-Hey, it's Rob with INYOPools.
Today, I'm going to show you how to test the capacitor on a pool pump motor.
A good sign that you might need to replace your capacitor
is if your motor is not running, or if just hear a buzzing sound,
it's not starting.
It could be a capacitor.
The first thing you can do is make sure you have the power cut off
at the breaker.
What you can do is take the end cap off of your motor
and see if your shaft spins freely,
just to eliminate that being an issue because if it's frozen,
the capacitor is not your issue,
and the motor probably needs to be replaced.
If it's spinning freely, there's a good chance it could be
the capacitor.
Let's go ahead and take a look at that.
This particular motor just has a start capacitor
as you can see here.
It looks like a battery.
Some motors will have a run capacitor on top,
so you might have a start and a run capacitor on top.
Or you might only have a run capacitor or only a start capacitor.
Some motors don't have either one.
If you don't see one on top and you take the end cover off,
and you don't see this, a battery-looking component there,
you don't have a capacitor.
The first thing you want to do, as I said previously,
make sure the power is off.
Let's go ahead and loosen up this screw here
so we can get access to the capacitor, and if you have one on top,
there's a couple screws that hold on that cover and you can take that off.
I'm going to loosen this screw.
You want to be careful not to touch the terminals
at the other end because we haven't discharged yet.
We'll do that in a second.
[background noise]
You can see it there.
What we'll do is we'll take an insulated screwdriver,
and we'll put the metal tip across the terminals to discharge it.
At this point, you can get some needle-nose pliers
and disconnect these wires.
Typically, what I would recommend doing is taking a picture
of how it's wired so that way, if you do have to replace it,
you can reconnect them in the same way.
[background noise]
We're going to disconnect these.
One thing I should mention is even before you take it off,
you can always visually inspect these capacitors.
Sometimes, it'll be real noticeable.
There'll be bulges on the sides or on the ends,
and you can just tell that the capacitor is blown.
This one's obviously in good shape, so we'll go ahead and test it.
The method I'm going to be using today with the multimeter is a capacitance test,
and I think that's the best way to go, because it's going to tell us
if our capacitor could still hold a full charge.
You want to check your multimeter and make sure it has
the ability to test capacitance.
It'll have a symbol like that.
It's hard to see on there so I figured my handy drawing would help.
Then also, before you test it, you want to look
for the microfarad rating on the capacitor.
On this one, maybe you can see it, it says 124 to 149 uF.
That's your microfarad rating.
When we test it, it should be in that range.
If you can't see that,
it's going to be a little more difficult to make sure it can hold full charge.
In that case, you could contact us at inyoopools.com.
We could help you figure out based on your motor model number
what the microfarad should be on the capacitor.
Besides the capacitance test, there is another way to test it with ohms,
but that requires making sure this is charged,
and it just tells you if the capacitor can hold a charge at all.
It doesn't really tell you if it can hold a full charge,
so I'm just going to go with the capacitance test.
If you really guys want to see that, post a comment down below,
and we can do that in another video.
I'm going to go ahead and turn this on to the capacitance test.
As you can see there, it should say 0 nF.
If it doesn't, you might need to switch it.
On this one, just hit select, and then it would take you back to 0 nF,
and that's what we'll you use to test.
There's a little bit too much glare on the screen to try and do this outside,
so we'll try it inside, so hopefully, you guys can see.
We're just going to take these, apply one to each tab there, terminal.
Okay, 133.7, and we'll flip it.
Just check the other way here, and 132.8.
As we said earlier, this should be between 124 to 149.
Sometimes you might see one that it could say, for example,
150 plus or minus 10%.
Then you just figure out what 10% above 150 or below 150 would be,
and that would be your range.
This one is good.
Obviously, if you're in that range, you need to replace it.
If you have any questions about this topic or anything pool or spa-related,
or if you have any suggestions, other tips on testing capacitors,
feel free to leave a comment down below or visit us over at inyopools.com.
Thanks for watching.