Pond Boss Forums AERATION Systems questions HF 7 SW Vertex compressor caught on fire

So many questions. Why did it catch fire. How did it catch fire. Is there any way to figure out why it caught fire. Has this happened to anyone else(or are we the lucky snowflake),
And if so what was the cause.
A little history. Live in Cleveland Ohio area. Unit with 7 air stations Installed in 2012. Runs about 8 months out of 12(want the lake to freeze for ice skating). I share the lake with 20 families and compressor is not in my back yard. Have been advocating for several years now that it should be seen by a professional for routine maintenance which was agreed to for later this year.Oops, too late. But even so, even if the gaskets had worn away to nothing-wouldn’t it just stop running? It’s probably obvious I know nothing about the workings of this machine, but I do know we need a new one

Post up some pics. Probably a bearing failed. Notice it getting noisier before it caught fire? were there really flames or did it just let the smoke out?

I'm struggling to think of what would actually burn with flame...a minor amount of grease in the bearings.... Any plastic covers?

If true evidence of flames, I'd suspect Beavis or Butthead... Any ornery rats live nearby?

Did it throw the breaker?

Been struggling to upload some photos so far without success. They have an allowed jpeg extension but I keep getting the error message.
I asked about flames, smoke and noise. He says happened at night while he was asleep so unknown.
I will walk over and take a look tomorrow and take some pics just in case I get lucky.

I will ask about breaker. And look for wire damage and actual fire damage when I walk over tomorrow. We have the odd mink & muskrat. Squirrels, groundhogs, skunks, chipmunks, mice, etc.

Seven years running with minimal/no maintenance is a testament to high quality gear, IMO.

I'd say you probably got all of the good out of it.

My capacitor boot is self-destructing for no reason that I can see. I wonder if the capacitor creates its own heat somehow? If that boot shielding is needed for some reason then as my boot continues to self-destruct I could get into trouble too I guess.

My cabinet cooling fans are working and I did move my cabinet a bit further back in the woods so that more hours of the day it is shaded.

As an aside, when I did my rebuild this summer I found the old page of instructions that they shipped with the rebuild kit lacking and ended up doing several steps when putting it back together wrong and had several calls to service and reattempts in order to get it right. The service manager Sean at Vertex was very helpful in order to get it right.

He even offered to try to improve the instruction sheet based on some of my experiences. I was able to review his updated instruction sheet which is better. I added a few more areas where I think things could be improved and suggested they actually put labels on the individual baggies that contain the new flappers, washers, gaskets etc so that there is less room for error. If they can incorporate some of these additional suggestions and corrections I think the do-it-yourselfer like me (inexperienced) could easily and reliably do this on their own on the first try.

The new piston Teflon wear gasket (cup) and piston ring that the Teflon fits into is a definite upgrade from my original one. I highly recommend the rebuild materials.

It might be a good time to do the component upgrade since you likely will have it torn apart anyway to see if the compressor motor went bad or if it was an electrical surge or capacitor failure.