This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition morning. We have a service call on a freezer, not working they're, saying the bottom. Temp is well they're, saying the bottom of the box. The temp is high and the top is fine, which is an odd request, but this should be a warranty call too so we're going to dive into this guy and see what we can figure out all right.

So we open up the compressor section. The condenser is clean, it was pretty cold when i got here, the evaporator is not iced up. There's a tiny bit of ice on the expansion valve, nothing to be really concerned about so so the unit was down to temp. When i got here, it was semi-loaded with food.

The condenser is a little bit dirty, but not bad. It's just sticky um. This guy's running both evaporator fan motors are running um at this point were because they're complaining that you know like during the day the temps go up, so we're gon na go and run a leak check on this guy. I'm going over this thing and for the life of me i am not finding a leak.

I even pulled back the insulation. Now the insulation itself sets off the leak detector, but i'm not sometimes on the older leak detectors. That would happen - and i think that's the case on this one, because i pulled back the insulation and moved it, but i'm going to go ahead and remove the insulation on the rest of that line and then thoroughly leak check just the line. But i went through the evaporator.

This is the uh inficon gas mate and it is a little bit sensitive. You got to be careful with it because, like for instance, if i tap it, it goes berserk like it's it's kind of cruddy in that aspect, so you got ta watch out for that stuff and understand how the leak detector works to this day. There's not a amazing leak detector for hydrocarbon refrigerants. Yet so.

But let's take this back in here. But if you, if you just set it down in here and don't hit anything, it doesn't go off. But if you literally put it in the same spot and tap it it'll go off there, it goes so that's just the sensitivity on the leak detector and we have it on the highest sensitivity too. So you can drop it down if you wanted to, but i like that so um yeah, i'm just going through it.

The next step that i'm going to do i'm going to pull off that insulation. We don't know that there's a leak we're just before we put service ports or anything, but before we put service ports i would actually do temperature clamps. This is one of those dilemmas. I have gone through this guy multiple times, it's a negative one right now.

It's a little off on that, but not bad, but my probe. I don't expect i'm not worried about that, but everything looks fine. I've watched it turn on and turn off and satisfy. Uh turns on at negative.

Two turns off about negative eight ish um temperatures. Don't look bad, i'm i'm very reluctant to put service gauges on this guy because i would have to add access ports. When i can't find anything wrong, i mean the condenser. Is i mean there's a little bit of film, but nothing to even make it do anything? Everything seems fine on this guy.

I i don't know what else to tell him. The defrost works everything so yeah um. Unfortunately too. This won't be a warranty thing, because i can't find anything wrong.

You know they're complaining the bottom's, not working so verify the doors spring closed and they do they're not getting stuck open best place to check a door spring is barely open and if it shuts itself just barely right, it just barely shuts itself and then slam one Door, slam another make sure they don't stay open. I am not seeing a single thing wrong with this unit. It's kicking butt. The last thing i need to check is just i'm pretty confident the sensors are fine, but i just need to check the sensors in here.

Other than that there's nothing else, i can tell them. So what we're looking for here is uh att is our box temp and then et1 is our evaporator temp negative 25., so the evap temp i mean that seems a little bit low, but i think it's okay and really, if that was high, that'd, be our concern Because then it would skip a defrost um, but yeah everything is fine. One thing i just thought about that i will discuss with them is how they load the box, because this box, the discharge area, does not have a channel going down to the back of the box. So if they load this all up, that air is going to have a hard time, so they need to keep it a couple inches from the back.

That way, we can go all the way down to the bottom and get even air flow and then suck in through the return. So some boxes actually have like a duct running down, but this one doesn't so if they were to shove all the food and fill this up with which they did. When i got here, i believe they had all fries in here that would stop or impede the airflow down to the bottom of the box. Other than that, i can't find anything wrong, so this isn't going to be a warranty thing.

So when you're doing warranty calls um they're, actually very frustrating for business owners, okay as a business owner, i personally as of right now, don't do any warranty work for manufacturers. I work on the behalf of my customers. Okay, so it's very limited. The amount of warranty work i'm actually allowed to do because i am not technically an authorized service agency.

Now some of my customers have negotiated and gotten the manufacturers to approve me as an authorized warranty vendor just for that specific customer in that situation. It puts me in a better place because imagine uh, if you guys, don't understand as a business owner having to go into a customer, that you've never been to and tell them that you know what after i spent two hours on this job, the manufacturer is actually Not going to pay for this repair and you have to pay the bill see. Customers don't understand that even though they're like well, you know on site, they just don't get it and that's one of the reasons why i prefer not to do warranty work on behalf of the manufacturers. Again, i am working for my customer, but i do have to agree to the terms at which the manufacturer is willing to pay me, so that is kind of an issue with warranty work, because typically manufacturers don't pay standard labor rates.

They typically have negotiated labor rates, and so i basically have to conform to the authorized service companies in my area, their negotiated labor rates that they have negotiated with the manufacturers. It's just one of the games you have to play, but in this situation i got a service call of one of my from one of my own customers and i had to go through their location and i had to you know basically tell them hey. This is not gon na be paid for by the warranty, because there's nothing wrong with this box and in conclusion, it actually ended up being the way that they were storing product in the box. Okay, or at least that's the best bet that i could come up to at the time, mind you this video is from a couple months ago, and we haven't had any more issues since i educated the customer on how to properly load the box up.

