This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition. Um we've got a service call today on a walk-in freezer that wasn't working right and i walk in the freezer coils at 35 degrees, but listen sounds like you can hear vapor, but then also those fans are not spinning at full speed. It's kind of odd and they're, like maybe slowing down and speeding up it's kind of weird, so um. It's definitely thought in here, so we're going to uh get our tools out.

Let's see what's going on with this, so this is very odd because it clearly here sounds like we're feeding, vapor. Okay, my liquid line is rather cool. It's not very warm now but which i i feel like. I need to go into the roof, but these fan motors should be spinning on high speed too.

So if it's a low charge issue, i'm afraid to go up and add gas until i figure out why these fan motors don't seem to be spinning on high speed, i could be wrong, but they just don't seem like they're moving enough air for me. So i'm going to look at the fan motor issue first now these fan motors are controlled by the temp control when the temp control calls they speed up to high speed when the temp control satisfies they slow down to slow speed or low speed. So there's nothing. No reason right now why they shouldn't be running at full speed now really quickly.

This is a rebranded ke2 therm, it's arctic fox, it's just their oem version, um that they made for cold pack or rdi. So the yellow light means that we're calling okay. So if we hold this, it tells you that we're set for negative 10 okay, so we know the controls calling now. This is our two speed relay for the fans right here.

If i disconnect this red wire, those fans should turn onto high speed and they're. Not it's unintrigued, so yeah, that's interesting! All right! We're gon na go ahead and test this. I set the control higher and these fans are not slowing down to low speed. So you heard the refrigeration shut off up there.

It goes what the heck, what is going on here. It sounds like it's in defrost now this is weird, because this does not control defrost all right um. I don't think this is. I was hoping it was just going to be like a quick check.

This check that it could be a coincidence that it just went into defrost, it's hard to say: um we'll still have to get up onto the roof, but i'm going to grab my amp clap and check the defrost. No, that's weird: is it just a coincidence that it literally just went into defrost when i pushed that button? What are the odds huh all right? Well, i guess we're gon na need to run up to the roof and see what's going on up there. One thing i will say is now that i think about it: these are not standard 12-inch, blades, um, they're bigger, so it's a possibility that i may not even you know normally, i could hear the sound and know like hey those aren't spinning fast enough, but it May be that they don't spin or make the same sound that i'm used to because they're bigger blades. You know they may be able to slow the motors down and then have a bigger blade.

So it still moves the same amount of air because it's all about energy savings with these things so, like i said, need to jump onto the roof figure out. The defrost issue check the charge and then we'll come back and look at the motors again all right. We're up here on the roof that looks like oil. It looks like a lot of oil um, let's open this guy up, is it in defrost? Yes, it just went into defrost right there now we're out of defrost, but what's with all that oil? Oh yeah, that's not good! It's all the oil from the system is it all coming from here.

Maybe it looks like it's not from the receiver. It's from the liquid line, the liquid line, cracked right here. So we've got a crack liquid line. Okay! Well, we're gon na get what we need to get and uh try to fix this guy and don't really have the thing barely had any gas left in it.

And if you look right here, it's like damn near cracked completely off, i mean not even much so pulled the schraders out just to vent whatever little bit of vapor was left in there, but i mean what you guys saw us. What was in there um here's one issue, i can fix this. This is no problem and i can say it's a manufacturer's flaw because if you look at it with the dryer right here, um there's, you know this guy right here, sitting right there, but that's still a lot of weight sitting on that top. So really what should happen is this should come over and go to the ground right and we'll put the dryer on the ground right here and then come out.

It's not a great idea with it. The way that it is so we're going to fix that, but the big issue is how much oil leaked out of the compressor. That's a problem with the reciprocating compressor, with no sight glass gon na have to take a shot in the dark. I do have oil in my van, so it's not a big deal i'll put about a pump pump and a half of oil in there.

It's just going to be an estimation, but it should be enough. One thing to understand is refrigeration oil. The tiniest bit goes a mile, so i probably a solid pump of polyester oil with my oil pump will be just fine, we'll put it into the suction line when it's running, but we'll get some copper, we'll re-pipe that put the dryer on the flat surface. Come over and then connect back to the liquid line.

