This video is brought to you by spore'ln quality, integrity and tradition. Today we have a service call on a walk-in freezer. That is not maintaining the correct temperature. They say it's maintaining 9 to 10 degrees, Fahrenheit and we're looking for about negative 10.

So I quickly went into the evaporator and I'll show that in a second, it's not frozen up the temperature controllers, calling it does feel a little bit warm in there. I dropped a thermometer and went up onto the roof. Just to do a visual came up onto the roof everything's running we've got some ice on the such line, which isn't a big deal, but the biggest thing is that the Cyclops is flashing. That's what I noticed right away is the sight glasses flashing, and this is a silly walking unit.

Kolpak makes this one. If you look at that receiver, there's no King valve on the receiver, so there's no way to pump the system down and change that liquid light filter dryer. I hate this one. The only service valve you have is this liquid line service valve right here so silly.

So silly, I do not like that. I guess you could probably still call that a king valve, but I just this is the dumbest thing, so you can't change the dryer without recovering the charge out of this unit, one of the silliest things but anyways we've got to get some service gauges on this Guy verify that it's actually low on charge and then will troubleshoot from there. So we have about positive 7 degrees Fahrenheit as the temperature inside the walk-in freezer. And if we come up to the evaporator and look behind, there's no weird frost patterns or anything.

But the expansion valve is making a funny noise. That's because it's feeding, vapor refrigerant to the expansion valve. That's a problem. The thermostat is set below zero, and that doesn't mean that it's working correctly, we have to check calibration to make sure it's actually calibrated.

What you can do is just simply turn it warmer. It turns off at positive six and it turns on at zero and we were set at about negative six, so I've confirmed that the thermostat is working, even though I don't like that style of thermostat, it's a piece of junk, but so what we need to do. I'm just doing a visual inspection, I don't see any refrigerant leaks. Definitely don't like the way the sensing bulb is ran, so we're gon na need to put some gauges on this guy and figure out if it's low, uncharged or not alright.

So we are still flashing box temps about five degrees. Now almost no subcooling yeah, so we're gon na go ahead and add some charge to this guy. When I'm charging with my probes, I just have my hose that has a low loss fitting on one side and a ball valve. On the other purge everything out, I waved my cylinder before I brought it on the roof, so I can find out how much gas I used and we're just going to go ahead and proceed to clear the sight glass a little bit out of time and I'm Just kind of working the ball valve I've got a suction port, suction probe, all the way down with the evaporators measuring the true evaporator superheat.

Obviously we're flooding back to the compressor too. We've got really low superheat, so I do want to be careful. We may need to adjust on that super genome. Now we're gon na clear.

It doesn't look like it's going to take much to clear up the glass we might just have to adjust the THD okay, so we cleared up the sight glass honestly, it didn't even take a pound, so I don't know that it was actually low uncharged. It may just be the expansion valve active wonky, so we're gon na go down and adjust the superheat because we're still running an extremely low superheat, it's saying negative, which is impossible, but basically it's actually no yeah. It's still saying negative right here, which you know is impossible, but we're gon na go down and adjust on that super easy. So we're just flooding back to the compressor and you can tell it's been happening for a while, because all the dirt right here go adjust that superheat all right.

So I pulled the super heat cap off or the adjustment cap off and we're gon na drive the. What do you really want to call it the screw or whatever into the valve, to bring the superheat up so we're gon na go about half a turn and that's about it? You don't want to go too much we're looking for about 6 degrees evaporate or superheat on this bad boy, not a fan of these emerson valves, because the power heads aren't replaceable on this style kind of silly, so got to give it time after you make a Superheat adjustment, we're gon na watch, we're gon na step outside the box and watch the readings. There's my superheat right here and it really hasn't improved, so we're gon na give it another half a turn to it. We'll probably get a one full turn and see what that does.

You still got to just be very careful with these valves, but I have a feeling: we're gon na have a bad valve here, but we'll see what we can get here. Okay, so the adjustment screw you're gon na go into the valve to the top of the power head to raise the superheat and down out of the valve to bring the superheat down, but we need to raise it. Okay, so that's one full turn. Four quarter turns and we're gon na see what that does for us.

So I am NOT getting a response from that expansion valve no matter what I do. I turned on it like three full turns in and I'm still sitting at 1.9 degrees superheat. I'm gon na go ahead and take jump out on the limb and say that that expansion valve is faulty it's bad. But before I change the valve, I'm gon na do a couple tests on the compressor to make sure that the compressor is not bad.

