’t mean to brag, but I was a very active Guide for a couple years and I am still in the top 10% even though I haven’t posted a review in two years. My profile info shows that I have had hundreds of thousands of views.
They gave me a pair of Google Guide themed socks. They were cheap, poorly sized, and wore thin quickly.
I’ve replaced a couple dozen. When I started out, all I had to do was buy a cheap (but reliable) multimeter and spend a half hour or so watching YouTube vids on how to test those kinds of capacitors.
They can be deadly dangerous if you don’t take precautions. It takes very little skill to replace, but the power to the compressor needs to be cut and the Fan and Herm terminals do need to be grounded/discharged to the common post before handling.
It’s still a very basic repair, though, and even in the +100° temps we’ve had here, it was worth the effort and only takes about ten minutes to remove, five to test, and five to replace and close it all up.