Another thing is we'd. What's interesting was between when i was down at the evaporator, and i could hear it running to when i came up here. It wasn't really that much time. Why was it still running if it only had that little bit of gas in it? So we don't know if there's a problem with the compressor, but regardless i am going to because the system's completely void of gas right i mean we're staring right at it.

I'm gon na go ahead and put a new dual pressure control in here and probably a new fan cycle control too, because if you guys don't already know these fan cycle switches on these guys are notorious for failing. So we'll probably do that. Um eliminate these stupid things because we're going to have you know we don't get any refrigerant anyways, but we'll hope that the compressor is still good. It probably is, but why was it still running? Because i didn't get up in time to get gauges on it or anything like that, obviously, because you guys saw when i walked up here, but this thing i mean it's literally been a minute and a half two minutes since i started the clip up on the Roof like so, why was it still running without a little bit of gas in there? You know unless the sound that i was hearing was it turning on and off on low pressure, but it's hard to say, but regardless we're gon na we're gon na put the low pressure controls or the pressure controls you know over here.

So that way, we can actually service them in the future, because the way they are welded on there, it's kind of dumb. I would hate to go put all this stuff on there and then find out. They don't work. It's one of those silly things about these systems: um, but, okay, all right! So i'm just kind of taking an idea.

What i need and then we're gon na go down to the van. I should have most of it in stock all right. At this point, i kind of got this pre-bent right here um this guy. I ended up just breaking it off and it broke off really clean.

So i'm able to sweat right onto that made a swage on this fitting i'm kind of put a flare on that uh. Putting some nylog on this guy right here, just put a tiny bit on the threads right there. Okay and then thread this guy on a couple of dugga's two clicks of the torque wrench and then we'll get ready to do the other side, get the dryer assembled and we're moving along. It's a mess but uh re-piped.

The discharge line got rid of all the little connections. Right here put two new tees right. There i'm going to try to fly with just one fan cycle, switch we'll just disconnect one motor we're not going to disconnect them both. So we'll make sure we disconnect the motor furthest away from the header at the end.

So we'll disconnect this motor um and then uh. We can always because i put t's on here so we can always add another one later if need be um now the way that i did. These is uh. There's a schrader here and there's a schrader here so that way you can actually take this off because there's a depressor in this tee.

So if you ever needed to change one of these, you can take it off now. Okay, so low pressure right here got a dual pressure. Control got a spaghetti of capillaries, but it is what it is when they make these units junk like this is what you got to deal with. Um i'll worry about all this here in just a minute.

So for now we're ready to get the evacuation running, so we've got everything all set up: re-piped dryer secured down on the bottom right there connected in so we're going to turn the evacuation on got the big boy pump here, the vpx7, so uh gas ballast is Open you can tell the gas ballast is open because it's flashing, yellow right here. So we'll do the initial pull down like that and then let it run for a little bit and i'll clean up and start doing the wiring and everything evacuations about 467 66. We've got power turned on so it's pulley, they're, full and pulling through the entire system. The wiring on this is a disaster.

I just gives me anxiety, but it is what it is so we're just we'll make sure we secure stuff. So that way it doesn't rub out. I got to fix this right here. Um we've got it connected into here, so we have dual pressure control.

The fan cycle switch turns that fan motor on and off this one will run 24 7. um. Let's see, we've got power from the pressure control coming from line three going through the dual pressure control coming out going into a time, delay anti-short cycle timer then coming out of that going to the contactor coil, then the other side of the contactor coil is wired. Energized all the time that way, if it ever ran low again, it wouldn't do the on off on off on off it's a 90 second timer, so um yeah or 180.

Second, actually, i think it's a three minute timer, so anyways uh yeah we're about ready to uh put some refrigerant in this guy. We got the mg 44 micron gauge, showing us system evacuation; okay, it's in its decay. 566.. I pulled off the big hoses.

I valved off the vacuum core removal tools and now what i'm doing is actually pulling the evacuation on the manifold gauge set before we hook up our refrigerant cylinder, because we want to make sure our hoses and our gauges are completely dehydrated right. So before we open anything up, then we're going to get some refrigerant, add it into the receiver and then open it up and start the system up got a drum of 404 right there. We waited it weighed 19 pounds so approximately. What is that about 14 pounds of gas in it, i think, is usually well on five or six pounds so 13 or 14 pounds, but we wrote it on there.