Am I worried running such low superheat is that we have pushed all the oil out of the compressor and that's an almost impossible thing to fix on a system like this. The evaporator is about 25 feet below me right now, condensers up on the roof. If we washed all the oil out of this thing, it's gon na suck, but we're just gon na. Do some tests check the copla mobile app, see how it says the compressor is performing, do some amp tests and then go from there.

Everything checks out on the Copeland looking good as far as the contrasting performance go, we're going to go ahead and look into changing this expansion valve. I got to see if I actually have the valve with me. I'm pretty sure I do, but then we'll have to recover the charge and go through all that. I did a little quick test and pumped it down to see if I could pull it into a vacuum and it would hold pressure in a vacuum and it pretty much did I mean I pulled down to negative one.

I'm a little concerned I'd like to see a pole lower than that, but it's not rising like the suction reads, bad or anything like that, so we're gon na go ahead and try to just change this valve, and hopefully the compressors doing okay after that, okay, so I went in here and I wanted to see. Sometimes these valves can be a little sticky and I still want to change the expansion valve, but I actually got it to adjust what I did was. I ran the adjustment stem all the way in then all the way out into the middle position, and then I adjust it from there. So I basically cleared whatever was stinking inside that valve.

That was causing a problem notice. My box temp, is dropping now and my superheat is running about nine degrees. I'm not gon na adjust on it too much more we're just gon na. Let it run.

I do still want to change this valve, but this way I can insert a proper quote and do it properly, it's holding pretty good for now, superheats down to eight degrees, we're down to negative two in the box. So it's looking pretty good. Looking good in here. We're gon na set that temp control, so what I'm gon na do because big picture.

We have a lot of problems with these, these coils with the silver line, valves and everything. So I'm gon na quote to change thermostat put in a digital expansion valve solenoid valve and then we'll recover the charge put in a new liquid line. Sight, glass and dryer up on the roof will go with flare dryers and then we'll get rid of this mess and clean up the wiring in here. That would be my solution to this so long as I see it come down to temperature, so I'm gon na watch this thing and adjust on this temp control make sure it's set correctly and go from there.

You know I wanted to point something out to again: I'm biased. I don't like these Emerson, alcove valves, whatever they're. Just I don't know, I have problems with them. Maybe it's just because I don't understand them.

I don't know I'm just not a fan, and maybe I see problems, I'm not saying that the issue we're having here is completely that valve. But I don't like the fact that you can change the power heads on, though it's not that I think I have a bad power and I think that there was some moisture or something like that. Stuck inside the valve frozen some wax buildup or something some kind of contaminant. If this was a spoiling valve, I'd, probably just take it apart, inspect it put it back together or even replace the internal components by.

I just don't like these emerson valves - and you know this is one of those things where I've done a lot of work on these cold pack coils and I run into these issues. So you know I'm getting ahead of the game and gon na quote the solenoid valve the temperature controller and the expansion mode. Just my personal preference, I'm not saying that's the right way to do it every single time, but I will say that usually you shouldn't have to adjust on expansion valves if you have to adjust on expansion, notes, there's either contaminants in it or the novel is starting To go bad after after first initial startup, that's my personal preference going, you know having to go in there and work on after-the-fact indicates that there's some time, contaminants or something in there looks like we just turned back on or turned off. I'm gon na have to check that something just satisfied.

So what I'm gon na do is I'm going to turn it warmer. It turned off so we just turned on so we need to go a little bit cool they're, not right there, so it actually satisfied see they haven't had this thing satisfying a very long time, so we were flooding the coil right now before once I reduce the Refrigerant through it, the flooding slowed it down got my superheat dialed in. We actually came down in satisfied, so I'm gon na go ahead and start taking my stuff off of this, I'm confident it's going to work and then we're just gon na quote to change all those parts. Look at that we've got a happy compressor cool hold such a line coming back to it, but it's not flooding back anymore, not that ice on the head of the compressors bad.

That just means that the temperature of the suction line and the temperature of the refrigerants below dew point and freeze point, but this one was excessive and you could tell it had been going on for yeah we're looking good for now. Temporarily. Cyclops is still clear. Unfortunately, I'm not going to change the receiver, because you know it's still working.

What we'll do is we'll just make sure the liquid line dryers after this valve right here, we'll cut out the stupid Quick Connect, liquid lines, iron sight, glass right here, and then this will be a color King bow before I left. I wanted to inspect that compressor. Contactor, you can definitely see just the cover. There's some arcing going on and it's gon na be hard to see, but it's really bad shape.

