After transporting a little used dryer the length of the country to my daughter's new flat, we plugged it in and were rewarded with an ozoneish sort of smell and the house RCD tripping.
I've no multimeter with me but I think I've traced the problem down to this component which receives the main power in before it all passed on to the rest of the electronics.
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If I disconnect the mains and neutral on the machine side leaving it as the only component on the input side, the RCD still trips.
What is it, what does it do? Is it easy to get replacements?
And it'll probably work perfectly well without it - it's for stopping electrical noise from the dryer interfering with other things. Try it without to make sure the dryer's working before you buy a new part.
Does this mean the fuse in the plug does not blow? This is a bit odd and as I cannot see your picture, it could be that the component is a filter device to either stop the device shoving grot up the mains or to protect the device from dirty or spiky mains. Has it been in a damp place unused for some months? I guess removing it as long as the outputs and the input is the same piece of foil is fine. However if its actually a power transformer then your only source will be the makers. This company used to have a bad reputation for reliability, and this may be one of those machines of course. The newer ranges are a lot better according to those I know who have them, but they are not built really well as they tend to be budget items so moving it a lot might take its toll. Brian
The device has a circuit diagram on it. It has capacitors between all three of live, neutral, earth. There's also something else across live-neutral - I suspect a resistor, but it's just drawn as a rectangle.
It's a simple mains filter designed to block noise generated by the machine from polluting the house mains wiring with unwanted RF interference. It even has a circuit diagram showing all the components mounted within the earthed can.
You could simply bypass it either to test that the rest of the machine is still working or even run it that way if you, or rather your daughter, can live with the extra RF noise being coupled into the house mains wiring whilst it's in use.
I think the only time I had such a filter go faulty (on a washing machine), I simply left it out of the circuit and rejoined the wires (blue to blue and brown to brown) to complete the circuit between the mains cable and the machine's wiring.
The most likely victims of such a 'fix' would be any portable LW/MW radios in the house and possibly VHF FM reception on a kitchen radio relying on a 'bit of wire' aerial, oh and any shortwave enthusiasts in the local neighbourhood. Also, any PLT network adapters plugged into sockets around the house as a piss poor substitute for CAT5 connections might (deservedly) suffer some 'payback' just for a change. :-)
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