Okay, but initially when we go through the call, we treat it like anything else, we're investigating right, i'm looking at everything, i'm going through all the common steps. Um the complaint of hey it works in the morning, but not in the afternoon kind of made me think. Hey you know it could be a refrigerant, related issue. Who knows you know as it warms up throughout the day, it's not keeping up.

So that's why i did a leak search on the box, but i did not see the need to put service gauges on it because it's a critically charged r290 system. I didn't want to go that route, so i did a quick leak search on all the hot spots. Did some temperature checks with my temperature clamps and nothing jumped out to say, hey, there's a problem now had. I walked up on the box and it was at 50 degrees and it wasn't coming down to temperature fast enough.

Of course i would have dove into it, but in this situation the box was actually down to temperature. When i arrived, i took all the product out brought the box temperature up quite a bit, put it back together and watched it come down within a you know, half hour 45 minute time frame back down to where it was supposed to be and watched it cycle. Several times on and off so that to me indicated that there wasn't really a refrigerant related issue now also using basic common sense, i shouldn't say common sense using basic troubleshooting logic based off of the amount of times i've worked on these boxes. I looked for ice patterns on the evaporation now if we saw a partially iced up, evaporator coil, just where the metering device entered the coil and then the metering device was all iced up.

It might indicate a refrigerant related issue, but that wasn't the case. I mean there was a tiny bit of ice on the expansion valve, but nothing to be too concerned about. I watched the unit go through a defrost cycle, of which i didn't explain in the video, but i did watch it go through a defrost cycle check the temperature sensors. Everything seemed to be okay, so this one was kind of a textbook issue and then, when i was all finished at the end um you know i had them.

Uh load the box up and i'll show you a clip of that right now and you guys can see that you know they had the product stored improperly now this wasn't even fully loaded up, they had it just they were just starting to load it, and i Was actually going to use the restroom and when i came back they had it halfway loaded and i was like wait. Wait wait! Wait! Let me clip this, you know, so i got a video of it showing so they were about to load up the top with even more stuff. Okay, and if you think about the original complaint, it was working on the top, but it wasn't working on the bottom. Well, that makes sense, because if they were filling that with fries in those pans up there, mainly it was the fries on the second shelf, fully loaded front to back.

Well, then that would happen because it couldn't get any air flow down to the bottom, so it makes sense as to what the potential problem was. So that's how i go through this process, but again i don't just jump to that conclusion. I still went through and did temperature checks. You know evaluated the system.

The temperatures seemed okay uh. I will tell you that i mentioned in the video or i didn't mention the video originally when these r290 units first came out dell field. The manufacturer of this box was doing a really good job of logging. What their temperature should be on the lines? Well, they since have stopped doing that, because i actually called delfield to say hey what should the temperatures be? You know on all the different refrigerant lines before i apply service gauges and they said they no longer give those numbers out, because maybe the boxes have changed or something.

So in the past you used to do a lot of temperature checks, but now it's more or less just rules of thumb, i'm just looking for a massive difference between discharge and liquid, i'm looking for a nice cold suction. You know you can kind of make some estimations uh. It's not 100 accurate. One way that you can estimate, if you ever want to know, because every manufacturer designs their box to be different and operate different right.

And if you ever want to know what a manufacturer designs, their evaporator td, to be right. The difference between the return and the saturated temperature of the refrigerant in the middle of the evaporator um is call the manufacturer and ask them what pressures they want at what temperatures? Okay, because manufacturers oftentimes won't tell you superheat sub cooling, anything like that, but what they will tell you is we want this suction pressure, this head pressure at this box temperature and this ambient. Well with that being said, you can backwards calculate what kind of tds they designed their system to eq to operate with, because if you know that they want uh, let's just say i'm just throwing numbers out there that they wanted on a 404a box 225 head pressure At an 80 degree outdoor ambient, well then, you could do the calculations find the saturated temperature find the outside air temperature and you can calculate what their condenser td is and the same thing goes for the evaporator too, so you can backwards, calculate some numbers and if You know what the tds are supposed to be. You can get some approximate line temperatures you know kind of within a ballpark figure to kind of tell you you know.

If the line temperatures are somewhat close, those are just some little tricks that you can do to try to calculate how manufacturers design their boxes, but you also have to understand every manufacturer beats to the tune of their own drum. You can have a 134a box with a capillary tube for one manufacturer and for another manufacturer, and they will both recommend different operating pressures because they design different efficiencies on the evaporator different tds on the evaporator different things like that. So, like i said, you always want to lean on each individual manufacturer to find out where they want their system to be operating at okay, so basic troubleshooting skills, nothing too crazy. I did everything i could.

The box has been working since i educated the customer on how to properly store the food. I really appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video. It's been awesome. Um.

Do me a favor if you haven't already check out my website? Hvacr videos? I'm sorry hvacrvideos.com, i was giving my email address out for a sec, but we have merchandise available on there. It's a great way to support the channel. If you're interested in doing so uh, you can also support the channel via paypal, youtube channel memberships, patreon, um truetechtools.com. I have an offer code, big picture.

One word: you'll get an eight percent discount, there's links to all of these things in the show notes of this video. You know it's just a cool way to help support the channel if you're interested in doing so. So, thank you guys very much and we will catch you on the next one.