Hunter Ceiling Fan Light Repair

TL;DR Summary: The Limitor part you are looking at (T160: Labeled Y59 B 120C or similar) is a thermal/current limiting switch.  It has failed and is probably why your lights aren’t coming on.

A couple of weeks ago I flipped on the light to my kid’s room and I was startled by a PLINK and blue arc flash of death that signified that it was time to begin the ritual hunt knowing that there was, like, a 5% chance I would have any bulbs that would fit.  

Oh, it’s not like the socket or bulb are anything special - I was just playing the odds with my Schroedinger’s Lightbulb Cabinet of Utter Inconvenience.   Since I needed two 40W candelabra bulbs, it was likely I would find one 15W, one 40W standard socket bulb, and twenty-seven 100W outdoor flood lights.  If I need a flood light, there would be a completely different distribution of stuff there.  Maybe it would just be filled with scented candles and a whale oil lantern but it would almost certainly contain no flood lights.  I’m sure you have a junk drawer or pantry shelf with similar qualities in your house.  

So imagine my surprise when, lo and behold, there were two perfectly good 40W bulbs at the ready.  Awesome.  Let’s just screw them in and flip the ol’ switch and… nothing.

Hmmm…

The fan’s still working so maybe I didn’t screw in the bulbs tightly enough.  Nope, that’s not it.  Let’s try the pull-chain - I never use it, but, hey, you never know - while I was hunting for the bulbs maybe someone else in the house tried to be “helpful” and yanked the pull chain a random-but-odd-number of times (look, don’t even get me started…).  No dice.

“The pull switch must have died when the bulb blew.  Wonderful,” I thought.  I shut off juice to the fan, removed the bulbs, took off the housing, removed the switch and took it to the garage so I could write down the info for a replacement.  On a whim I screwed in the bulbs, got my multimeter, and measured resistance across the switch.  Low resistance.  I pulled the chain.  High resistance.  I pulled the chain.  Low resistance again.  Everything was fine.

Again, hmmm…

Well, maybe the switch had some crud in it and I knocked it loose taking it out. I put it back in the fan and, of course, nothing.  I wondered if I was getting power to the bulbs at all... I mean, the fan runs, the bulb must have been getting power before it blew, and all the breakers looked OK...But since you never know what kind of maniac wired your house it makes sense to check all sorts of things it makes no sense at all to check, you dig?

Since the wall switch felt mechanically "fine" (not loose, good action going from up to down then back) I decided to test for power to the bulbs at the fan. With the wall switch in the OFF position I got the expected 0.0VAC. In the ON position, though, I got less than 1.0 VAC but not zero. I mean, what gives? It's a switch, some wire, another switch, and some bulbs, right?

Wrong. I didn't notice the little part (pic in the upper left of this post) that was in series with the bulbs.  On the front it had the label “Y59 B 120C” and on the back it had “Limitor T160”. After some searching (I couldn’t find an exact match [9/27/15 edit: see comments for link to part]) I was able to determine that it was a thermal/current limiting switch.  If its surroundings get too hot (120C) or the current gets too high (B = 5 amps, I think), the switch opens and kills power to whatever it is that is causing the issue.

Good idea, right?  I guess, but in this case I'm questioning the reasoning behind installing it here.

I mean, 120C?!  Yikes!  This is higher than the melting point of many commercial grade plastics, but is thankfully under the melting point of PVC insulation. Based on the location of this item, the recommended max wattage of the bulbs, and the distance of the bulbs from the metal housing, things would have to be pretty bad for this tiny thing to decide that the only way to save the day is to shut off the lights while the apparently-engulfed-in-flames ceiling fan blades continue to merrily spin round and round...  

I can almost hear the calliope music now. 

Since the lights were off when I flipped the switch and stayed off after the remaining lightbulb popped off to join the choir invisible I was 100% sure this part did whatever it does to keep the inrush current under 5 amps while the tungsten filament vaporized (destroy itself, I guess).  No heat issue. No lasting over-current issue.

After some more searching on Hunter ceiling fans I discovered that lots of people have had this problem. I also discovered that some people REALLY, REALLY hate the Hunter corporation and Home Depot. It's all "lack of customer service" this and "horribly filthy expletive deleted" that. Entertaining but not super helpful. The Limitor website seems to disavow any knowledge of that exact part number, and the closest match I could find at AllElectronics was for a normally open switch, not a normally closed one.

A couple of sites, though, said some people simply bypassed the switch and things got back to normal.   The reasoning some gave for justifying the bypass was a little cavalier and/or conspiracy theory driven (ranty planned obsolescence stuff). 

Normally you don't want to bypass or defeat safety devices but, in this case, I couldn't come up with a scenario where the thermal part of the switch would ever be useful.  Maybe... and this is a pretty big "maybe"... if the room was already at the upper operating limit for the fan AND the bulbs inside were at or exceeded the max wattage AND the fan was not running then maybe the temperature inside the wiring housing could get to 120C, causing the switch to open in an attempt to cool down the unit. But, even then, once the unit cooled down the switch would (maybe) close and either a) arc weld itself shut or b) self destruct open.  

Exactly the way a lightbulb filament fails...

