That economizer is a side shot but they're not using a side, shot duct they're using a downshot, so someone put and ordered and installed the wrong economizer on this unit. So many years ago it's meant to have the ductwork come out of this right here. This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition. All right, we got our work cut out for us today.

The customer's complaint is that their dining room all over the place is warm. This restaurant has a lot of acs here, uh every one of these, except for this one right here and that swamp cooler is theirs. So all i did was go down to the thermostats i'll show you a picture. There's a bunch of them turned them all into cooling and then we're going to go through these and start triaging them one at a time, and then you know then we'll dive into each one individually to figure out.

What's up now, this location does not do normal. Preventative maintenance with me: they have a national filter, changing company, but so i'm just walking around you know we got warm air blowing out of here. Um, that's not good panel kind of falling off, so every one of these things should be running, although one of them the thermostat, was off for some reason. So we got to dig into that.

If i can come up here and make sure that we actually have a call for cooling from everything, then i can start jumping out with jumpers. You know what i'm saying and and get them going, but i mean this one's not cold or not warm air coming out dirty condensers yeah. We got our work cut out for us. These are old lennox units too.

I mean it's all warm air, but it's not well that one's left off at the disconnect switch that's a main dining ac, so that could be a problem. This one's not running we'll have to dig into that all right. Well, at this point, we'll just start picking them one by one, we'll start back there at the back and work our way through. At this point, i've gone to every ac and i've verified that the thermostats turn on every single ac, even the one that was shut off so now that i've tested the thermostats, i can go ahead and pick each individual unit and start diving into them.

Okay, so the first thing i checked was that the thermostats actually worked and told the units to turn on. Once i get past that point, i can now troubleshoot the units from the unit and not worry about the thermostat calling or not, because i can jumper them out if need be okay, but i always want to test the thermostats first now um. The next step is, i went around and checked tds on everything and we have problems on several units. For instance, this unit has a 40 degree supply air and a 73 degree return air.

That's way too cold something's wrong with that. So we're just going to pick each individual unit and kind of go through them, one at a time and evaluate the problems, get the customer uh a punch list and then let them start approving things now in this situation, i'm dealing with an nte meaning they sent Me a work order with a 500 not to exceed, but i am going to get them to create a work order for every single ac that has a problem. That's how i'm going to work with these ntes and even still that nte. It doesn't mean that i have 500 and that's it.

I mean that means that i'm going to basically go through these units and triage them for that. First, work order, get a punch list and then have them create a work order for every single ac and then i can appropriately quote them and go from there. Okay, i have to deal with these ntes all the time too, and i was recently talking with someone and they were all concerned about ntes. Okay to me, the definition of not to exceed value or nte does not mean that i can't go past that i just have to ask permission to go past, that that's how i treat it with my customers.

So but that being said too, this customer sent me one work order and said all of our acs aren't working. Well, that's not going to cut it they're going to have to send me a work order for every single ac, that's problematic, but i got to get them that list first and a brief description of what's going on so that way they can send me a work Order and then i can dive into them more appropriately. This unit's clearly got a bad condenser fan motor. The bearings are going about in it, but there's nothing more frustrating than having nine acs and the numbers don't match the thermostats.

The thermostats have two numbers written on them and we have multiple acs that are labeled number two. It just creates a headache when you're trying to itemize and break things down. It really does help. When you have these things, actually labeled appropriately and people don't take it upon themselves.

So this unit's labeled number two and then that kitchen ac all the way over there there's a temp star unit, that's labeled number two and it's just frustrating so that makes it have really good airflow right when the insulation completely stuck down onto the blower assembly. I just got back and i uh picked up belts for that unit and this unit. Every other unit is direct drive, i've kind of got a general list and i also went to the manager and had him create six more work, orders for all the acs that were down - and it's funny too, because when i get the work orders, all of a Sudden, it says this unit's scheduled for replacement and it's like well, what do you want to do fix it or not? You know so. Anyways um we're going to start with this unit.

I already changed belts on it, but after i changed the belt, the belt was really loose. All of a sudden. Now it's only getting a 15 degree td before it was getting uh, four five, five. Actually, no! I was getting a 30 degree td before so we were getting 75 46, but now we're only getting 15 degrees.

