How Do Fan Motors Work?

 We have lived with electric motors for so long, most of us take them for granted. Everyone understands that they obviously work significantly differently than a petroleum-based internal combustion engine, but the average person probably has no idea how these things actually work. Being obviously simpler on a mechanical level than internal combustion engines, it may be easy to think that these motors are more or less immortal if cared for. As a result, people may think that a well-made fan motor such as a fasco condenser fan motor or fasco evaporator fan motor never has to be replaced. Thus, when fans and other electric motor devices breakdown, people have a tendency to think that something else is wrong, surely these motors are immortal. There’s generally only one moving part in them, it doesn’t look like a moving part that would break down.

Well, let’s talk a little bit about electric motors and why they do fail over time, even ones made by a company as fantastic as Fasco.

The first thing to really understand is pretty simple – notice what happens when two positive or two negative sides of magnets are placed facing each other. They tend to repel each other, right? The second thing to bear in mind is that electricity and magnetism tend to interact, hence the idea of things like electromagnets. When you combine both magnetism and a separate electric current, the magnets can be repelled by the current. With motors, this is really all there is to it for the most part. Quite simply, electric charges placed through copper coil, and magnets line the shaft that spins in the motor.

The intense current pass through the coil causes the magnets to spend as they are repelled by the current, creating the motion in the motor. That is, on a fundamental level, all the really is to an electric motor. However, don’t let the simplicity lead you to think that there doesn’t need to be quite a bit of care and innovation put into the design of these. Circuit boards controlling and supplying the current can be very tricky and complicated, the materials behind the magnets, the bracing in shaft, the coils themselves can be of high or very low quality, lower-quality stuff being more prone to immediate failure. Fans are one of the things where these motors tend to die the fastest given how fast the motors have to spend and how much work a fan has to do, running on high for very long periods of time.

Devices like a fasco condenser fan motor or fasco evaporator fan motor are built to last for prolonged periods of time, was standing the overheating that happens when fans run for a long time, as well as even standing up to imbalances when the fans pick up deposits, though you should of course clean them on a regular basis. However, in the event that these fans do breakdown, as anything with moving parts eventually must, fortunately, Fasco provides easy replacement products!