Jenn Air / Maytag Dim clock display

[schleven]

I had a customer with a dim clock and dark oven temp on a built in Jenn Air (made by Maytag) oven.
They didn't want to spend $150 (or more depending on parts store) + my labor to fix it.

I did some research and found that the C3 capacitor on the clock/display board is the problem.

I went to Fry's Electronics and bought a replacement capacitor for about $2.  All I had to do was un-solder the old one and put the new one in place.

You need to have soldering skills to do this.

Bottom line, I charged the customer my basic labor rate and $75 for rebuilding the board.

The saved quite a bit, and I made more than I would have replacing the board.

I imagine this would work on many models.

I plan on repairing many more boards in the future.

Any thoughts on repairing vs. replacing control boards in appliances?

[AJ]

Thanks for posting that fix. One of our members repairs a lot of different boards. His website is http://fixyourboard.com

I know years ago as the maytag MAH3000 washer control boards started going out because of the door lock wax motors I tried to repair them.

There are still kits sold on ebay to repair them boards, but I found with the boards I repaired a lot of them ended up failing again down the road and I got tired of the call backs.

I do look over boards for bad solder connection, but other then that I replace bad board with new ones and move on.

Please keep us updates as to if your repair last or not. It sure sounds simple enough to do.

[krazytech]

How did you do research on the boards? I too repair boards but find little information about them...

[tgoods]

Thanks for the tip.  Looks like I'll be saving customers some money.

 AJ, I've done a couple dozen Neptune board repairs and not one callback.  I did have one that didn't work at all.  I think it was a bad new triac.  It was my last triac and they needed it fixed so I ended up replacing the board on that one.  Don't buy the kits. The NTE5656 triac cost less than $2 at Mouser or Newark and a 3.9k resistor is only a few cents.

[AJ]

tgoods

I'm glad you have had better luck them me at repairing the old neptune boards. It's been years sense I tried to rebuild one and it was before any so called kits were being sold.

Living in a rural area some of my service calls can involve a lot of windshield time. After a few long distance call backs I decided it just was not worth trying to rebuild them.

[schleven]

As far as how I found what to replace, I googled the problem and found several pages with the info about the capacitor.

Most of the times when it is a capacitor, the bottom or top bulges out some.

When rebuilding a board, or replacing a board, the one thing thats most important is to make sure that there was not another problem that caused the board to go bad.

[kebisch]

I saw a post on this problem; it said the electrolytic capacitor was bad. 
I took out the board and found 4 electrolytic capacitors. 
Since I did not which one might be the problem,
I replaced all 4.   
Now it works fine. 
A fairly simple DIY project.  User a heat sink. 
Even if you spend 10 bucks on capacitors,
it is well worth a try to avoid replacing that %^&* expensive board. 

[AJ]

Good to know kebisch, thanks.