This video is brought to you by spore'ln quality, integrity and tradition. We have a water complaint, meaning that the restaurants complaining that they have a water leak down inside the building, so I'm walking up on the roof initially in icy water all over the ground. So we followed over, I have a feeling where they're gon na have a plugged up drain or a broken drain, pan it's carrying and that's a notorious for having broken drain pans and it doesn't look like it's broken, no yeah. It's broken! Look at that.

It plugged up too, though, because it should still be somewhat draining yeah. So it's very common for these things. You need to touch it. You have to change this drain pan because the threads get rotted out and they no longer drain properly, but obviously, we've got two plugged up terrain they're, complaining, though, that they have other issues.

So we can clear this thing, nice and dirty in there all right put it back on for now get him something. Now it's draining it's the amazing. What having the p-trap on there does because it wasn't draining, but that's because this is p-traps on the negative air pressure side. So you notice that I pull the p-trap off and you see it doesn't drain and that's because the return air is actually sucking.

The air through that hole because the drain pan or p-trap or drain pan, I should say, is on the negative air pressure side. So we put this on and the moment that the p-trap fills up with water takes a second and then it'll start to drain out because and see there we go. We already have a trickle. Now it's not gon na be as much as it was a minute ago, because it's it's already draining out pretty good, but it has to fill up the p-trap first, which it just did and then once it fills up the p-trap, then it can drain properly and The trap itself has to be sized properly so that way it doesn't pull the air or pull the water through the trap.

I've seen that too, before, where the negative air pressure in the building will actually dry out the traps and then when they go condensating, then they don't drain. So we're not just going to leave it at this. As usual, big picture diagnosis. The customer is also complaining about an AC unit, not working right here.

They're saying this units not working on their kitchen AC is not working, so I'm gon na dive into it and see what we can figure out now. This is the Lenox unit. I just went to the terminal board, there's no active error codes on here. I highly doubt this units down, but we're going to obviously check it out.

So we have an occupied signal which is good and we have a G call showing returned air temp of 73 degrees discharge air temp of 70. Now the unit's not running right now. So that's probably just going to be evaporative cooling happening because the you know the you know probably satisfied and there's still condensation leaking off of the evaporator. Coil is my guess, but we will check everything out.

Yeah everything seems to be okay check. This guy out make sure the end or blower motor is actually running. This is a VFD drive or VF beat-driven unit, I should say, looks okay. Damn wrist hurts.

So it's hard for me to turn these panels. Okay, well we're gon na jump into this. I'm probably going to go ahead and finish up on this unit, we'll finish going through this unit to make sure it's working properly and if everything's good, we'll clean out the drain pan go from there. So when it comes to this drain, remember what I said that you can't expect it to drain, because this has a negative air pressure drain pan.

So you can't really expect to drain when the unit's running. Now, what you'll notice is when you shut off the unit? You'll see water come out, so I don't know if I'll see it right now or not, but I'll go ahead and shut down the unit because I'm going to check the evaporator out anyways but power.this get down and let's go see if we have any water coming Out looks like just barely not much, though okay, but if it was plugged up - or you know, had a lot of condensation, then it definitely would we're gon na go and give it some sprays. Now I'm gon na go ahead and pull the this panel right here and clean it. Well, I'm gon na inspect it to see how dirty it is, but we're going to give it some squirts and then I'm also going to clean the main going downstairs too, and in order to do that, what I'm not just gon na do is simply tape.

This hose nozzle to it turn it on and let it run for a little while and just clear out, because these things can plug up this particular restaurant has got eight all their ACS connect underneath, so they all connect under the roof right here and then come Down at one single point in the back of the kitchen - and we actually get a big complaint here - multiple times a summer where they call us and they say that it's leaking over their restroom and usually what happens is it'll back up into this right here, because This is the lowest point, so it'll back up into here and then overflow in the return go downstairs and it's just because the main gets plugged up downstairs so I'll, probably end up cleaning that today just to be safe. I don't know how much I'm gon na be able to get to, though, because I do have a thunderstorm over my head. It doesn't look like it's gon na be big, but I am hearing thunder in the background, so we'll see I'm to do what I can so. It looks like this is another AC.

