Hi, I'm Brian or with the HVAC school podcast in HVAC, our school comm, and this morning I'm headed out to work on a refrigeration unit for a customer. This units been having some issues with defrost intermittently, so they've unloaded it and they've got a whole bunch of meat coming in that they want to load into it. So I need to make sure that it's working properly, so it was a perfect situation for using the new danfoss ERC 213. The ERC 213 is especially great when you have a situation where somebody has that old-school mechanical control, and they want a little more precision.

A little more accuracy and a little more reliability as well as some a lot of additional options that you get with the ERC 213. So we're gon na head out and take a look at all right. Jeff's here max, is here morning max. The goats are here: how's, it go ting all right, so here's what we've got reach-in freezer this one actually already has a digital control, but we have reason to believe that it's got intermittent issues.

In fact, when I showed up here, it was going in and out of defrost like crazy. So that's the issue that we had previously when it was loaded full of meat, and so they just took it out of commission for a season and instead of messing around with it, we're gon na go ahead and just put in the danfoss 2:13. But again, one of the one of the really good applications for the 2:13 is to use it, even in cases where there may not be an issue just because you want an efficiency upgrade or reliability upgrade on the control. So here we go all right.

So this is the Danfoss ERC 213 kit. It is a universal refrigeration. Controller kit that comes with a QuickStart guide comes with the controller itself, and then it also comes with these two temperature sensors most typical applications. One of these sensors would be for the Box temperature or air temperature and then the other sensor before the coil temperature or defrost.

So if you look at the controller of the face of the controller, you get a couple, multifunction keys, you get like a selection button that Scrolls through you've got your set button, which this is what you hold in. To actually set your set point or make adjustments. You hold that down for three seconds and you have a multi-function up or down. If you hold this button here you can see it looks like a snowflake dripping and that's defrost.

If you hold that down for three seconds, it'll go into defrost and then you have power on and off as well. Now, there's a couple things here: it's got these these depth, adjustments on it and slide in and out it's very nice here you just hold down this little button. I guess right here on both sides. You have all of your terminals connecting to the back.

These are your high voltage terminals, you can tell a larger, larger gauge and then you have your smaller terminals, which are like your your sensors. You see here. You've got your compressor control. This is the highest amperage rated.

So if you look here, you have 16 full load. Amps on relay, do one, which is this one. Here you have a rating of 8 amps on do 2, which is this switch right here and then you have a rating of 3 amps on do 3, which is this one right here? If you look closely here, you can actually see that there's a little icon here. This one here is an icon for a compressor.

This one here is an icon, a defrost, and this one here has a fan icon. So that's generally how this would be set up. Compressor defrost and fan, but you do have some alternate options and then you have your air temperature sensor that connects in between these points and then you have your s5 sensor, which is your coil sensor, defrost sensor right there. So this is sort of your standard, wiring you'll notice.

That again, you have larger gauge connections here, but a key thing whenever making high voltage connections is that you want to make sure that you strip the wire back the right length, also not a bad idea. If you, if you have the time to do it, are you willing to do it if you want to tin the ends of the wires, that can kind of help, keep all the strands together on a stranded conductor, but another thing you'll notice here is you? Have your 115 volt inputs in between these two points? If you look here, you'll see that there's an embossing that I usually that in but it's embossed on here you have line in neutrals. One really nice thing about the ERC 213 is that it comes with an easy, Quick Start Guide, which goes through some of the most common applications that you're going to set up with this, and it really walks you through one at a time how to how to Set it up so you're really just a matter of following the instructions, and then, if you see it has these control application codes, which is that they call apps you're, actually selecting an application and then from there. You can make your finer final adjustments, but it's easier.

If you start with one of their one of their app applications versus the universal ones, which would be AB 0 and apps X, in other words, if you start with AB 0 f6 you're, basically starting with a blank slate. Otherwise, you can start with refrigeration with natural defrost refrigeration, with electric defrost, a freezer with electric defrost refrigerator with electric defrost 2 temperature sensors freezing with electric defrost 2 temperature sensors. So it gives you that option of choosing time and temperature or just time and what type of defrost you're using in essence he also knows here, explains all the different buttons and what they do. But you can definitely go through the first time.