Now that, obviously we put the belt on and it's moving the airflow properly. So we're going to start on this guy just to diagnose and see if we can figure out what the problems are. You know i'm going to quote everything so we'll just kind of go from there, so unfortunately everything's in a weird place so get conduits, broken and stuff, but you can't get these covers off. You got ta, pull the whole panel off same thing on this.

It's just kind of silly, so we'll start by pulling the panels and then checking the refrigerant pressures and getting a big list of issues. We may not be fixing anything today we may be just giving them quotes, you know who knows, but the unit itself is not looking too bad to me. It's an older unit. Now the sub coin.

You can't use that number, because there's a pressure drop we're on the discharge line right now, because linux wants you to take discharge pressure according to their data and there's a pressure drop on the liquid line, so meaning that the discharge pressure is not going to give. You an accurate sub cooling number, so it says 14 degrees, but that's not accurate, because my discharge pressure is 203 right now, but my liquid line pressure is like 192., so there is a pressure drop across that so the saturation temperatures are going to change. It's going to be wonky on the subcoin um, the rest of the numbers. Don't look too bad to me.

The head pressure measure, quick, saying it's a little bit low and according to linux's data too, linux says that my for my outdoor ambient conditions of about 86 degrees, we should have 211 discharge and 82 suction and we're running 64 suction and 211 discharge so um. But at the same time too, those linux numbers are probably for 50 relative humidity. I bet - and i don't have that right now - we're really low on the humidity. We don't have the the you know the mass amount of moisture in our air, because we have really dry conditions where we're at this unit's.

Looking decent, i mean it's old and beat down. Of course it could use some love. We need a condenser fan motor over there because the bearings are going out on it. Refrigerant pressures are okay, i mean not amazing, but not enough to really worry too much about it units delivering about 90 000 btus, which is about what it's rated for.

So i'm giving this one the all clear and we're going to move on and quote this one appropriately and move on to the next units for some clarification too. Before i wrap this one up, i was concerned about this one because it was reading like a really high td, but what i actually found was that the outdoor air damper was pulling in a minimum outside air and it was open quite a bit so in troubleshooting. I closed the outside air. Damper, um and uh verified with the outside air damper closed that the units got the proper td and everything's working on it.

So now i'm gon na go ahead and open that back up to their normal position where they keep it. So if we come right in here, the outdoor air board - or this is the economizer board - it's set to deset, so that basically means that we're going to have minimum outside air - and i closed it by turning it all the way to the left, i'm going to Go ahead and turn it back to where it was, which was partially open. I'd, say: that's probably gon na be about 25 open, so uh. Now the unit will probably go back to that higher td.

But that's because it's pulling that outside air to mix to bring in you know to meet fresh air requirements for the building. Basically, so it's always important to understand if the outside air dampers are open, that's going to affect the way that the unit performs all right. This is another one of their units, this one's a temp star, seven and a half ton um right off the bat. When i open this up, there's there's oil remnants everywhere coming out the bottom of the unit and everything and uh.

I went ahead and probed up on the system. I don't see anything obvious other than just like a thin layer of oil on everything, but my standing pressures between the first and the second stage are also very different um. So if we go circuit one, we got 221 standing pressure and then we go circuit two and we have 154 standing pressure. This unit's been off for an equal amount of time, so those those should be pretty darn close together.

So more than likely we're going to have some sort of a refrigerant leak or low charge issue with the second stage, but we're going to go ahead and turn this guy on and go through it and see what we can figure out. All right. We are on and running, i put jumpers on there and the second stage is turning on and off on low pressure safety so see it's going on and off. So we're gon na go ahead and make sure we get that second stage disconnected.

So it's not short cycling um, but with that being said before i do that we're going to go ahead and do a quick leak search, see if it's something easy or if it's really obvious, we'll see all right, um the refrigerant leak wasn't jumping out at me. So what i did was, i went ahead and took off the service gauges off of that stage, and then i turned the unit on and i ran it for about five minutes with the condenser fan motors to kind of move any refrigerant residual refrigerant out. Okay, so we're going to hit it up with the leak detector and as i suspected we're picking up refrigerant leaks right at the schraders and that's the high flow schrader cores, which is a very common place to leak, not so much over at this one. This one for sure, which would make sense - and you can see the leak detectors, going berserk right now, which would make sense because there's oil all around in that area.