You got multiple drain pans that have busted threads, this one's all jacked up. I got ta, take it off to blow it out anyway, so it's gon na show. My example of this AC is running right. Now, I'm gon na put a little water in there.

Okay and you'll notice that it struggles now it's finally, the pans getting full. So you're getting like a drip drip and I don't know if you guys can hear that it's sucking air back through the trap. There's a significant amount of water in there and the negative air pressure is pulling the water back. Okay, so the moment that I turn the AC off all that water is going to flood out and I'll prove it right now, we'll walk over here.

Turn it off. Let's go look at this noise and look at look at all the water coming out now. So that's why we have to have a p-trap on this AC. There has to be this pea trap to prevent that that negative air pressure from stopping the unit from draining okay, because the negative air pressure will stop that unit from draining, but because I shut it off in the end or blow motor turned off.

It lost that negative air pressure and then it drained got ta, be careful too, because I can overflow the drain pan right down into the ductwork very easily right now, so I'm just kind of giving it a few squirts little chunks are falling, ah, but nothing horrible. So I'm just gon na cut keep clearing these, so I came back I'd gotten out of here last time in a hurry because we had a thunderstorm coming over and I needed to get out of. There came back today and I have a hunch. So, just to recap, the last time that I was here, they were complaining that they had several AC is not working.

We had a leaking drain. I went ahead and fixed the drain over there. They said that the bar, which is that unit directly right there in the middle and the kitchen weren't working properly, but they had good TVs. While I was here, I did not go any further than that because I couldn't spend too much time.

But I noticed that when I was leaving that they have a severe building balance problem, the building balance is very negative. That got me to thinking and I had popped the lid on one of these exhaust fans and notice the belt looked loose. Now. If I have loose belts, that's going to make the balance even more negative, but we need to start there so we're going to start with the kitchen we're going to make sure that all these belts are loose.

I did pop the tops on them right now, but I do have a few loose belts just off the just. You know from looking right away this one right here as well as you can tell us loose right over there, so I'm going to jump on these things check the belts, tighten them up and then we're going to start there and then we'll go through the ACS. Just visually what a difference when you put a new belt on there put a spare in there too, I always like to put new belts and spares together. So when I can so I've got the exhaust fans, belts tightened up and they're pulling as much air as they can mind you.

They had a company, come in here a couple years back and slow down all their exhaust fans and turn off their make up their units. That's why I says: do not operate. I'm not gon na change that that's a whole engineered thing. It's not really a great thing in my opinion, but you know whatever I'm just gon na work with what we have here.

So exhaust fan belts are tight, they're pulling as much air as they can. The way that they are make upper units are not running. So our make up air comes from the ACS. Unfortunately, this economizer and I believe this new ACS economizer are the only economizers that are working.

I believe that this carrier is disconnected this care is disconnected, and this one only has a minimum outside air damper. So I'm gon na make sure that, even though these ones are disconnected, we need minimum air coming through those ACS, because the building isn't a negative air pressure. Again, I'm not a certified balance guy, I'm just working with what I got here so the buildings in a negative air pressure and I'm trying to make it just ever so slightly positive. I probably won't be perfect, but even though these economizers aren't working the customers aware and they haven't wanted to fix them, I need to at least force the minimum outside air dampers open.

So we get a little bit of fresh air to try to help with the balance. So in that situation we may have to take the dampers and screw them open or something like that, just a little bit so that way we get some fresh air. It's one of those things you know: economizers are most of the time the payback on them and the customers eyes isn't very real and so a lot of times they don't want to fix. So much.

I understand especially like these economizers are the old-style carrier. I mean Honeywell controllers, the electromechanical controllers and they are pretty complicated. If you don't understand how they work, they're, just very confusing you know, so customers usually don't want to fix them. You know it is what it is.

You just got ta you we put in quotes and then they say no so but anyways. I need this building and a slightly positive air pressure. So I need to verify that these things are open. If they're not open, I need to manually open them just a little bit get you know, 10 % open or something like that.