You start one up, make sure that you understand all the different functions, so you can see it shows you the same thing. This is the same diagram, that's on the top of the ERC 2:13 itself, but you can see here that it also better defines each sensor. So your s, air, is your control sensor. Your air sensor, your defrost evaporator sensor, SC, is a condenser condenser sensor.

You have a couple digital inputs here on D l1 and d l2, so d, l1 and d l2 in between 12 13 and 14 you'll notice. That 8 and 7 don't currently show any purpose with this programming configuration the app sets all of these parameters to predefined settings, but if you want to go through and adjust all the parameters, that's also in the QuickStart guide, also on the quick guide, it shows you How to set up four different sensors resistances, and so, if you're, using the ones that come with a kit, you have an NTC negative temperature coefficient 10,000 ohm resistor and you would use code n 10 in the sensor section. But you can use any of these codes in order to set up the standard types of sensors that you'll often see in refrigeration. Really, this covers all of the standard types of sensors.

The Quick Start Guide also shows you some typical wiring configurations, depending on the app that you've used. So in essence, once you figure out your application, you go and wire it. The way one of these diagrams show you, which are the standards. You know the most typical types and then you choose the application to suit.

Another thing to notice is that, on the do one compressor relay it does have a rating also for a 230 volt compressor. If that's, how you have it wired up depending on you know whether of course, you're using a solenoid or whether you're directly running the compressor off of it. It's going to be dictated by the particular situation that you have, but you need to make sure that you don't go above the 10 load amps with 60 lakh rotary amps after using 2 30 and it's 16 full load amps in 72, locked rotor amps! If your at 115 volts so now just for demonstration purposes, I'm gon na go ahead and wire this up to 115 volts. I have tin the ends of these wires, just to hold all the strands together and make it especially safe since I'm using a piece of lamp cord here.

One to the left side of the low voltage block is the air sensor, but be careful because you do have 1 2. 3. 4. 5 6 7, which is 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. So it's actually these two here that we're using for our air sensor, which I'm going to just wire and just going to just tighten down the left one to start with, because I have to layer in the other sensor and share the common. So you can see it's measuring 77 degrees Fahrenheit, and that is about exactly what it is in this room right now showing 76 degrees on my thermostat right now.

So let's go ahead and set up our typical configuration following the filing the quick configuration mode. So first thing I do: is I press this for more than three seconds to enter the quick configuration mode, and now I have the O 61. It appears on the screen. Just like it says.

Then i press set while the o 61 is on the screen, and that lets me choose my app, which is currently at AP zero, which is the default. Then, if I want to press up and down, I can select the different app modes, so ap 1 would be refrigeration, natural natural defrost. One sensor. This would be refrigeration with electric defrost one sensor, but let's go ahead and do a freezer with a temperature defrost.

So that would be five. That means we use two sensors air sensor and a coil sensor, and then the default is minus 11 degrees, with the temperature range min max of 15 to 4 default differential for defrost interval an hour 6-hour defrost interval max defrost time, 30 minutes and defrost termination temperature At 43 degrees, so once you have it set in how you want it, then you just hit set, and now it will just display that for a little bit and then it will reset on its own. Now it's that see all of these every single one of these little crimp connections are cracked every single one and then, when you look down at the connections to the depressor contactor, slash relay, all of them are just melted, so we're gon na remake. All these put in a new relay the one thing in this particular case is you have to you have to remember that your compressor contacts these can be either 115 volts or 230, which is why they make them dry contacts.