Now we purged everything up to here and we open up all the valves. We're still that's our decay, 578 microns, so the system's nice and leak free. We turned off the disconnect switch because this powers, the liquid line, solenoid valve downstairs. So what we're going to do is we're going to dump as much gas into the high side as possible.

Okay, so it's dumping into the high side, the receiver, that liquid line going down and stopping at the liquid line solenoid valve and then just filling up as much as it can. And then, when we turn on the switch in a few minutes, the liquid line solenoid valve will open the gas will come back up in the low side, activate the low side pressure control and then the system will turn on. But for now we have it off. So that way we can just dump as much gas as possible in there once we have positive pressure.

We take this guy off that way. We don't introduce any air into the system and uh yeah we're good. So the mg 44 can take slight positive pressure. You don't want to leave it on the system forever like that, but we'll put the caps on there.

So we have that one in case we need to put a fan cycler on the other. Condenser fan motor if need be um, and then this one's just an extra port and yeah we're good, so we're just going to keep letting it add gas and then we'll uh, we'll turn it back on here in a minute all right here we go one. Two three: please don't blow up: okay, low pressure control should start to see pressure once the thermostat downstairs. We have a digital thermostat, so it's got to go through its power cycle sequence.

Then, once it turns on the liquid line solenoid valve, we will start to see pressure come up on the low side now. The number four terminal in the defrost clock right here is what sends power down to that and energizes it. So it's just a waiting game to wait for the uh um. What is it uh, arctic fox or ke2, therm, 10 plus defrost controller to basically go through its energizer power up all right here we go and we just turned on and one condenser fan motor turned on that's good, so i'm going to go ahead and add refrigerant And we've got a sight glass right here.

We should be running a clear sight, glass and then that guy won't turn on until it gets to 250 psi on the head pressure. So all right we're doing good now, so we had it set to cut in about 25 psi. So all right, so we're just going to keep adding gas and then we'll follow up in a minute. The fan cycle switch cut in about 260, which is fine, so we're just going to let it run sight.

Glass is flashing, that's a good sign, meaning that liquid is getting making us all the way through. So we're just going to go ahead and add a little more refrigerant make sure that cyclist clears up be careful because we do have a heavy load in the box right now, so we don't want to overload it we're just adding refrigerant slowly. There is no head pressure control valve on this guy, so it's just going to be a clear sight, glass, so just slowly adding gas. Now, when i say you slowly want to add gas, you don't want to overload it and clear the sight glass when the box is at 60 degrees, because, theoretically, you could add too much gas, because you could just basically dump it in there.

If you give it time and let it slowly come down to temp just slowly, adding it so what i'll usually do is add it till it's about three quarters full or a little bit over and then just let it run for 10 minutes and add a little Bit more slowly until we get a clear glass, we are charged up, everything's good. The system turned back on now. What we're going to do is we're just going to add about a pump of oil. Now we have no idea how much oil was lost, but, judging by the little container right there, i'm just going to make an educated guess and i'm going to give it one full pump.

So we're going to give it one full draw coming out and then we'll just give it, maybe maybe a pump, maybe just under a pump okay. Now i already purged everything. It's already ready to go okay, so we are pushing against the system running so we're to go slow, adding it very slowly. Oh, like i know it's not that hard.

I had the ball valve closed. So just nice and slow don't want to overload it we're putting it into the suction line. Okay, close it off. That's all! We need all right.

We closed off the ball valve. That's all! We need um again we just added just a little bit to compensate for what was lost. We have no idea how much was lost. We took an educated guess, but it's better than not having enough oil.

Basically all right uh, we are back up and running. We have a clear sight: glass, it's been clear for a little while i like how, with the um scorland catch all and see how you get the male female sight glass. I like how they mate together, like that, it's really nice fan cycle switch, is working fans. Turning on and off everything's looking good, so we're going to take the gauges off and assemble the unit and then go downstairs and have a look at the evaporator make sure those fan motors are running the way they're supposed to all right, they're running on high speed.

So i don't know what i saw earlier. I don't know what that deal was, but yeah they're kicking right. Now i'm really tempted to disconnect that that two speed, because i don't know why it was dude, see there's no reason right now why i should have done that that two-speed relay is jacked up or something all right. So here's the problem.