So all that we're going to do is just kind of, and you can see that things leak in refrigerant and even with the cap with the rubber o-ring, it's still going to leak out. So we need to replace the uh high flow schrader. So for now we're going to tape this guy up we're gon na submit a quote to the customer to repair this one, but i'm gon na go ahead and turn it on and troubleshoot. The first stage make sure it's working okay too, as best as possible.

I just pulled my gauges off of it. It's looking pretty good. I just wanted to show you something which is kind of funny. I've noticed this before this economizer just doesn't quite look right.

You know i've always questioned well, i mean i know what the problem is, but the first time i saw it, i was like it doesn't look right that economizer is a side shot but they're not using a side, shot duct they're using a down shot. So someone put and ordered and installed the wrong economizer on this unit. So many years ago it's meant to have the duct work come out of this right here, what a mess, what a mess so all right, we're putting this guy back together. The first stage looked okay, we're going to jump onto the next one, so i've shown this before i'll show it again.

This unit is a really old unit and i can't find any data on it. I've turned every panel apart trying to get a model number now. I know this is an old linux unit, so i know the the beginning. Numbers is gcs, okay, but i don't know what size it is after that.

So when you come over to the compressor, you can get the the information off the compressor, but the compressor tags. All worn out too cool thing about copeland's. You tear that off and there's actually another tag underneath that will help you to find out what your information is. So there you go, that is a zr36 zebra ralph 36 k3.

So this is a three ton: 36. 000 btu unit um, so that's a little trick if you ever needed to know - and just as i did that i actually found another spot look down here - i cleaned that off. So it's a gcs, 1603 three-ton, so always look around. There's usually multiple places for the model and serial number, but you see the little tricks that i show so this unit has got really low air flow, so i was investigating the blower assembly it's running in the right direction.

I don't see any obstructions in the return. I went downstairs. I can feel air pulling at the return. It's just not very much so we're trying to figure out why our airflow's so low all right with this guy we've got some airflow issues and i need to dig into it more.

But i need to go ahead and quote this and come back because we're pushing it on this one, so we're going to put this unit back together. It's running, i don't like the low airflow, but we'll address that when we come back on it all right so check this out. This is what i'm talking about. There's got to be a damper that i'm missing, but again i can't go any further without their approval.

So the unit's running it just turned back on: there's no screws in any one of these panels. This is a supply. This is the return, so you notice the supplies not blowing off or anything right. But when i pull off the return boom supply opens up because, and it should, you would think it would blow it off.

But there's got to be a restriction or a damper that i can't see that's causing the issue. You can see that thing gets sucked in so yeah there's something going on some kind of restriction, airflow wise. So this is my ac right here, and this is my return. Look at these dodo heads.

They installed a damper on the return. Why would you do that? That's what this little thing usually means is: there's a damper there, it's a pain to get to, but i opened it and then i tightened down the wing nut super tight, so it won't move anymore. I mean in a perfect world, we pull this off and remove it, but i'm not going to get that involved right now, because customer doesn't have a rough room and the quote the nte to remove it permanently. So came back up here.

Um had to jump the unit out the old unit, so it doesn't have a terminal board or anything. You just got wires right there all right. So this is what we're looking at um. Also, these units are super inefficient.

There's like a lot of air blowing out right here, it's kind of silly but um we're looking a lot better than we were. It's still looking now it's looking a little bit charged ever so slightly, so i think we're going to go ahead and add some refrigerant, but uh. We actually have a td now and it's not crazy, big anymore um, like 19 degrees right now, 18 degrees. So that's pretty good airflow is pretty decent just about 1200 cfms.

This is a three ton unit, so we're going to get a little refrigerant and top off the charge add just a little bit. I don't think it's going to take much and see if that makes it work a little bit better. I got a drum of 22, i'm charging with the smart probes, and i want to point this out. So what i do when i'm charging with the smart probes is put the probe on there and then you're going to slightly put it on, leave it loose and then you're going to crack it.