So you don't it's not actually pulling from 120 volt feed, so you have to bring in a separate 120 volt feed wire to feed the compressor, and in this particular case they are using the same power feed for the compressor and all of them. Because of course, it's independently controlled by a contactor at the bottom, so we're gon na have to bring a wire from the hot which, if you look down here, you can see line and neutral here. So you have to bring a wire from from line and actually I'm gon na splice it further down from line into your feet on the on the compressor, which would be this right here. This terminal right here, which is terminal number 2, so the way it shows it it doesn't really matter because it's dry contacts, you can cook the compressor on either side, but you have to bring power into one of these terminals and then the other side out to The compressor that makes sense where's on the on the fan of the heater.

It's fed from the power that you feed the control with. So one of the things that I always like to do is find potential causes for problems and when you have all these burned up wires everything you kind of ask you know why we have a hard start kit. It all looks to be in good shape. I don't see any issues there and again we'll test it further once we get it running, but we had a run capacitor on this thing, and I have some very good friends: refrigeration who tell me that the run capacitors never fail in refrigeration, but we are in Florida we have high temperatures, and so it does increase the odds that you do have failures and so show you what I got here.

We are running 3.9 micro farad's and we are rated at 30 micro farad's. So when you have a hard start kit in place this, isn't you know it's a star, capacitor and potential relay? What will happen if your run capacitor isn't working? Well, then your compressor will ramp up get to 80 % speed. The potential relay will open the circuit passenger will come out and if the run cap isn't functioning properly, that motor can start to wind down again and hit the point that once again the potential relay kicks in and it just keeps bouncing back and forth an inrush Current, which can definitely result in what we're seeing here, not saying that is the cause, but on a freezer that we knew was working. It makes a lot of sense.

So it's not like. We had a freezer that wasn't working at all, but it did have some intermittent issues, and it makes a lot of sense that this could very well be part of the cause, as well as all this burnt-out mess. We've got I'm demonstrating how to wire this up and just proving that it's gon na work before I put it all in place, and I did the thing that I just mentioned not to do. I made a mistake of using terminal 8 for the sensor, which is actually onions terminal.

So that's one thing to remember when you're wearing these up, because it's just easy to go all the way to the edge you got to come in one. These are the nine 10 and 11 the sensors, and also the same thing. If you're working from the other side number seven is an onion'el as well. So in essence, I wired it wrong all right, so we ran into a very interesting circumstance here, which is that this particular region actually switches the neutral side of all the circuits and, as you see here, we have a yeah.

These are dry contacts for the compressor because you can use either 120 volts or 240 volts, 115 or 230, but the for the defrost and for the fan it actually passes through power from your line side too, in order to power, the fan and the defrost, and So if you look here, you get line and neutral, and so what I wasn't sure about is if the control would work if you swapped line and neutral on the control. So the first thing I look for is: was there any you know, metal body on this? Is there any grounding anything and there isn't it's all plastic, so I went ahead and powered it up and just swapped over line in neutral just to see if it would still work and it actually does everything still works properly. Sensors all wear controls all work, and then I tested to make sure that instead of passing hot through it was passing neutral in order to work with this particular application and sure enough. It works just fine, so not saying that.

That's something that you'll do normally and it's not really even the way that I would like to see it work, but in this circumstance that's what we had to do in order to use this control and it actually works works fine. I always make sure that my wires, don't are just as long as they need to be in no longer so that way, I don't have any bare wire hanging out the back and short out. You can see here this little symbol. It's got a little bell and then it's got a defrost symbol as well, so it's either an alarm or defrost is what those contacts are generally used for and then we connect in our power now, in this case, I'm actually swapping the polarity, because this freezer is Wired up to break neutral, but in general you would put line so in this case black on this side, but I'm gon na swap it all right.

So we got it together and I thought that I had the sensor set right, but apparently I didn't so. I'm gon na go in and set the proper temperature sensor. One thing that I noticed pretty quick as a parent test defrost is that if you try to force defrost too quick, it doesn't go into defrost. It won't just normally.

If you hold this down for three seconds, second, both initiate and terminate defrost. The reason for that max pointed out here is it has something called defrost. If you look at the troubleshooting guide, it'll say: defrost does not start and the controllers in pulldown mode, and so it has a duration where initially, it's not going to allow the frost, even during the typical time, because it needs to make sure that it pulls down. Yeah, I don't always wear a white linen pants.

