Here's the same old story with a different question.

My girlfriend had a fridge that wasn't cooling, but had power and the fans were running. So I hit the internet and found that all signs pointed to the start capacitor / relay / overload assembly on this particular model.

And, what do you know, the capacitor is bad. I didn't even have to break out my multimeter to figure it out. The capacitor has blown up... as shown here:





So, my question is this... what could cause this? I don't want to just replace the thing for it to happen again, and actually start a fire this time.

The circuit is pretty simple, so all I can imagine is that the capacitor was crap to begin with, or the compressor failed so beautifuly that it killed the cap.

Thanks for any help that gets sent my way.

Vlachen