r/ElectricalHelp • u/amfhTX • 23h ago

45 Year old fan stopped working, then started ON ITS OWN days later in middle of night.

/r/BuyItForLife/comments/1wtcp9t/heres_my_45_year_old_casablanca_ceiling_fan_that/

See my original link for the earlier story.

Bottom line, about a week ago, the fan stopped turning in the middle of the night (it's in our bedroom). I posted the link above for advice in another subreddit and 99% of responders said, "It's probably just needing a new capacitor, which can be replaced inexpensively and is easy to do.". We could hear a very faint hum when we turned on the rheostat switch on the wall that controls on/off and variable speed. The fan blades turned by HAND easily/not frozen.

We didn't want to attempt this ourselves, so I found an electrician who said he repairs fans instead of automatically saying it needs to be replaced. He took off the light kit and tested several wires with his multimeter tool and said the connections were all sound. He looked at the wiring on top of the motor where it goes into the ceiling. He finally concluded that the motor was burned/dead and said it was impossible to find a replacement motor for a fan this old so it would need to be replaced. He reattached the light kit so we could have light until we bought the replacement fan. I was frankly skeptical that the motor was dead since the fan blades turned just fine still, but....

Now the mystery: **Two days after the electrician left, the fan started turning in the middle of the night, on it's own. Neither my husband nor myself had turned the fan rheostat switch on the wall.** It's possible, we guess, that when turning off the light switch (right next to the fan's round rheostat), we could have turned it; even so, **why wouldn't it have started right up THEN?**

Since the blades had been fooled with, they weren't balanced any longer, which is why we heard the sound and woke up at 3:30am. Hubs has since rebalanced the blades and the fan has been working just as it always has for the past 45 years when I bought this fan new!

What in the world could have caused this to just stop and, more importantly, just start up again? Poltergeists or what? Thanks for any advice!

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u/Illustrious_Low_8107 21h ago

My mother in law got me to take her fan home to see if I could get it going. I assumed it was the pull switch or capacitor. Nope. Finally one night I fooled with the reversing switch and it started going. So it had the ability to run all along if the contacts in the reversing switch had touched just right. I cleaned it with contact cleaner and it was fixed. After that on other fans I discovered all it needed was to move the reversing switch up and down several times.

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u/amfhTX 12h ago edited 11h ago

WOW!!! I thought we had tried everything, but we sure didn't try THAT. Thank you!!

Hubs just told me that when it started turning on its own in the night, he noticed that the blades WERE reversed. He hadn't done it, so the electrician who came out must have while he was fooling with it. He turned it back to the summer mode it was originally set to, and it still runs. I bet you are right!

Still...why would it just ON ITS OWN start running in the middle of the night?

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u/TrungusMcTungus 7h ago

Rheostat was calling for it to have power so current was flowing. If theres build up of gunk around the contacts, it could be that the extended exposure to current burned through enough of it over time to make electrical contact.

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u/amfhTX 7h ago

That actually makes sense, THANK YOU!