You can see some pitting really bad, so we're gon na quote to change that guy out too. That's not good. So again, big picture diagnosis, guys big picture diagnosis. So to recap, we had a service call on a walk-in freezer that just wasn't getting cold enough.

The complaint was that it was maintaining. I think like six to nine degrees, positive temperature, that's Fahrenheit, and they want to be in the negatives basically closer to negative ten. If we're keeping ice creams in here that they're gon na scoop, we typically want to maintain our walk-in freezers at about negative ten degrees. So when I arrived, I found that the unit had a flashing sight glass, and I noticed that there was quite a bit of frost coming back to the compressor indicating that it was flooding now, like I mentioned in the video just because there's frost doesn't necessarily mean.

There's something bad: you have to evaluate the situation and take the readings and figure out what was going on. In our case, we were flooding back to the compressor we had on the evaporator superheat measurement. We actually had zero degrees superheat, even though it said negative, that's impossible, so it was zero degrees superheat. Now I never measured it at the compressor.

I imagine it was probably a couple degrees superheat out the compressor, because it is gon na gain some heat on the way back up to the compressor. You're, not necessarily gon na have zero degrees at the compressor too, but it was definitely low enough to be a concern. Now. The extremely low superheat on the compressor can cause all kinds of problems.

Okay, it can cause. It can basically cause the compressor to have oil problems. It can push the oil out of the compressor. Basically, you know and it can wreak havoc on the system.

Obviously, you saw that the performance of my evaporator wasn't working very well either, but there was also something funky going on with that expansion valve. So at first I got a couple adjustments out of it and I noticed there was no change in anything and that made me concerned makes me want to change that valve and I was getting ready to change it. But then you know I'd rather with this particular customer. I'm allowed to go ahead and do emerging.

He fixes, but it's a little bit more of a pain because they have not to exceed values and different things and don't get me wrong. I would have gotten paid, but I just prefer to go through the quoting process, so that way they know what they're getting up ahead and then I can also make sure that I have the right components to install them. I'm sure I could have gotten it going, but anyways what I did was. I made those adjustments.

I adjusted the valve one full turn and I got no change out of it, which is concerning okay. So then you know just before I was kind of like a last-ditch effort. What I did was, I was worried about something being sticky inside the valve, and so I ran the adjustment stem all the way in all the way out back to the center point, and then I adjusted the superheat from there and it started to respond. So what that did is it confirmed that there was something sticking inside the valve Wow the needle that opens and closes on the valve probably had some goo or something like that on it.

There could have been ice formation inside of it because of moisture contamination. There's a lot of things that it could have been okay, so we got the valve to start responding. This is a temporary fix until I can go and do the proper quote and we're going to go in quote to clean up the system. Now, out of precaution, my quote is going to include new refrigerant, a proper evacuation, liquid line, filter, dryer, a new sight glass.

That's a little bit easier to see, cuz that a danfoss valve that's and there's a little bit difficult to work with all right. I'm sorry! Danfoss sight, glass and we're gon na put in a proper expansion valve. I prefer the spoilin valves, because I'm just very comfortable with them and they have replaceable components. You can change the power heads which, more than likely or most of the time I should say, is the part that fails because the the sensing element rubs out on things but yeah.

I just prefer the spoiling valves myself. So that's what we're gon na quote to do, and then I'm also going to change that temperature controller. Just because I don't like to I'm just not a fan of that style of control. I prefer to have a digital and/or, a Johnson pen like an a nineteen mechanical control.

If I had to so we'll see, I'm gon na submit the quotes. I know that they're gon na approve it but, like I said, I just wanted to go through the proper procedures and make sure everything was working properly. It's also interesting. You know you guys can see the temperature change in the box too, once my expansion valve started to react.

Also, if you remember and beginning in the video I mentioned that the expansion valve was making a funky noise more than likely. You know it was just because we were feeding vapor, refrigerant and or we had just something funky going on in the valve that wasn't allowing it to work properly. I only added it was actually like 8 ounces, nine ounces of refrigerant to the system and it cleared up the sight glass. So I actually don't think that it was low on charge.

I think that something was going on with that expansion valve that was making the system act like it was low, uncharged and making the sight glass flash so anyways. I want to say thank you guys so very much for taking the time to watch these videos. I really appreciate it be sure to send me an email if you have questions HVAC, our videos at gmail.com leave a comment on this YouTube video pay attention. I do my live streams Monday night, it's our Monday nights, usually typically at 5 p.m.

Pacific Coast time and I'll go and answer most of the questions that you guys send me on these YouTube videos and different things, and so stay tuned, keep an eye on that And other than that, we will catch you guys on the next one: okay.