Help finding a part

All, I am out of my depth trying to find a replacement part for a EF-20(P) transformer, which I believe caused my wine fridge to break.

Any chance one of you could take a look at this, tell me what it is and possibly where I can buy a replacement?

I put in a picture of the board too.

Thanks you!

It is very unusual for a transformer in a switch mode power supply to fail. How did you prove that it was faulty ?

Les.

JeremyJGreen said:

All, I am out of my depth trying to find a replacement part for a EF-20(P) transformer, which I believe caused my wine fridge to break.

Any chance one of you could take a look at this, tell me what it is and possibly where I can buy a replacement?

Click to expand...

It's a switch-mode transformer, and you won't be able to buy one - it will be a custom transformer made specially for the manufacturer of that board (not even for the manufacturer of the fridge). Assuming spares were available from the manufacturer?, it would be the complete board, not any individual components.

That makes you think the transformer is faulty?, they VERY, VERY, VERY rarely ever go faulty - I've repaired many hundreds (probably thousands?) of switch-mode PSU's - and have only ever come across two particular PSU's where the transformers occasionally die (and even on those it would only be in the low single percentages). There's a lot more parts on that board that would be far more likely to fail, and even if the transformer has died it's quite likely to have killed many other parts as well. An exception would be if the primary had gone O/C, this does happen VERY occasionally - but it's up there with winning the lottery.

I think it also depends on what method used for disassembling the transformer.

I've tested the use of heat gun, and one experience out from that is that some times, the PCB board goes soft before the soldering melt all the way through, and it makes it hard to get the component loose without overhetating or destroying it in the process.

On another electronics forum there is a large thread on fixing wine fridge SMPS. Nearly all of them involves replacing all the electrolytic capacitors. This is the main reason for them to not work.

debe said:

On another electronics forum there is a large thread on fixing wine fridge SMPS. Nearly all of them involves replacing all the electrolytic capacitors. This is the main reason for them to not work.

Click to expand...

Standard technique on SMPSU's - but they quite often cause other damage as well.

Please let me know the make/model of the wine fridge. My fridge stopped cooling and I just replaced the compressor relay, this is a common part to fail.

This is similar to what I bought, they are attached to the side of the big black tank looking thing in the bottom rear.