No Power to A/C Thermostat
Hello All, I'm new here and have a question that I hope someone can help me with.
My A/C thermostat started acting weird a few days back. I have a simple digital stat, with a greenish-glow backlit screen, with settings for cool, heat, and fan. All of a sudden, the screen went blank, no light, and the A/C of course would not kick in. Initially I thought the stat must have gone bad, and I was going to get a new replacement. Decided to take it off the wall mount and check it out. Removed the green and red wires and put them together, the fan didn't kick on... no power? Tested it with a multi-meter, no power at all from any of the wires. So... it's not going to be a simple stat replacement after all.
The strange thing is, after messing with the wires on the stat, and turning the main A/C breaker on and off, suddenly the stat came back to life. Lighted up and settings displayed, A/C kicked in, and this lasted for a couple hours, before it went dead again. That was late last night. Early this morning, my wife said she saw the stat working. Late morning when I woke up, it was dead again.
From my recent research on this forum, as well as eleswhere on the internet, I suspect it could possibly be the transformer. But I have no idea where that is! Just to make one thing clear, I am not savvy with electrical stuff, I'm pretty handy mechanically, and can follow instructions well though. So, I opened up the air handler in the garage, looked inside at the bunch of wires, there were some similar thin wires as the wall mounted stat's. I tested those with the multi-meter and got positive readings around 18 V.
Now I'm thinking it must be somewhere else... so I opened up the panel in the condenser(?) at the back of the house (the noisy one with the fins and fan). Tested the terminals where the power enters (A & B) and is connected to some device (attached pic below) and got around 110-120V. Tested the other terminals (C & D) which look like where the power gets distributed to those familiar thin wires that I saw on the wall stat. No Power there... so I assume I've found the culprit! Well, being an amateur, I am not sure. And that's why I'm here.
Here are some pics of the panel in the condenser/compressor (sorry, I don't know the correct name for this noisy thing! LOL!). Can someone confirm if this is the transformer, if not, what is it called? There looks like a little contact point, I guess for the timer to kick the thing on/off. Judging from my description, is this the faulty part, and should I attempt to replace it myself since I have come this far?
I am one of the many unfortunate unemployed ones, and would rather do this myself, if I can. If I have to, I don't mind getting someone to do the job, if there are big risks involved.
Thank you all.
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