Last year my home's central air condenser fan motor stopped working. When I noticed the house wasn't cooling down I went outside to investigate and found there was a humming sound coming from the unit, but the fan wasn't turning.
After researching the problem online, I found the capacitor may be bad and causing the problem. The capacitor wasn't blown, but I replaced it anyways. The problem still existed; Fan won't spin and a humming sound is coming from the unit.
So, I inferred the motor must be bad. Yesterday I unbolted the fan from the unit to try and spin the blades by hand. To my surprise, it spun. It spun 3 to 5 rotations with a medium amount of force (the same force it would take to bounce a basketball 8 feet in the air). I expected the motor to be stuck and not spin at all, so now I'm second guessing myself.
My question is: How "freely" should it spin? I've read in numerous places that the blade should spin "freely", but I'm not sure what that means. Should it spin around 50 times with a medium amount of force? If I was holding it up in the air, should a 15mph breeze spin the blades like a pinwheel? Or is the 3-5 rotations freely?
