Electrical Troubleshooting; Explanation Of The Technology - Kärcher ARMADA BRC 40/22 C Manual

Electrical Troubleshooting

Explanation of technology
The Armada controller is unique to the industry and uses several method to supply power to the electrical components.

The Pic Duo controller uses a 12 Volt DC power supply to operate the logic of the board. It uses 120 VAC inputs to supply
power to the components. The Pic Duo technology gives us the ability to make changes to the operating firmware using a
Picket 2 programmer to upload the firmware change.

The DC brush motor operates at 120 VDC instead of AC voltage, with no load the voltage input can get as high as 135 VDC.
The controller monitors both amp draw and operating temperature using a thermistor mounted on the motor. The current
firmware, Rev E will allow the brush motor to run as high as 5 amps with spikes up to 8 amps.

The thermistor's resistance is 10,000 –15,000 Ohms at ambient temperature, as the motor heats up the resistance goes
down. This combination allows the controller to protect the brush motor by lowering the amp draw threshold depending on
the temperature of the motor. Under normal use the motor will operate at 3-4 amps it can run up to 5 amps spiking at 8
however as the motor heats up the thresholds decrease from 8 amps to 5-6 amps to trigger the brush error light.

The vac motor operates at 120 VAC in deep extraction and around 80 VAC in Eco mode. The amp draw in deep extraction is
around 10 amps, in Eco mode the amp draw drops to around 7-8 amps. The Pic Duo monitors the motor current consump-
tion looking for drops and increases in the amp draw. A drop in amps indicate a clog in the vacuum system an increase in
amps indicate water or debris entering the motor. The motor field resistance is 1-2 Ω.

The solenoid valves operate at 120 VAC at .00 to .02 amps. The coil resistance is 190-250 Ω.

The water pump operates on AC voltage, the controller uses pulse width modulation to control the flow. When testing with a
volt meter you should see around 35 VAC in encapsulation mode and around 41 VAC in deep extraction mode. The current
draw is .2-.3 amps in eco and .5 amps in deep extraction. The field resistance is 11.8 mΩ.
37