Furnace blower motor dying - what to do?

[goodtimes]

Like was said, try the capacitor first to save $$. I have fixed them without a lot of time, talk, or cost. If the motor will run when hand started.

 

[rationull]

I *am* starting to think about the capacitor actually. The only thing I'm not sure about is whether the capacitor could cause it to stop running when it was already running, because that did happen yesterday.

I took the motor/fan assembly out today to have a look. Funny thing is when I went in there to start disconnecting it I noticed that the fan will now spin without resistance. Maybe I knocked something loose yesterday when I was messing with it? With a flick of the wrist the fan would spin 3.5 revolutions or so which seems pretty good to me. Smooth and silent without a hint of play.

The motor is a GE made in USA and it doesn't appear to have any lube points so I'm wondering if the sticker is just wrong or if maybe the motor was replaced at some point in the past already.

After cleaning all the dust off it I put it back in and it's running now, warming up the house before we go to bed. HVAC guy is coming in the morning so I'll see what he says. I'd love it if it were just the capacitor. That would be a nice cheap fix and if it's on its last legs we could take our time finding a replacement.

 

[rationull]

Naturally the heater worked last night and today when we ran it. Considering this, HVAC guy's recommendation is to keep it going for the rest of the cold this year and replace it before next winter. It's in decent shape overall but the problem here is probably the motor after all and that combined with some funky behavior with the ignitor which could be the ignitor or could be its controller means it's probably not worth spending much money chasing the problems.

If it fails again I will just rewire the auto fan position to a different speed, b/c it turns out it's a 4 speed motor.