So why not use a thermal fuse to begin with?  Or "nothing"?  Does this thing also have some surge-suppressant capability that helps extend the life of the bulbs?  Maybe. If so, maybe it’s also there to extend the life of the pull-chain switch.  I’m sure there is a reason I am not smart enough to understand, and I wasn't going to armchair quarterback their engineering/sales/legal decisions any further. After all, the sun was going down and you need good light to fix a light (something that totally blew my six-year-old's tiny little mind).

So in the end I cut power to the fan, snipped out the part, stripped the wires, and twisted them together with the smallest wire nut I had. I reassembled the... uhh... assembly and flipped the wall switch. After cursing profusely in the gathering darkness for a few seconds I remembered that I yanked the pull chain to the light while I was putting it back together. Dummy.  Another pull and there was light.  

And I saw that it was good. 

I kept the two 40W incandescent  bulbs shining for a few hours and "measured" the housing temperature with the back of my hand. Nice and cool.

I might someday just out of curiosity take a thermocouple and actually measure the temperature inside the housing but I probably won't. If I notice that I am going through a lot more bulbs than usual I might revisit this issue, especially if I begin blowing through the newer fancy-schmancy expensive ones.  Time will tell.

All in all seems that the bypass surgery was a success - your results may vary.  If you do choose to bypass the part, do yourself and your family a favor - use your brain and be careful.  After all, I'm just some dude on the Internet and, as Richard Bach might say “Everything in this blog post may be wrong”.  

Good luck! 

Frankenfoods?

Hey!  I know what'd be fun! Showcasing my ignorance and rapidly declining cognitive abilities with a couple of quick pics!  Let's do it!

I have been driving past this sign along Route 58 every fall for about 10 years and this is the first time I was able to take a picture of it.  It's gotta be on purpose... right?  Right?

I sat there in the parking lot and read this sign half a dozen times but for some reason I could not for the life of me figure out that they meant A-1 Steak Sauce here.  I guessed "AI"was some fast food abbreviation I had never heard of or maybe it was slang marketing thing like "super-sized".  It bothered me enough to force me to type into Google "AI BACON CHEESEBURGER" when I got home that night.  I immediately felt so stupid that my next Google search involved looking for hospice providers that specialize in caring for folks who think that there might actually be such a thing as an Artificially Intelligent bacon cheeseburger...

Geocache Update November 2014

Now that it has cooled down a bit and the leaves have begun to fall in earnest it is once again perfect weather for Geocaching.  

We went out of town a few weeks back so my wife could visit with her relatives so the boy and I went and hit some caches around central Virginia.  The following Saturday he asked if we could go again so we spent the day cruising around our stomping grounds and finding what we could find.  A lot of new caches had popped up since I had last gone so it didn’t take too long to find an area that was dense enough where we wouldn’t be doing more riding around than walking.

He loves his backpack.  Lots of pockets mean lots of places to stuff snail shells, sea shells, cool leaves, cooler stones, and about a bazillion acorns.

Hiking through the woods with the six-year-old is a blast.  He is more jazzed about finding waterlogged, broken dollar-store trinkets in a muddy sandwich container under a rotten log than any sane person really has the right to be, and that energy is super-infectious.  Also, he is tenacious without being ridiculous about it.  That is, he’s not a quitter but he knows when to give up when we can’t find what we are looking for.  As the great philosopher W.C. Fields once said “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.  Then quit.  There’s no sense being a damn fool about it.”

“Besides, we can always come back some other time, right, dad?”  “You bet.”

It’s not entirely about the stuff in the caches, really, or even finding them at all (we are about 75% successful).  For both of us the coolest part is the hunt and exploring along the way.  For example, the picture you see in the upper left of this post is a California Redwood tree that someone transplanted to the middle of downtown Suffolk, Virginia in 1954.  It was my first time ever seeing one and I doubt I would have ever known it was there if I hadn’t been looking for geocache number GC2319B. (If you are reading this, TFTC, SN&P!)

Odd nooks of public land sit awkwardly in areas you would never expect.  Tiny jetties forty feet wide and a tenth of a mile long jut out into protected swamplands all over the place here – just park on the street and walk a “trail to nowhere” for a really rewarding view even if you aren’t rewarded by finding a cache.  It’s weird to be able to stand less than 75 yards from a CVS drugstore and still be enveloped by nature (pics below).  

 

That tree in the second photo had about two dozen vultures in it… just silently watching us not fall down and die, I guess.  Off-putting, sure, but cool nonetheless.

Rook Update: The rook I put into a geocache forever ago (see pic in sidebar) is now in South Wales.  It has traveled 10,000 miles since it was turned into a Travel Bug by the people who found it 16 months ago.  I am not sure what the owners have in store for it after it completes its “tour of Scottish castles” but I am thinking about offering to trade the D20 cache container I made for it should the little guy ever make it back to the States.  The D20 is (still) sitting in my garage taking up space and I (still) have no desire to be a CO for it. Nonetheless I would really like to see it used “out there somewhere”.

Geojunk Clock Update: Although a couple of pieces of the geocache treasure that had been hot-glued to it have fallen off, the clock is still ticking away as expected.  After 300+ caches, though, real-estate on it is at a premium so I might be forced to come up with a solution for what to do with new cache finds sooner than later.  

Also, I only have a couple of handfuls of the cipher discs and the little fish I made to trade so it will soon be time to plan for replacements.  Not sure what I will build next, but I doubt it will be puzzle-related.  

Maybe something with invisible ink, though… Hmmm…