So I've got this one set to. I think twelve percent, this one. I need to look and see what it's set at. It might be around ten percent and then I'll check that minimum outside air damper and make sure it's manually open and then we'll check these other ones.

Oh, you got the balance as best as possible. It's not perfect! It's just. I think it's pretty close to being slightly positive, but I'm not even using a manometer because they got customers going in and out the doors and just using my hand. So again it's just a quick adjustment.

They want to get crazy, they can call a certified company out. All the races are working, I'm not putting my gauges on every unit. We've gone through these units in the last couple weeks, checking them out they're all doing everything they can. The last thing I want to check is I'm going to climb into that wall, lift the ceiling tiles in the kitchen and make sure that we don't have any broken ducts just to make sure that you know duct didn't fall off.

It's very common on these older buildings, so I'm gon na check that out, but everything is running. I have the dampers set to a minimum position, the ones that don't work, which is this one. This one and this one has a manual damper they're all set for about a 10 12 percent error, this one I have set for it. I think 25 percent or 20 percent, and then this one I have for about by 10 12 percent.

So this is a newer unit. It's a little oversized so it can handle that extra, because you got to remember when I open up that outside air damper. That AC has to cool that on top of the building there too. So so that's where we're at I'm gon na go downstairs and check in the Attic look for any broken duct from my kitchen.

Just to look at this look at how someone has connected this flex duct to these cans, it seemed I found three of them that were doing this. I can only imagine what the rest of them look like. I couldn't get to everything. This is the one of the supplied ducts, so get the pinch on that.

So to recap, on this one we had a initial service call of two air conditioners, not working. They were saying their kitchen and their bar, but then they also had a water leak from one of the ACS, so I went ahead and took care of the water leak first, because, basically I go into these situations and I evaluate them. Of course, I asked the manager if they have an opinion on how they want me to address these, but if they don't, I usually take them with the customer. Satisfaction being the number one thing, meaning that I need to fix the water leak because that's preventing customers from sitting in their dining room.

Okay, the kitchen is important too, but that's the cooks, and you know the customers are first, the cooks comes second, unfortunately, that's the way that restaurants look at it. Okay, so went ahead and took care of the water leak issue. First, okay and I kind of explained in the video a little bit about the negative air pressure trap and why it's important that we have that trap on there when we have a negative air pressure drain. Pan.

Okay, very, very important. Make sure that they're clear. But then also make sure that that trap has water in it, making sure that the trap is not undersized too, because you can dry out a trap due to the air pressure. It'll, actually pull the water out of a trap so took care of that.

I am going to talk to the customer about drain pans, but in all honesty I can't see putting drain pans on those units, because the economizers don't work. I think the heat exchangers might even be cracked too, which is a whole nother thing as we're coming into the fall where and then you know the beginning of September right now so we'll be coming up, so I actually know where the middle, I think we're the 13Th of September, so anyways I'm getting off on a tangent there. So, as I was finishing up on the drains, we had a thunderstorm coming up, and on top of that, I had another couple service calls that I needed to get to so I got out of there really wasn't a fan of being up on the roof when The lightning was going off, especially with my 38, a six-foot extension ladder or whatever sticking up in the air. You know all that good stuff so got off the roof, and then I came back a couple days later, but as I was leaving, I noticed that the exhaust fans didn't have very much airflow being discharged out of them.

So the first thing I did when I came back was we went ahead and checked all the belts we found multiple, loose and or cracked belts, so I replaced all the belts got them all tightened up, got the exhaust fans running to the best of their ability? Also went through and checked all the a/c belts too. I did change a couple, a/c belts to got those things I'll tighten back up and then I went on to adjust the air balance. Okay with this particular restaurant, the they had an air balance company come out and they certified air balance. Company of all things come out and kind of re-engineer their building and shut down all the make up air units and then slowed down the exhaust fans to low flow and then also basically adjusted all the pulleys on all the ACS.

