This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition. I'm at this location today for an exhaust fan not working. Now i don't know which fan it is as of yet. I have a hunch that it's this fan but we'll find out, but we have direct drive fans here, meaning that they are uh inverter controlled.

They have um yeah, all kinds of fancy controls but anyways when these fans are sold to the customer. The customer's, under the belief that they're energy-saving, that you know they don't have preventative maintenance costs as much with this kind of stuff. And i think that there was a miscommunication - and i noticed this with a bunch of different customers, because the lack of preventative maintenance is huge. Okay, just because it doesn't have a belt doesn't mean that i don't need to do a maintenance on this fan anymore.

These are motor vents. Look at these motor vents. They are completely plugged solid. Okay, whether or not that's my problem right now - i don't know, but those motor vents are there to help cool the motor off and if it can't breathe, theoretically, it could overheat.

Now i prefer to do this when the fan is running, but it's not running at the moment, so we'll figure that out in a minute i'd, rather all this stuff not go down into the motor, but i don't do so much trying not to breathe this stuff. In it seems very healthy, now, look at look at the difference all right. Let's start by checking power coming into the fan, see if we have anything i'm checking from phase to phase, and i got nothing on the top of the switch phase to phase nothing on the bottom of the switch. So we've got no power coming into the switch check across nothing, nothing, nothing and then we can even check to ground nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing nothing! So we have no power to ground no power to the switch on either side. So i went ahead and turned the switch off okay and i'm gon na go downstairs to the breaker panel to see if we have a tripped or a breaker. That's turned off, but i made sure i turned it off so that way when i reset it, if it is tripped uh potentially if we have a bad motor or something it doesn't blow the breaker again, i can come up here and see it happen by flipping The switch there we go. Look.

We got a tripped breaker right here. It's tripped um, let's go ahead and look right up here, that is 18, 20 and 22, and that is 18, 20 and 22.. So what we're gon na do it's a trip? Breaker turn it off turn it on and then we'll go upstairs and troubleshoot all right. So now that we reset it i'd shut this off, and i will tell you something that when i shut this switch off, it didn't feel right.

The actuation felt funky okay, but we're gon na test incoming voltage coming into the switch. So one to two we get 202 volts one to three. We get 200 volts and two to three. We get 200 volts now um, i'm going to go downstairs and turn that breaker off, because i want to test this switch before we go any further because i'm telling you it felt like something was broken in the switch i'm going to test power.

I turned it off: we've got no power up here. Let's test the ground: okay power is dead, so we're going to do is we're going to ohm out this switch okay, so my switch is on now it just i don't know it's it's loose right here doesn't feel right. We have continuity, look at the resistance across the switch there's a lot of resistance across that switch. It's not making good contact and this one has no continuity.

So we've got a bad three-phase switch here. So let's go back here and look again. Look at the resistance. You shouldn't be reading resistance across the switch.

That's closed. This one has low resistance. This one has very high resistance, and this one has nothing so yeah we've got a bad three-phase switch, so we're gon na go ahead and change out. This three-phase switch so the color combination.

We got to mark that because this we don't want to reverse the rotation. So we're going to go black to red red to white blue to black. You can do a couple different things. You can mark it two three.

I guess before i uh honestly, i probably should have checked the motor to ground to make sure we didn't round out the motor, because with the one leg that was completely bad, it was probably single phasing. So before we go any further, i'm going to go ahead and test the motor windings to ground, which is this one right here, we'll test this to ground, to see if we have any shorts to ground, no short to ground, no short to ground, no short to Ground and we should have continuity between the windings four ohms, four ohms, four ohms, so theoretically, our motor should still be good. In theory, yeah, this switch is uh good thing. The meter can take a beating.

I got a uh. This is a square d switch. I keep these in my truck, hopefully it'll fit in here it should this one comes with the whole enclosure and everything yep should fit in there. Just fine make sure you uh torque them down properly.

There we go. Click click click yeah; they meet the proper torque specs. In all seriousness, guys. I am joking around with the torque stuff.

If you guys feel the need, you need to make sure that you're using a torque wrench to make sure that uh, you actually uh, don't over. Tighten or leave a screw too loose when it comes to electrical connections and or flow nuts, don't just listen to some stupid guy because he makes youtube videos and you got to try to cram all that stuff in there. That's what i don't like about these things put way too much crap in these switch boxes. Man, this idiot's got this giant wire head in here.

That's causing problems. There we go that'll work. I told you i'd win. I'm gon na go turn the power back on leave the switch off and then we'll test the motor after okay, let's fire this guy up, first we're going to check voltage, make sure we got three phase coming in yup three phase coming in nothing, shorted we'll uh Have to find a better place to check current draw and let's see if this guy fires up without blowing up one two three, please don't blow up it's running.

It's got a nice little vibration to it, but it's running. Okay, we're gon na open up uh! There's a j box right here and we can test current draw right there, all right. I turned it off right down in here it's kind of hard to see, but it says up at the top 3.2 and 1.6 for the current draw or the full load amps and it's rated for 230 or 460. We have 230, so we should be allowed to run 3.2 amps now the fact that this unit is vibrating so bad leads me to believe.

