Be gentle with me fellas. I'm new to this whole PCB repair thing. A friend was gonna throw away this NewAir wine fridge because the right side of the fridge had failed. I said I'd take a crack at it and here I am. So here we go.

Upon plugging in the fridge. The left side of the fridge has proper temperature display and interior lights, fans are spinning, and the red and green LEDs on the board are lit. All is well. The right side, temperature display is on but not showing numbers correctly, interior lights work, neither fan is spinning, and only the red LED on the board is lit.

Inspecting the questionable board reveals a single bulged capacitor. A replacement is ordered and installed. I plug the connections back in and give it power, it blows the big glass fuse. I unplug all connections except power and install a new fuse. This time I make one connection at a time. Everythings looking good. I have both LEDs, front display, interior lights, fans are spinning. I make the last connection, which was one of the wire connections, and the fuse blows again. So I disconnect my last connection, replace the fuse, power it on and.... no LED lights and one of the transistors actually popped. Thank goodness for safety glasses. So today I replaced the popped transistor and the C8 capacitor ( I read on a bunch of threads here that the C8 seems to go bad often.)

I put the board back in the fridge and connect power only, plug in the cord and I get nothing, no LED lights, no voltage at the glass fuse, nada. Seems to be stone dead. I did put my probes into the power connector and it's showing 120v so it's definitely the board.

I'd order a replacement board but alas I can find none and I do not know where to go from here with this repair. I've inspected the board front and back and can see nothing obvious to my amateur eyes. It's my first time and my only training has been YouTube and this forum. Any advice would be appreciated.

Attatched are some pictures of the board. You can see the bulged capacitor and the later popped transistor.

 

If it helps and you still have this, I found a few parts went bad and have a repair to an almost complete state. Board 1 is fully repaired and Board 2 is still having issues cooling fully but I think I have that almost solved. It is under Whynter repair. I also have some suitable part replacements, since some of the originals are no longer readily available.

Awesome to finally hear from someone. Sounds like these boards go down pretty regularly. I don't know if I have the technical skill/patience to keep tinkering on my bad board. Did your boards need a lot of replacement parts or was just a few capacitors?

 

Be gentle with me fellas. I'm new to this whole PCB repair thing. A friend was gonna throw away this NewAir wine fridge because the right side of the fridge had failed. I said I'd take a crack at it and here I am. So here we go.

Upon plugging in the fridge. The left side of the fridge has proper temperature display and interior lights, fans are spinning, and the red and green LEDs on the board are lit. All is well. The right side, temperature display is on but not showing numbers correctly, interior lights work, neither fan is spinning, and only the red LED on the board is lit.

Inspecting the questionable board reveals a single bulged capacitor. A replacement is ordered and installed. I plug the connections back in and give it power, it blows the big glass fuse. I unplug all connections except power and install a new fuse. This time I make one connection at a time. Everythings looking good. I have both LEDs, front display, interior lights, fans are spinning. I make the last connection, which was one of the wire connections, and the fuse blows again. So I disconnect my last connection, replace the fuse, power it on and.... no LED lights and one of the transistors actually popped. Thank goodness for safety glasses. So today I replaced the popped transistor and the C8 capacitor ( I read on a bunch of threads here that the C8 seems to go bad often.)

I put the board back in the fridge and connect power only, plug in the cord and I get nothing, no LED lights, no voltage at the glass fuse, nada. Seems to be stone dead. I did put my probes into the power connector and it's showing 120v so it's definitely the board.

I'd order a replacement board but alas I can find none and I do not know where to go from here with this repair. I've inspected the board front and back and can see nothing obvious to my amateur eyes. It's my first time and my only training has been YouTube and this forum. Any advice would be appreciated.

Attatched are some pictures of the board. You can see the bulged capacitor and the later popped transistor.

Just a quick note that may help...

For testing power circuits one of the tricks is to run the circuit up a little at a time, if you can.
This means if it runs on 12 volts normally, you would start it out at 1v, then 2v, then 3v, etc., up to 12v. This gives you a chance to watch the input current to see if it rises up too much at the lower voltages. You can often test something like this without blowing out any fuses or transistors.

Obviously, this means you either have to have a power source that you can turn up a little at a time, like a switching power supply, or create one with a variac and rectifiers and filter capacitors (assuming a DC source).
If you don't have that then you can try a resistance in series with the input so that the input gets less current than it would at full voltage. You may have to keep reducing the resistance until you get up high enough for a full test, but in the mean time you can monitor the input current.
There is one other thing to consider though and that is the control circuit. The control circuit usually has to have full voltage so that it can operate correctly. This requires a separate power supply. That would be tested first to make sure nothing blows out. After you are able to run the control circuit up normally then you can start to increase the main power source and see if the current becomes too high at some point. Once you correct that then it would run up to full voltage with no problems.

 

From what I understand from the photograph, this is an SMPS type inverter. I see the 494' controller.

The power transistor have popped, which indicates that there are bigger problems than just replacing the capacitor.

Check the four identical diodes D13, D17... with a multimeter in diode testing mode. Check the NTC thermistor - the green disk in resistance checking mode, it should be a few ohms.
Power up the PCB and check the voltage on both black round capacitors, it should be above 100 volts.

The repair of SMPS inverters is not a very simple task. Just replacing the swollen capacitor and transistor is likely not enough