Let the pressure through and then tighten it that way you push all the air out of the lines. Okay and then you get a nice clean charge without a charging chart for this unit. What i'm going to do is i'm going to aim for close to 10 degrees, sub cooling, and i am on the liquid line - pressure port. Okay.

This is a txv system, but linux typically wants you to use approach temperature most of the time. The approach they want to see is around six degrees somewhere in there ish. So we're just going to kind of monitor the approach, monitor all the pressures and monitor the sub cooling as we're adding a little bit of refrigerant to see if we can get this guy operating just a little bit better. All right, um, i weighed the cylinder down at the van.

It was 14 pounds. I have it written on there so i'll find out how much i added after the fact, but we're gon na go ahead and look at this guy, this guy's looking pretty good the approach temperature is still kind of moving back and forth. Um, my sub cooling, about 10 degrees other than that the system operation seems okay, let's scroll through it, uh return and supply so 20 degree, temp, split, uh, just under 1200 cfns and airflow. This is a three ton unit, so it should be about 1200.

But that's. Okay, um yeah, so that return air damper was the problem and it was just a little bit shy, but i didn't want to add gas until i fixed the the restriction and the airflow issue. You know um. Now someone made a mistake: there should not have been a damper on the return.

It'd be one thing if there was multiple returns, but there's a single like 18 inch drop 16 inch drop. Something like that. So there's no reason to have a damper on that return. That that damper should have been on the supply and it should have been at each branch - basically um, so you know it is what it is, but this customer has also scheduled this unit for replacement.

So i'm not going to put any more time into this. I'm not going to look for a leak at this time. We just put a little refrigerant in it, supposedly they're, changing it in the next few weeks. I think i don't know but anyways.

That's it we're going to move on to the next ac. Now this is their kitchen ac one of them. The condenser is a little bit dirty, not horrible, but it's a little bit dirty. But when you open up the compressor compartment, look at the frost pattern on the expansion valve um we're gon na get into this guy.

It could be an airflow issue mixed with the refrigerant issue, or it could just be a refrigerant issue we'll find out but something's going on, because that's not a proper frost pattern right there. This economizer could use some love filters. Trashed um. This evaporator is pretty dirty too, when you look inside filters, not in a good way.

These guys put the stupid filter in there. The filter changing company - i'm not gon na name names, but you know uh all right. Well, we're gon na put our air probes and uh probe up on this guy yeah, the suction line's, rather warm too, when you're troubleshooting units with economizers, if you're having refrigerant related issues or you're, checking uh for delta, t temperature, split and stuff like that, you have To make sure that the outside air damper is closed because if it's open, even the minimum amount, that's going to affect your unit operation for testing purposes, so i got in here to the minimum position set point and closed it completely. I'm watching the damper.

Actually, it's opening right now, so we got to make sure that we get it closed properly. Let me make sure i think it might be just working its course. Yeah it's closed so we'll give it a minute we'll make sure that it closes completely and then we'll proceed with troubleshooting all right, so i've probed up uh the unit is a three ton unit. I verified that the outdoor air damper is 100 shut to me.

It's looking low on charge, um definitely could use some good pm work too. It's really dusty. The evaporator is a little bit dirty too, but it's not plugged. So let's come on down here and let's look at what we got going on here.

So it's a 410a system, we've got a 17 degree evaporator, which is way too low. The frost pattern coming out of the expansion valve it is the txv system indicates to me that it might be low on charge too. So we've got low sub cooling, high superheat, um approach, temperatures still on the higher side. Uh temperature split across it is 13 degrees, we're showing about 1200 cfms of estimated airflow.

That measure quick is uh, estimating they have some magical voodoo stuff that they use. Some air temperatures and different things - i don't know it's a secret recipe. Okay, so we're gon na add a little refrigerant. I've already purged my system and we're going to see if we can't get that sub cooling a little bit higher and see if the system starts to stabilize out a little bit.