We have two bad fan motors, they're shorted internally, so this one's running on full speed. What i the way that i proved this was i disconnected the two speed relays? Okay, basically, if you pull the red wire, you should disconnect the two speed to the motors, but they're all wired together right. So then i went in and i unplugged every red wire to each motor, and this is the only one running at full speed. These two are running at slow speed, so we have two bad fan motors um.

They just must be shorted or something inside. Who knows so they still spin just on slow speed. Basically, so this sucks, but it's just silly um, there's not much i'm gon na. Do it it'll get them through the weekend? Um, the closest supply house, uh, is, is quite a bit away from here, so this should get them by for now, but we'll just have to come back with two more of those fan motors weird.

I come back in here to check on it now. The left two motors are spinning at full speed. So that's random. It's just like intermittent so weird, but we'll get those two new motors and then the right one, i think, is fine and then uh yeah we'll follow up next week.

All right we are back today. I've got new fan motors, we're gon na put on the two left ones, ironically, they're they're all running at full speed right now, so it's intermittent with those two left motors doing that. But the box is at negative seven, so we made it through the weekend. Everything's good all right, replace the two left motors um.

I purposefully left the two speed option out of the picture, because we've been having way too many problems with these two speed motors. Failing so we're gon na leave them in high speed. I hate to do that because i love to stay with oem. You know the way they designed it, but i'm telling you.

This is one of those things where i'm going to be an engineer and protect my customer, because these two speed are costing the customer more. You know, luckily, these motors are under warranty, but these aren't even a couple months old and i've been changing these like crazy lately so uh the unit's back up and running we're gon na go jump up onto the roof and have a look make sure everything looks Good up there all right, the equipment's, looking good sight glass is clear. I don't really see a need to do anything else with that. I'm going to put some tape on this just to strap it down and that'll.

Be it i'm going to set the time on the defrost clock, but we're good to go. This equipment's beat down, there's not a whole lot. There's a lot of things i want to do to it. I want to redo all that wiring and everything, but we're not going to reinvent the wheel here so using your senses when you're walking up to the call or the problem helps you know, i immediately thought something was wrong.

Those fan motors didn't seem like they were spinning fast enough. I kind of doubted myself a little bit and kind of backtracked thinking that maybe they just had bigger fan blades, but that wasn't the case. I in fact was seeing an issue where the fan motors were all spinning slow, but it was intermittent. I tried to prove the problem by disconnecting the two-speed wire on the relay and they didn't slow down theoretically or speed up theoretically if they were running in slow speed.

If you pulled that red wire in mind you, not all two-speed fans work the same okay, these particular ones have the extra leg. There are 208 volt motors and when it gets that extra leg of power going to that red wire on these ones, that's when they slow down so the relay in that case only uh sends power. You know when it's not calling, basically so or vice versa, whatever it is, i may be mixing it up, but the whole thing is: is that understanding the sequence of operation, understanding how these things work? Now i didn't have a manual that explained how these motors work. I just kind of process of elimination figured it out by having a lot of problems and like playing around with it.

Sometimes you got to do that. You know schematics. Don't necessarily tell you how the two speed stuff works. The manufacturer doesn't have a very good explanation of how they work again, i've just kind of figured it out by playing with them.

So i knew something was up. I kind of doubted myself a little bit, but it turns out. I was right, obviously, okay and the process that i went through to find how those motors had failed was a process of elimination. The first thing i did was disconnect the red wire at the relay right, but that red wire comes from the relay and goes to each motor and then it's wired right, daisy chained to each motor.

So whenever um, i disconnected that that would have proved whether or not the relay was the problem. Okay, but in this case the motors were still spinning slow. So then, i went and isolated each red wire from each motor and then the problem persisted with the two left motors, but then the far right motor was still working. Okay, so more than likely what was happening is internally.

Those motors are shorted, somehow okay and it's intermittent they're, making an intermittent connection to where they slow themselves down and because all the motors were wired together, it was in turn slowing down the last motor too. Okay. Now, in this situation in a perfect world i would have changed all the motors, but because it was under warranty through the manufacturer. You know i'm only going to change the ones that presented themselves being bad because the manufacturer is going to test them right.

