Quote:
Originally Posted by TriGlide
What surprised me is that when the motor was going bad that the breaker never tripped.. since the amps would surly go up as the motor degraded I would have thought the breaker would have tripped at least once or at the bitter end of the motors life but that did not happen in our case...
|
It depends on the failure mode.
DC motors usually use carbon "brushes" (which really are a rectangular chunk of carbon) as electrical contacts to provide power to the part that spins. They have a spring at the back to keep the tension up. If there is uneven wear, or the brush cracks, or the brush just wears down too much, or there is a bad connection inside the motor, then the motor just stops.
Our Tecma toilet stopped flushing a couple of times. I used a multimeter to see that the motor was an open connection for some reason. I thumped the motor with the handle of a screwdriver and it temporarily repaired whatever the issue was. Then we could flush it until we changed locations again. Another couple of thumps and it would flush again.
Ray
Linear Mode