This was a long time ago and it just created a bunch of headaches and stuff, but I'm not into I'm not wanting to really get too involved in re-engineering the building. Basically, so I just kind of work with what they have, because those engineer guys are much smarter than me that re-engineered, the building they're the balanced guys. I should have said you know, so I just let them do their thing. So we work with what we have.

I needed to get the outside air dampers on the ACS opened up to get rid of the negative air pressure problem in the building. Okay, with the negative air pressure problem, the exhaust fans were pulling out more air than we were putting back in. So therefore, the doors were very difficult to open up and then when they would open up the doors they would get a blast of whatever it was outside right now, it's hot air and then it would make the humidity and the temperature in the building go up. Okay, so I did a quick little air balance, basically to where the building is slightly positive, we're not blowing doors open, but we're not sucking in that hot unconditioned outside air in anymore.

Okay, as I was leaving, I got to thinking about something and I went and confirmed my suspicions. I didn't even climb through the attic really I just looked at the registers or diffusers and noticed that the ductwork was not connected to the diffusers properly. There's no cans on the top of them and they basically needed callers and everything. Okay, I looked at three registers that I could get to popped a couple tiles and notice that all three of them had problems.

So at that point I need to go and go back on another morning and go through the rest of the building and check the or the rest of the kitchen. I should say it's like Pandora's box, if you start inspecting all the ductwork, so I'll just worry about the kitchen. Look for broken ducts, get a punch list. Basically, if things that need to be fixed and then I'll submit a quote to the customer things like this, you know on a business side.

I closed out the invoice when this video ended and I'm gon na start another invoice and go back out just to assess the situations. Okay, because I had already paused my invoice from the previous visit. I can't keep unpause in these invoices and just prolonging them longer and longer cuz. That just adds to the bill on the customer side for us.

The way that it works is it's better to just go ahead and get our time build-out and then address the problems. You know incrementally just because sometimes things get forgotten, I get busy and the next thing you know I've got an invoice that I've had open for 90 days, which does happen quite often actually, where it's like. Oh yeah. I need to go back on that.

So I'll pause it you know so anyways, but I will go back and we'll give the customer a list of things. Once I fix all the ductwork issues, then I will have to go back and close down those outside air dampers and rebalance the building. Again then, we'll get them back into hopefully operational. The funny thing is, is you know basically it's like September 13th or something by the time I get all this done is probably gon na be a couple of weeks and it's gon na start getting cool again, but we're still gon na have these same balance.

Issues in the fall too, when it gets cold outside so anyways all right guys. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to watch these videos. Okay, it's really cool.

It's very humbling, any questions that you guys have any comments. Any feedback good or bad I'm open to it all tell me if I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Tell me if you like what I'm doing whatever send me an email HVAC our videos at gmail.com, leave a comment on any of the YouTube videos. Leave a comment on my Facebook page anyway.

I try to answer as much as I can. I do acknowledge and I read every single comment on YouTube. You guys can see that because I heart and then like thumbs up I'm or whatever but um. You know I try to answer as many as I can sometimes some slip through the cracks.

If you guys, if I don't answer something that you put on there, don't don't feel bad, just put it on there again: okay, you're, not gon na hurt my feelings. If I see a double comment that me that oh I must've missed something or something like that. Okay, I also do live streams Monday nights, 5:00 p.m. Pacific time work permitting, and I usually answer a lot of questions on there too.

If I'm gon na answer one of your questions for the most part, I try to go ahead and let you know so I'll either comment with a link to the live stream on YouTube or on Facebook, or through email and I'll. Let you know how I'm going to answer this in the stream and then, if you guys want you know, if you guys send me a question, and you want me to, I try not to mention your guys's names. Unless you tell me that you want to. You know you want me to mention your name, so just let me know in the comments hey, if you don't mind, if you can talk about this and just because you guys put a comment in there doesn't mean I'm gon na talk about it on the stream.

You know I do have to kind of I get so many things that I can't cover everything. Okay, so I try to get to as much as I can, but anyways I'm going off on a big-time tangent. I really appreciate you guys watching these and we will catch you guys on the next one: okay.