Ferm Chamber Evaporator (internal) Fan Died

General
1

Hi All,

About 8 months ago I picked up an old 430 litre Westinghouse upright freezer with removable shelves. It works great and can crash cool 50 litre batches really well.
My only issue with it is the frost free cycle - I need to do some more work to rip out the timer for that.

The problem is the internal fan that circulates the cold air from the evaporator has packed it in - well has been slowly packing it in for a while and now just doesn’t work.
It has a date stamped on it of Nov 1976… haha so not too bad a run for the old motor - I can’t image i’ll get 42 years out of the replacement fan I just purchased off eBay ($38).

Anyway, I’m wondering if the fan has finally died because it is designed to run in a cold environment and has been running full time in ~19c environment instead. Has anyone else had issues with the internal fans on ferm chamber dying prematurely?

It’s easily replaced so not a big deal (fortunately I managed to get through this ferm and chill before it completely died), but will be annoying if I need to keep replacing it every 12 months or so…

2

Ok so an update on this for anyone interested.
The evap fan is only supposed to run when the compressor runs, just like the condenser fan.

Looking more closely at the circuit in this freezer, the original wiring had the hot lead going into the thermostat, then back down to the common input on the frost free timer and then terminal 3 from the timer went both to the compressor and to the internal fan.
All I did initially was take the thermostat out and permanently close that connection, then run the compressor wire through my SSD. The result was that the other hot lead going to the internal fan wasn’t switched by my SSD and always had power.
Killed two birds with one stone over the weekend and removed the frost free timer and ran the evap fan from the SSD as well.
So now I won’t have annoying temp spikes from the frost free timer and the evap fan will only run when the compressor runs - …maybe I will get another 40 years out of it in the end… hahah