I was looking at the data tag wrong. This actually is a 510, so i correct it accordingly, but we're still adding a little refrigerant. We've got a charging chart right here where they tell you to take the outdoor dry bulb the entering wet bulb and then they'll help you to calculate what the pressure should be so we're in between 85 and 75. So technically, we should have.

Let's see my outdoor air is 83 degrees and my entering wet bulb is 60 degrees, so 83 degrees and 60 degrees. So if we come over here 80 degrees right about here and then entering wet bulb, let's go with the 62. We're going to be right at 2, 000 cfms, so it looks like we should have 136 over 351, possibly we're a little elevated on that, but we're still going to add some refrigerant. It's getting better, though we're just going to walk.

Actually, i'm going to let it run for a little bit and kind of stabilize out before i put any more gas in it. Another thing to understand is even though i'm looking at sub cooling right, it's at 9.6 degrees right now, that's discharge line pressure. That's not liquid line pressure, so typically you can see 20 to 25 degree pressure drop across your condenser to the liquid line. So keep that in mind when you're watching these systems, you can't just assume 10 degrees.

Subcoin is good to go because it's actually a skewed number because we're seeing discharge pressure so more than likely when we're done we're going to see higher than 10 degrees and we're going to try to monitor their charging chart as best as possible. My airflow was acting kind of wonky kind of low, as i was charging it and i didn't feel like a huge negative air pressure. Like i did on the previous unit, i was working on where it sucked the return air filter panel on again that's a crude way of checking the static um. So i went ahead and came over here.

You know they got a mess of electrical in this thing and found that uh i had room to speed up the indoor blower motor - it's an ecm motor, so i sped it up to full speed on this little jumper back in here. So we're gon na see. If that makes a difference, but man, i can't tell you how messed up this wiring is in these units. It's just a giant mass amount of wires just sitting in there.

So carrier has a couple different ways of checking the charge um, and i want to point this out too, that they have required sub cooling and the reason why the sub cooling numbers are different. If you go in here, you find your unit 5 ton. It's a model number 60.. You find your outdoor air we're about 90 degrees now so right between these two and you see that the sub cooling is calling for is either 18 degrees or 17 degrees, and that's differs from what people typically think of a 10 degree sub cooling.

But that's because we're checking discharge pressure, see they're compensating for that. So you've got to pay attention to those charging charts and you can't just always use rules of thumb to assume all right, so we're at about 9.8 degrees, sub coin right now, so we're gon na. Let it run a little bit longer, let it stabilize out, because i just turned it back on after adjusting the airflow and let's see what our airflow settings so we've got a 23 degree split about 1 600 cfm. So it seems like we're still running on the low side, but we're going to let it stabilize out some more all right at this point, i'm not going to put any more gas into this unit.

I believe this is a unit that they're going to replace again too soon, but here's the deal my indoor blower wheel is dirty. The evaporator is dirty, the condenser is dirty. It was definitely low on charge. None of those are dirty enough to cause a huge issue.

I did speed up my indoor blower motor, but my airflow is still on the low side. I think it's right around 1500 cfm's - and this is a 5 ton unit. We should be running about 2 000 cfms, my temp split's, still a little high, which is you know, has to do with the airflow issue um as best as possible. This unit is uh, i put refrigerant in it to get them going.

I'm going to do a quick leak check just to see um again, i don't want to add too too much more gas to it. So until we clean the unit up properly and uh, you know clean that. So i'm going to do a quick leak search, see if i find anything again, i think the customer's replacing this unit, so i don't think they're going to want to do a whole lot, but at least we get something better than it was. Sometimes you pay attention.

You'll find it is on the core max fitting when i took the thing off, it's still leaking, so we're going to change that guy out real quick. I've got some cormax fittings in the tool, so we'll knock those out real, quick. All right. First thing: we're going to do to change the coimax fitting.

Is we're going to loosen this piece right here, we're just going to crack it? That's all so back it up with another wrench there we go. That's all so that way i can unscrew it we'll. Do the same in here, okay, just crack it, and then i have two new cormax fittings right here. Take the cormax tool, pull the plunger out it hooks on and then we're just gon na, remove it make sure everything's, nice and tight okay and we're just going to unscrew.