Well, not always, but sometimes they do, and you don't ever want to send something back. You know changing it, just out of precaution when it's under warranty that that doesn't fly too well with the manufacturer. So but we proved the point we went back in and we changed the motors now onto the roof where we had the broken liquid line. Okay, there was a couple things going on and i had to make an educated guess when i went up there first off whenever you have welded in pressure controls.

That's a problem! Okay, because it's very difficult to replace them. You typically have to remove the entire refrigerant charge. I did not know for sure if the system was still running, but there was no gas left in the system. What you guys saw when i went up there was what was in there that liquid line just started spraying when i bumped it, and then that was it it sprayed for like 20 seconds and then the charge was gone.

So there was barely any gas left in the system and the question is: was it running when i was downstairs it sounded like it was? It sounded like i could hear vapor, but it was kind of on off on off. So maybe it was turning on and off on low pressure. I don't know - and that was my fear - okay, so out of precaution, because the way it was designed, i installed a new dual pressure control and then also added an extra feature to the system, which is that time delay relay that's going to prevent short cycling. So now that is a what i think it's a delay on brake timer.

So whenever the power brakes at that relay right it, it doesn't let it turn back on for another 90 seconds or 180 seconds, whatever it is okay, so it basically delays the thing. From short cycling from turning on off on off in some situations, if you have a high pressure control, that's that's turning the system off and it's an auto reset. You can short cycle on and off that way, or vice versa, on low pressure, there's just enough gas in there that it still turns back on, but then it doesn't and then it just goes back and forth. I eliminated that.

Okay, of course, i'm keeping the customer in the loop now um the fan cycle switch. That was a we had the gas out of the system. Okay and i talked to the customer, we have a high failure rate on those fan cycle switches. They go bad.

All the time and those of you that work on this rdi equipment, coal pack, equipment or manitowoc equipment, it's the same stuff, they use these encapsulated pressure controls and, in all fairness, it's i in my opinion, it's not necessarily the manufacturer's problem. It's actually the fact that most of these customers don't do proper preventative maintenance. This is my opinion. I do not know this to be fact.

Okay, but most of these customers do not do proper preventative maintenance. Okay, so they run with dirty condensers. They run with dirty evaporators and the systems tend to run higher than normal current. So therefore uh, you start to run into pressure control issues.

Now that is purely my opinion again. I have no facts to prove that. That's just me using my logic and i could be completely wrong. I'm sure you guys will like me up in the comments about that, but that's what i believe to be the cause of these pressure controls that constantly go bad.

I prefer not to use encapsulated pressure controls; they tend to not have as good of longevity when it comes to high current situations and stuff, especially when you're disconnecting line voltage. It's one thing: if you're using one of these tiny little pressure, controls and you're, just disconnecting low voltage like 24 volts or something i find that the encapsulated peanut style controls last a lot longer, but on the higher voltage stuff you tend to have higher currents. You are disconnecting a leg of power, depending on which leg of power you're disconnecting in that three-phase circuit. You could be running an extreme load through that pressure control, and maybe it's not set up to have that and then my theory is, you tend to run into more problems now the pressure control that i went and put in for the fan cycle and the dual Pressure is a much more heavy duty control it's adjustable and it's field replaceable now, because of the way that i installed it because of the way that i put it below schraders, and so that way you can pop it off with a schrader below that and you're Good to go okay, so you guys see how i like to do things i like to be as thorough as possible, um, adding while being practical at the same time right that was a friday afternoon call it was getting kind of late.

I didn't want to spend a whole bunch of time there. One thing i will say, as i'm editing the video. I realized that i didn't show when i mentioned that i taped the liquid line, i actually strapped down the dryer too. That's something else that was very important, because that could lead to a future failure.

Oftentimes what you'll see on some of these systems, depending on how they're, piped and stuff, when the solenoid valve downstairs calls, depending on how they're piped, sometimes you'll, see the liquid line. Vibrate. All the way up to the roof and if nothing's strapped, we could run into the same situation that we did before, where the liquid line could potentially crack. So i did strap down that dryer kind of frustrated that i didn't get footage of that.

But i did strap it down in a way, so that way it's not going to vibrate and we taped up the liquid line. You know it's not a perfect situation that wiring on that thing is a disaster. I've always wanted to redo that wiring just haven't had an opportunity, but one of these days when i do get an opportunity i'll redo that but who knows maybe it'll, be time to change the equipment before i do that, you know. Who knows, i really appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video.

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