That's the reason why the switch went bad because i'll turn it on again. I don't know if it comes across on the camera, but this thing is vibrating really bad and that would ruin that switch, but we're still gon na. We got it operational. I'm gon na lift up the fan.

Look at the bottom side of the wheel, see if there's any damage, um we're gon na open that up and check current draw. Look at how crispy that looks. It's all corroded in there that looks healthy. I'm gon na have to turn the camera off and open that up carefully.

I was able to carefully get that out and we're running 2.8 amps, so we're under the 3.2 so we're okay on current draw. But now we got ta investigate why this thing is vibrating. So bad um, what i notice is, if i power it down, i don't know if this is picked up or not, but this is wobbling like like the shaft has bent where the blower's bent it's come all the way up, the shaft of the motor - and i Could see the whole fan assembly wobbling inside of the motor again it probably isn't coming across because of the frame rate, but um this thing has hinges, so i should be able to hinge it and get a bottom look at the wheel, all right, here's, the underside! I don't see anything stuck in the wheel, it doesn't look abnormally dirty, so we just have a out of balance blower wheel, shaft in the motor, something like that um. I can absolutely guarantee you.

This customer is not going to repair this and i guarantee they're going to replace the fan. I know them a little too well. They order their own fans so we'll get all the specs off of it, but at least we have a working fan for now and then i'll just warn them that if they don't get this taken care of asap, then they're gon na have another bad switch. If not more damage soon and then when we do so, we'll definitely redo that electrical box redo the conduit all new wire, because there's some corrosion inside there put new gaskets on them all that good stuff.

So it's interesting because i i really do think that these customers are sold on. You know very low preventative maintenance and, while i will agree, they shouldn't have to do as much preventative maintenance on these fans with no, you know belts or anything, but they still need to have people in there checking on the equipment. Looking for the vibration, you know that switch failing could have been prevented. Had you know uh once a month once every other month, someone just come and walk through, and you know investigate the fans, look for strange vibrations and from the damage on the fan.

It almost looks like maybe the hood cleaners dropped. The fan i prefer to use super hinges by omni containment because they have an automatic catch on them. This one has a catch, but you have the ability to disengage it, and i think that's what happened and that's. Why that fan is dented in the way that it is because someone probably dropped it and threw the thing made it all cattywompus to where it you know, started vibrating like that um, but you have to remember that you know remember this.

Whole big picture diagnosis thing right: you've got to look at the big picture because that switch didn't just fail more than likely something caused it to fill. Was it loose electrical connections? Was it the ambient environment being very corrosive? You know if this was uh near the ocean. You know, maybe the salt was corroding. The inside of the switch contacts i mean that's the kind of stuff you need to think about, there's a reason that parts fail now there's a small percentage of parts that just fail and you'll never find what's wrong with them.

But for the most part, if you stare at something long enough, you can kind of figure out what happened. You know i at least try to do that as much as possible. Again, i'm not always successful. To say this is the exact cause and another thing too: i never go down to the customer and say the problem is 100 solved.

You will never have another issue, no, no! Okay! I did the best that i could more than likely. This is what caused the switch to fail. Everything's operating at properly at this time, keep an eye on it that kind of a thing. Okay.

Now, in this situation, i did bring the information up to the customer and they actually already replaced the exhaust vendor. They had us replace it. I don't have footage changing it out, but those fans are silly. Just we use a crane, lift them up there.

Real quick, no big deal. Actually this one. We might have used our equipment lift depending on the location, we'll use our uh telescoping. We have a sumner, uh 24 foot equipment, lift that'll, lift the stuff up there.

I think i've shown it in some videos before, but it has outriggers and everything does a really good job. I think we can lift up to like 800 pounds. I think i don't know anyways but um yeah, so the customer ended up replacing the fan, but i did everything i could to get it operational and working properly. As far as those three-phase switches you know, i use those.

Quite often i do run into failed switches. I prefer using those switches over a disconnect switch because disconnect switches are big and bulky and if at all possible, i prefer not to have fuses on an exhaust fan. I prefer to have a motor starter, protecting it and a breaker in this situation. I didn't get footage of it, but the motor starter was actually bypassed.

Okay, the customer. It's it's a long story, but they have a variable flow hood system and they're, not using it, so they put in traditional motor starters um, so it i shouldn't say bypass, but it's not a vfd anymore so because it has a traditional motor starter. This fan runs at basically 100 60 hertz all the time so um, but i'm sorry, i lost my train of thought there for a minute but yeah i prefer to have these switches. It is kind of tight, fitting the switches into some of those boxes.

Sometimes but hey you know, you can't be perfect with that stuff. So i really really appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video. I say this every time, but i truly do. Okay, if you haven't already check out my website, hvacrvideos.com just another way to support the channel, got merch available.

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