Hello cannabis John,
first off let me say thank you for taking the time to read and reply to everyones posts/questions. alot of work involved in all that. Anyways this is kind of a long explaination of my problem but i hope you can help or point me in the right direction.
I have a Payne 5 ton split unit from around 2011. Everything was working fine until the other day when I plugged something into the same circuit unknowingly(its a rental). I would have never done this if i had known it was the same circuit as the air handler. Later on i noticed that the handler and condenser were off and it was super hot in the room.
After some trouble shooting i discovered that i had probably overloaded the circuit that the air handler was on. the breaker hadnt tripped but i reset it anyways. still nothing. Breaker was really old so i just replaced it too but to no avail.
after more troubleshooting, i find the outlet on the same circuit as the handler wasnt deleivering a full 120v... somthing more like 80v.. being in a pinch i decided to just wire a whole new circuit to the air handler, easy because my sub panel is only ten feet away. After wiring and double checking everything, i went to flip the breaker. low and behold the unit fired right up, BUT, it was makiing a very loud humming noise from around the control board. fast foward 20 seconds and POP! sparks and burnt electroincs smell.
flipped the breaker off and dove right back in. took off that panel covering the blower and control board and found that my transformer had blown. it was obvious that it was the transforemr because there was black char around the cover on it and the burning smell was comming from there for sure. after removing the transformer for closer inspection i found that it was the 120v side that had fried. Does this mean anything, such as the short is on the 120v side as opposed to a short on the 24v side?
So Today i ordered a new transformer from the interwebs because it was impossible to find one locally that wasnt at least 3x the cost of online. After ordering the transformer I went to have a look at ALL the wiring including the condenser and the thermostat. as far as i can tell everythign looks good and matches the wiring schematics in the manual for the handler and there was no visible damage to any wires. Im afraid that when i put the new transformer in, it will just blow again.
Thanks for reading
Madmangos