I don't know if that's unscrewed enough close the ball, though there we go. No, oh yeah. Yeah, i got it cool, so pull the old one out put the new one in pushes in just like that. It's kind of going in kind of feels like cross threaded.

Almost let's see something here. I don't like that. It almost feels cross threaded yeah, it's cross-threaded huh, not a good idea, so nice and good, and then we're just going to torque it on cool, and then we need to do the next one and uh. We got two new cormax fittings all with the cormax tool.

Now something to understand this cormax tool is not for pulling evacuations. It's not a normal schrader core removal tool, it's just to remove the high flow schraders when they fail. Okay, very common, it's a very expensive tool anywhere from five to eight hundred bucks depending on 450 to 800, is the range that i've seen it uh. Yes, it is expensive.

Yes, it is. You know just a couple fittings that it looks like you can make yourself, but not necessarily, okay and uh. It's really easy to justify the expense of this, because i didn't have to recover the charge to change those and uh when i sell them these. I just have an added cost in it for the tool.

Every time i do it, i have a couple extra bucks and eventually the tool will be paid off just like any other tool that we use. You add a fee for it all right. We're gon na put this guy together. I'm gon na fix up all that wiring that i told you as a mess.

I get some zip ties and then we're gon na talk to the customer about letting us clean this unit. Up again, i don't think they're gon na do it, though, because i think they're changing this unit, so we got the office slash kitchen ac. That does not have the greatest td. It's like 12 or 13 degree temperature difference between supply and return.

So we need to dive into this guy now and figure out. What's going on so we're gon na open it up all right. This guy is not horrible. The numbers are a little wonky, but not bad approach is decent.

The temperature splits a little bit low at about 16 degrees, but i'm almost wondering if i have a bad probe placement, because it's not too bad this unit is a four ton, so i mean air flow's a little bit on the high side. I guess i want to investigate to see if we have any kind of uh duck leakage or anything something's going on here, because my numbers look good. So i'm just investigating the supply air duct and i'm going to open up the return air duct and see if we have any leakage issues this economizers disconnected. But it's partially stuck open.

But i don't know that that's our problem, because i would think that that would be causing a higher td than normal, but still i'm gon na try to get this thing to shut completely and i'm trying to get this damper out. So i can inspect the uh return air duct, but that damn ac is too close. I don't know it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, but um i tightened up those economizer dampers so that way, they're leak-free now um and then replace my probes inside the units and not just sticking through the sides that way they'd get a Better movement or uh sense: you know whatever you want to call it they'd sense, better and uh we're looking pretty darn good, now, 17 degree, temp split, airflow's, still a teeny bit on the high side, but we're delivering pretty good got green flags on measure quick. So this unit was just simple air leakage from return to supply or from outside air.

It's kind of weird, though, because i would expect a higher td, but it's working now i haven't had to do anything to it. Yet so we'll see i'm gon na button this one back up and then i got to move on to this ac right here. I'm not finding anything wrong with this unit either. So i'm thinking what happened was.

I was originally using this thermometer and i i haven't checked the calibration lately and i think the calibration's off on it, because once i put the the probes on the inside there, this ac is doing fine. So this one's good um and that's it. I just need to quote that one which has got a leak in it and then that one that has a condenser fan motor, that's failing! Let's go over there and see if that condenser fan motor tripped, the head pressure again or if it's still running now. It's still running, i can hear it so when i first got here, the head pressure control was tripped, oh no, it's not running, it might be tripped again, so i have to jump in there and make sure, but that one needs a condenser fan motor, that one Needs a leak repair, everything else is running and then the kitchen over there that little one i'm gon na get them to.

Let me pull the blower assembly if they want me to. I don't know i just reset the high pressure control on this guy and the fan motors, not even starting so it's locked up and then i forgot this one has a fan motor going bad too. So fan motor on this one fan motor on this one refrigerant leak on that one fixed refrigerant leak need to clean the blower uh, and that's it oh and then this one right here fix the return. Air um fix the economizer and then we just cleaned them all because they were all dirty.

