Newell Gurus

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Gurus,

Many of us have heard of or experienced the long sad saga of the control boards in SCS basement AC units.  In case you have not heard....these boards are prone to failing...sometimes in a spectacular fashion.  The boards were not great when they were built and age has not been kind to them.  Some folks have added external relays to the board to relieve the stress of running current through the board.  Others have replaced components and added additional traces.  

Newell has used an external vendor to repair old boards, but the supply of the older (non-cooked) boards has dwindled to nothing.  This meant that if a board cooked it self, there was no way to get the AC running again.

All of that is now behind us.  Morgan Partman is the parts manager at Newell.  He told me that he was frustrated that he did not have a good replacement for a bad board.  When the supply of old repaired boards ran out, he had no solution for a guy with a bad board and no AC.  He set about designing and producing mock SCS control boards.   

This is the result. 

[attachment=6313

The board appears to be well made with clean solder joints on a very solid substrate.

I am not sure what input Newell corp had in the project but they are available from Newell.  Contact Newell parts department for the current price but I believe they are in the $575-600 range each.  Not cheap but much, much better than nothing.

Morgan said that they have been installed in 8 coaches so far and seem to be working well.

Kudos to Morgan and to Newell for spending the time and resources to make these boards available!

For details contact the Newell parts department.

Bill
Looks like they used much more robust connectors for the compressors and fan motors. That indicates recognition of the previous design issue. Very nice.
I don’t see any relays but maybe they are part of the kit - I like the idea of using the board just to switch things on/off and not run a lot of current through.
I see a 12 v dc double pole double throw ice cube relay on the board, and a second ice cube relay that I cant  make out the specs. Now that is a substantial board.
These boards use on board relays so they route the current to the compressors through the board, but the connectors are much improved and they probably increased the size of the traces to improve their performance. I guess time will tell.

For folks searching for a board, this is super good news!