Electrical – How to tell hot from neutral on the power cord of an evaporative cooler

electricalevaporative-coolinghvac

I have an Essick 4700 CFM cooler, where the power cord was cut and had a custom 3-prong attached, to trim the cable length. I detached the prong when winterizing, not realizing that this cable doesn't use the standard white/black color-coding for hot/neutral (they're both wrapped in beige, though the ground wire is colored green underneath). How can I ensure I don't wire this backwards when re-connecting the 3-prong plug?

Inside the control box, the live wires appear to connect to "COM", and "A", and the latter appears to be part of the "FAN" grouping. (The "COM" also has a second wire protruding from the same port, which travels to the fan motor.)

Essick 4700 CFM Fan Control Box

Best Answer

If you don’t have a meter trace the wires back at the fan if they do not connect to the case it won’t matter many (most) motors the wiring goes directly to the windings and only the case is grounded with the green wire.

So if no connections other than to the windings a single phase ac motor won’t matter, if it happened to be DC the fan would spin backwards if not properly connected but that should not hurt the motor, power down and switch them if the fan spins the wrong way.