So i'm all finished up just closed up the roof hatch up there um i want to point out. You know i'm not perfect, but i try to consolidate as much as my stuff try to keep it in bags. So it's organized you know, um i'd like to pick up the new v or not, and i'd like to pick up another veto bag, the big open top one. That's like a giant beach bag, big giant thing.

I want to pick that up because then i can really put a few more things in it and be consolidated even more, but i try to do it so that way, it's you know as minimal stuff up and down as possible. So this is all my main tools. This is my pro bag leak. Detector, obviously, and then refrigerant rope always carry a rope with you.

So all right. Well we're going to wrap this one up um. I still got to go in and adjust all the thermostats because they're the type of thermostat that when i shut off power to the unit, they lose their time and they lose their program really crappy ones. So i'm gon na go in there and fix all those and then write up all the invoices.

Sometimes these calls can be overwhelming. When you have this many air conditioners that are down, i try to make it a little bit easier on myself and i just try to take the triage approach. Uh first get up there. Visualize everything go downstairs, turn the thermostats on you know and just do steps.

One by one make sure every ac turns on okay, once i've done that and make sure that every thermostat turns the units on then i have freedom to continue to diagnose and i don't have to worry about the thermostats turning off or anything like that, because i Know that the thermostats work, then i just kind of go through and you know do some real quick checks check the temperature split mark it. So that way i remember which ones to go through and then work my way through each ac individually. Obviously, this restaurant has a lot of problems. They don't do proper preventative maintenance.

You know it is what it is. I mean it just happens. So i do my best this i i was there for basically a full day, but i split it in between two things. So i came halfway through the day, started the video and then came back the next morning and spent half the day there and you know just figured out everything it did get a little overwhelming because i was getting warm and you know it's it's just getting slightly Warmer outside so 90 degrees ish, something like that.

So you know just work my way through everything again working with the customers and tes. You know not to exceed values um and with me and most of my customers, i kind of explained it in the video. That's kind of a you know suggestion. Basically i know what i can jump into.

You know. I know if they have an ac, that's not going to be replaced that i can kind of go ahead and start doing things to it. Of course, i don't want to change a compressor without getting their approval, but you know within reason i can do certain things, but inevitably i went through everything and i ended up getting a list of things, so i didn't fix everything. I got everything operational as best as possible without spending a crap ton of money of the customers, money right and then i got them a punch list and to be honest with you, it's been three days since this uh, since i filmed the two days of video Here and i haven't even had a chance to sit down and do the quotes yet just because i've been super busy with other stuff, so i really need to sit down get those quotes out to them.

So that way we can appropriately fix everything um. I do want to address something because i know i'm gon na get a bunch of comments about it is the the air balancing damper? Okay, i'm not a fan of air balancing dampers okay, i understand the need for them. Um but - and i understand that building plans call for dampers different things like that: okay, but unless the system is properly designed, any of these air conditioners on this roof are not meant to have dampers on them. Okay, if your ductwork is designed properly, it's set to deliver a set amount of cfm throughout the building, and you know, depending on the registers and all that stuff.

And if you close down one of those registers, you affect the cfm flow of the rest of the unit. Okay, that's the amount of airflow going through the unit. So when you have balancing dampers on these things, it just drives me nuts. Now i know you know these buildings, they want them to be test and air balanced and all that stuff.

But my firm opinion on the matter is, is don't touch the acs. Okay, put an economizer on it and - and you know i just don't like them all right now. I understand code often calls for them, but that's like a major contradiction, because here in california we have an energy code and they want everything to be super efficient. They want it to be delivering the the required amount of airflow um, btu capacity and all that stuff, and if you put balancing dampers and you start closing down dampers and different things like that, you're really going to start to affect things.

Now. If a system was designed for it, it's totally understandable you, you can use a damper to kind of help correct flaws in your ductwork design. I get that so long as you still have the proper airflow going through that ac. Now, in my opinion, on the ac that i was having a problem with, there's absolutely no reason for there to be a damper on the return airdrop.

Okay, that return airdrop is a 16 or 18 inch duct, it's about four feet long. It goes right to the register and that's it. Okay, there's absolutely no reason for that damper to be there um, because they don't need to balance it out. The unit had an economizer okay, so if it needs to pull fresh air, a full-fledged economizer that can shut down the building air - and you know the return air and bring in outside air and compensate for that.

