If you find yourself the victim of a botched condenser fan motor “repair” job, like this grasshopper was, you may need to know the wiring scheme for the fan motor. After the parts changing monkey finally gave up on brutalizing his refrigerator, here’s the conundrum our grasshopper was left with:
A local repair shop attempted to replace my condenser fan and in the process he removed the wires from the control board harness connector that mates with the fan harness connector. He couldn’t figure out how to put it back and eventually gave up. How hard can this be? I have the wiring diagram that was attached inside the refrigerator but it doesn’t show enough detail to re-install the connector.
There are 4 wires on the fan: Red, White, Yellow, and Blue. There are only 3 wires in the harness that connects to the control board: Red, White, and Pink. Schematic says Red is 12VDC, White is Fan Common, and Pink is Condenser Fan. Schematic doesn’t show the 4 wires between the fan motor and its harness connector. Only shows the Red, White, and Pink wires between control board and fan. The big question is what color wire from the control board mates with what color from the fan motor.
And the answer is…
Red to Red
White to White
Pink to YELLOW
The blue wire is RPM feedback to the main control which is not used.
In case you’re interested, here’s how the whole sordid story of appliance butchery ended up:
Issue: My refrigerator was making a ticking noise that my wife could not tolerate. (She’s the sensitive type)
I called a local repair company and the diagnosis was the condenser fan motor. The motor was running but supposedly the shaft was making noise. The repair tech had a lot of trouble removing the fan motor due to limited access on top of the fridge. He was complaining the whole time. When he left the fan wasn’t running but he attributed it to the system needing to warm up. He even called another tech who confirmed it. So I let him leave. The fan never came on.
The guy came back twice when I wasn’t home and my wife has no idea what he was doing but he eventually gave up and said call GE or another repair company. Here’s what I found.
1. The fan motor harness connector must pass through a very small hole that you cannot see. Apparently he just ripped the fan connector through because the old fan motor just has bare wires.
2. The mating connector on the harness back to the control board was in a bag when I took over the problem. I don’t know why it was removed but maybe it had something to do with him ripping the fan motor out. This is why I was inquiring here what the wire colors were for.
3. I attempted to put the wires back in the harness connector when I noticed one pin was broken. I don’t know if this was the cause of the problem or whether it just happened when he was trying to get it to work.
4. I didn’t know where to get this type of pin so I just went to Radio Shack and bought a different 4 pin connector and changed out the motor and mating harness. The fan started running immediately. Should it ever fail again the new one won’t mate with the new connector but it’s easy enough to change it out. I used the same type of connector you’d find on a computer hard drive.
As is stated in an earlier post, the condenser motor wiring for a GE Monogram built-in refrigerator is:
RED to RED
WHITE to WHITE
PINK to YELLOW
BLUE is not used (it is used on the evaporator fan which has a very similar motor to the condenser fan)
Samurai Appliance Repair Man
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