I simply have to share this saga with someone..
It all begun last Saturday with smoke alarm in my (weatherboard) house, while I was at home.. It turned out my daughter’s room was full of smoke.
I immediately switch off the main power and called fire brigade. It took them 7-8 minutes to arrive.. amazing! However the smoke ventilated away in the next couple of minutes and we all spent next hour looking for possible cause of this scare, nothing significant was found, but the consensus was the culprit was probably the evaporative cooling unit.
Next Monday I called the service to have a look at it.. Next day he went up on the roof, spent there 15 minutes, came back down and said all is OK. He even gave me the certificate... after collecting $180.
For the whole next week I was checking the wiring in the house and found nothing as a possible cause for fire alarm.
It was not very hot those days so we did not use cooling, but on Saturday morning, we did.. when fan stopped working almost instantly.
Today I decided to climb up and have a look at the cooling unit myself (I do not feel very safe any more on places like this, after all I am a mature man, right
?).
All seemed to be fine, but on closer inspection I noticed that the housing with driver circuits for the fan motor was suspiciously tightly closed.. so I opened it and, imagine, I found the starting capacitor turned into shapeless mass of burned plastic and paper.
I bet he did not even bother to open that box.. but I was actually happy because I found what was the cause of smoke alarm a week before.
And now, what to do with the service company?
I think I will give them a call and demand the repair for the money I already paid for worthless “OK” certificate..