Clicking Then Shutdown: Cracked Blower Catching on Housing

A click, then a stop, then an error code. It repeats on every start attempt. A new main board is the next step on the table, though the clicking has never been explained by anyone who has looked.

A repeated click is mechanical. Boards fail silently or erratically and do not produce the same physical sound on every attempt. So the moving parts get checked before any electronics. The hand test does the separating: stiffness at one point in the rotation means something is being caught, while stiffness the whole way round means the bearing itself has gone.

Plastic fatigues, and a wheel spinning for years eventually splits somewhere along its length. The cracked section bends outward under rotation just far enough to touch the housing, which stalls the motor and trips the lock protection. The code names the motor because the motor is what stopped. It has nothing to say about why it stopped, and the why here is a few millimetres of plastic sitting in the wrong place.

The wheel alone. The motor tests fine once the obstruction is gone, and the board is doing its job correctly by reporting a stall that genuinely happened. Replacing the board would have cost more, left the crack exactly where it was, and produced the same code again within a day. The error was accurate throughout. What was wrong was the reading of it.