Okay, so first thing is setting up the sensor. We had to go in and do that initially and I ended up just changing the sensor, because the original sensor was a little erratic. So, in order to do that, the first thing is you: you need to do the install setup within a minute of operation, initially of initially powering it on. So you can see right now, it's not doing anything so in order to we're gon na do it again.

You just powered off you just hold down the button until it goes off, give it a little bit for a give a little bit of off time suddenly doesn't short-cycle here's a good time to play some snazzy tunes and speed up the video really fast. Now, if you go into our base, app settings just hold that down, and then it's set so we're an app 5 and the reason for that reason run app. 5 is because app 5 is freezing with electric D for 2 sensors, meaning we have both time and temperature default temperature minus 11 temperature rain 15 minus 4, typical typical settings default differential differential 4 degrees D for us intervals, every 6 hours, which is 4 V frost Max depressed time, 30 minutes and D for us termination temperature at 43 degrees. So all pretty typical things we can change the number of defrost like I want to change the number of defrost to every 4 hours because we're in a very high humidity environment here in Florida so I'll make that adjustment.

We can make that adjustment in the additional parameters, but then also what I want to show you on this display here is that if you hit set again hit it twice, then you're in here, I'm type of thermistor. So you can do any negative temperature coefficient 5k negative temperature coefficient 10k positive temperature coefficient and plus, and so the difference there I'll shake my head, but you have PTC PTC, 1000 NTC and NTC 5000. In this particular case, I've installed the factory one now because the one that was are the one that I installed, the one that comes with the Stan Foss GRC 213 kit, as opposed to using the one that came with the freezer, because the one that came with The freezer was acting up so go ahead and set that to an ten, which is the one that the factory sentence and then just hit set and then once that's done, it'll do a quick reset all right. So it's now, a few days later, I'm just coming back and checking on this freezer.

I haven't opened it yet, but it did just come out of a defrost, so I'm pretty good, pretty good shape. We're gon na be loading this full of product. In a couple days and we're not going to be the customer is going to be, you can see this is in a unconditioned space. This is just a like.

A warehouse on insulated warehouse we're in Florida and we've been having a lot of rain, so our relative humidity is extremely high. So this is not the ideal condition for this freezer to be in, because you can see all the sweating and there's nothing to really do about that. So, unlike the quick startup menu to go in and set the full parameters, you actually do that. You know you don't have to do that within the first couple minutes and power up.

You can do that at any time, so with the with the quick startup menu. You hold down this button here for three minutes, but once you want to set full parameters, you hold down set for three seconds, it'll say I N, and then you cycle through whichever parameter set. You want to go into so the first letter and so we're gon na go through and check the defrost setting, it's just to make sure everything is set in how we want it for this particular racer. So once we get into D we're gon na hit set and now we can go through our parameters, so d2 is the first one e to is to set whether or not it's Fahrenheit or Celsius, which we know where our Fahrenheit three is defrost interval.

So, let's take a look and see what we've got to do for us in a bit, so we've got a defrost interval of 4. That's a 4 hour interview interval, which gives us six defrost per day. I'm doing that because we're in Florida - and we have the super humid environment, that the skin that this is in. I just want to be safe to make sure that we have enough defrost.

So that's our defrost interval, and so you can see I'm just toggling back and forth between set and the up and down arrows, pretty simple okay, so we actually actually cycled off. Not too long after after Vsauce, though we are, we are doing. Okay, even given these conditions, so we live in a world today, where we're expected to do more and more calls in a day, we're expected to get it right. The first time our customers don't understand that we have to come back and adjust a setting or or recheck over and over again, so we really need to be able to get it right, the first time and with older mechanical controls.

You know that the accuracy can be two or three degrees off you. Don't have all these defrost capabilities. The ERC 2:13 is a great solution to replace those controls with something that you can be confident is going to work. If you want to find more about this control, you can go to danfoss comm thanks for watching you.