So, there's no reason for there to be a balancing damper on that return air, but i realize that oftentimes building plans you just got to do what they they require you to do, but this is what happens. Okay. This is a really old system. The damper came loose and it sucked its shelf shut, and then the ac doesn't work right and what that's going to lead to is failed heat exchangers and failed compressors if they don't have proper safety protections to protect them.

Okay, yes, heat exchangers, have limit switches and different things like that, but over and over and over tripping a limit switch is not good for a heat exchanger and on the flip side, over and over and over tripping a low pressure control is not good for a Compressor, okay and if it doesn't have a low pressure control, it's going to lead to really low superheat and then it's going to basically act like it's overcharged and flood out the compressor because it gets no heat transfer across the evaporator. Because the air is not moving across it, okay, so i know i went off on a tangent all that different stuff, but it just frustrates the heck out of me that we run into these silly problems. Okay, um and again i you know, i understand that's what the building plans call for. If, if i was doing a new installation and the plans called for dampers, i would put dampers because that's what the engineer designed, but it's just silly to me that they're, actually there especially on this little tiny four ton unit, i think is - was what it was.

There's absolutely no need for that damper on there: okay, but anyways. Let's get off that subject: okay, um understanding the sequence of operation on these air conditioning units, understanding rules of thumb. Now i did say you got to be careful about using rules of thumb and that's very true. You always want to lean on the manufacturers for proper charging and all that stuff.

But sometimes you got to do what you got to do to get the equipment running and if you don't have all the proper data in front of you, you might have to resort to a rule of thumb. But just like i say with a lot of other stuff, if you use a rule of thumb, you're making an educated guess, you know you're you're you're, taking shortcuts. Whatever you got to do right, there could be repercussions so understand. You know there there's going to be repercussions to things that you do um and just keep that in mind whenever you're, using rules of thumb or taking shortcuts, and i'm talking about when i was charging the unit um and on that kitchen ac, the one that i Changed the coremax fittings on um.

I left purposely left in the struggle that i was having without cormax fitting because it kind of was going in stripped, and you know it's kind of a pain in the butt. But i got it in the end. Okay um, but with that unit you know in a perfect world, i would like to go ahead and recover that charge and weigh in the factory charge we'll see if the customer will. Let me do that, but i definitely want to quote to clean the evaporators, the condenser pull that blower assembly clean the blower, because before i start adjusting too much more, i did make an airflow adjustment and you know i kind of made uh.

You know kind of made a judgment call there probably shouldn't have made the the fan, speed, tap adjustment without cleaning everything first, but i was just trying to get the unit operational temporarily until we can go in and properly. You know clean the unit up and check everything again, so i do plan on checking that kitchen ac out a hundred percent once we clean all the stuff and check for air flow, you know and all that good stuff. Okay, so i really really appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video as usual. You guys are so awesome if you haven't already please check out my website hvacrvideos.com, we have cool merchandise available on there.

We have hat shirts, i'm wearing one of the shirts right now. This is my flag design shirt, one of my favorite ones. When you turn it around, it says hvacr videos on the back hat is the number one seller purposely made this hat. The way that it is it just says, hvacr does not have my logo.

I did that purposely, because i didn't want people to have to advertise my brand so that way they could still wear these at their place of business and their work without violating uniform policies. At least that was the hope. Okay, this hat a lot of thought went into it because it is a breathable mesh material. It's not like a normal hat, i'm not saying you're not going to sweat in it, but you're going to sweat a lot less because it's breathable.

If i hold it up to light, i can see light right through the hat, but it's not a trucker style. Mesh hat okay: it is a flex fit and my favorite thing is the black underbill. So that way, our fingers when we're at work, don't make the hat all nasty. Okay, so check them out on my website hvacrvideos.com.

It helps to support the channel um. That's pretty much it remember. I do live streams monday evening, 5 p.m, pacific on youtube and then i go live on the hvac overtime, youtube channel with my buddies on friday evenings. Okay, there's links in the show notes to the overtime channel.

So that's it and we'll catch you on the next one: okay.