Flow thru water heater fix

[MadDad]

I have been fighting the Girard flow thru water heater for 3 years. When It works It works great. Unfortunately it often doesn't work. No flame, no hot water. After several conversations with their tech support which has been great I think I found the problem. The fan wasn't coming on that draws air thru the heater. I found out early this year that there was power to it, 12 volt, but the fan didn't come on. The ground wire goes to one of two blocks of 4 grounds that are rivited to the left side of the heater. Reaching in and moving the ground plate up and down seemed to fix it for a while.

When I got home this spring I decided that ground plate needed to be anchored better. Taking the unit half apart I found both ground plates only had 1 rivet, but had 2 holes for rivets. Replaced the existing rivets, and put in one in the other hole. Aha I said, this should fix my problem once and for all. Put it all back together, whew, and guess what? Still didn't work unless I reached in and wiggled the ground wire where it plugs into the ground block.

Man I was about ready to rip the whole thing out, but instead I unplugged the ground wire, and cut off the rubber insulation covering it. I found, see pic, that the part that should have been bars wire, arrow on pic, still had the insulation on it with @ 1/8 " of bare wire sticking out. That's the part that would make contact for a while and let the fan run. So I cut it off and crimped on a new crimp on and did it correctly. So far the unit has never failed, yet. How many more are barely making contact???

[hoppers4]

Yeppirs, I've seen a few insulation crimps in my experience as an electronics tech. Very hard to nail down! Nice going in having the persistence to fix it.