This video is brought to you by Sporland. Quality, integrity and tradition. Working on a glycol unit today ran into an interesting problem. So this is a really old unit.

I've told them to replace it, but regardless, come up into here and I shut it off and look down into there. that's all ice. The refrigeration lines are completely encapsulated in ice. So we're going to get the refractometer out and check the concentration of glycol.

I Suspect it's going to be too much water, All right. So I'm using a refractometer and that is the glycol concentration level you can see. it's probably about 18 degrees is where it's set at and that's not going to be good because down in here is all Frozen up. And so what's happening is this unit is getting colder than I'm sorry the refrigerant lines are getting too cold and the glycol is freezing.

There's too much water in the glycol so you can see it's all the way around. so that ice starts to act as an insulator, makes it struggle to bring the glycol temperature down and it just you know is a vicious circle. So this unit already struggles. As you can see, there's a box fan bringing air from outside because it's just an old R22 unit.

We put a compressor back in it in 2017, but I bet you this unit's from 2004 probably and it's just just beat down. It really is. So unfortunately, um, this is something I'm going to tell them to call the beverage company for. So I could mix glycol right? because glycol and water you use the refractometer you check it.

but this is like the gray area where the beverage company does all the beer lines and everything. and if you don't get the concentration right, depending on the type of restaurant you're working in, it can really start to affect the pumps. Like if the glycols mix too thick, you can start overloading the pumps because they can't pump thick glycol very well. Also what can happen is the heat transfer that happens in the beverage lines can be affected by the glycol concentration if the system has like Cobra head Taps uh if you don't know what those are Google search Cobra head draft beer taps.

They're actually really cool, but the glycol has to be mixed correctly. Now this restaurant goes now the Cobra head tops but the Cobra head TAPS in my experience tend to be a little bit of a pain in the butt. Um, depending on humidity and all that different stuff, it really starts to affect them. But in essence Google search it.

But what it is is it's a beer tap in the shape of a cobra snake. and then when the ice builds up on the beer tap, it really it like exaggerates the Cobra head shape and it looks like you're dispensing the beer from a cobra head. It's really cool actually. But um yeah, I'm going off on a tangent on that one.

So yeah, in this situation they're gonna have to call the Beverage Company I don't think there's anything along with the refrigeration system. It did say 30 degrees when I got here. The last thing I'll do is I'm just going to turn it off at the disconnect switch like I have it I'll plug the pumps back in and we'll let the pumps recirculate the glycol and what I'll do is I'll tell them to call the Beverage Company right now. So that way when the beverage company gets here, all they got to do is flip the disconnect switch on and the refrigeration will start again.

So that's where we're going to go on this. But the last thing I'm going to do is just check the accuracy of the thermostat to the actual glycol temperature with another thermometer just to make sure that's good. And if that's good, then it's all the beverage companies problem. All right.

So um, my thermometer says 29 degrees there with them says 30 so that's accurate. Now the other thing too is that, um, we there's three pumps. okay and we shut the pumps off and then we turned them on and I watched each pump turn on. So there's a return in a supply line for each pump and we notice that this middle one wasn't pumping and uh, I I was making a loud noise at the pump too.

Like really loud. We're like, what the heck, those are newer pumps too. What had actually happened? we were I installed that in July what actually happened and and I've never heard it make a noise like that I Looked over at the pump and all of a sudden I I turned off every other one except for that one and I left it running and all of a sudden I could hear it just buzzing and I stuck my hand in there. This big old goober of silicone came out.

It was stuck inside the supply line. actually it was the return line so it had sucked up like something from up here or something fell inside the glycol or silicone from here and it was stuck in there and then uh, it popped and boom. then it starts flowing. So that's part of the problem too.

But the the glycol concentrations Incorrect and so what I'm going to do is like I said leave this off. We're going to leave the beer company a note and let them know how to turn it back on by literally flipping this on. We're gonna plug in all the pumps which they actually are all running now and then. That way it's just going to run and circulate the glycol and warm up and then they can, uh, they can change the glycol and then uh um, then it should turn back on.

You know it all should be good. So to me, this looks like a freaking two-year-old wrote this. It's horrible how bad my penmanship has gotten. Beverage Dude I Was called on the glycol unit not working when I arrived there was an inch of ice on the refrigeration evaporator I Tested the glycol's concentration and the freeze point was 18 degrees Fahrenheit which is too high.

The glycol is also very dirty I Turned off the compressor at the disconnect switch. When you are done, turn it back on. please sign Refrigeration dude and I'll uh, leave them my cell phone number on here too I Just won't leave that for you guys. This was a short one.

This was actually filmed sometime last year, but it's important to understand that the way that I do certain things is not necessarily the way that you're going to do things. Okay, my company doesn't deal with glycol I Choose not to get involved in that. And the main reasons why I Don't get involved with changing and adding glycol really is because it's a double-edged sword. Once you start going down that path, then the customer says, well, hey, you know we have a glycol leak down here and since you can add glycol, can you fix the leak? No.

I Don't deal with the beverage lines. Hey, we're not getting proper temperatures when the glycol lines run underground. Well, I'm not equipped to pull new glycol lines and that kind of stuff. so it's It's one of those areas, uh, where it's always going to have two people involved.

The the beverage company they deal with the Taps they deal with the pressure settings for the the ex you know, the propellant gas or whatever they're using to push the the beer through the lines. They deal with that I deal with the cooling the refrigeration right and so you just got to know when to say hey, this isn't my problem. You need to go ahead and get the other guys involved. But in the situation to this I still have to have a basic understanding of what it is that they do and the basic understanding of what the glycol does.

You know the idea is that the glycol allows the fluid temperature to get below freezing. Okay, but in this situation it's still. even though it was below freezing, it wasn't letting it get low enough below freezing because you got to figure that the the the temperature differential from the saturated refrigerant temperature to um, the the fluid temperature is going to be pretty high probably 25 to 30 degree temperature differential across or evaporator TD or whatever you want to call it a cross that the fluid to the refrigeration line. So they probably need to be getting their glycol temperature a little bit closer to zero for us to maintain.

Um, you know, a 26 degree box, right? Maybe not quite 30 degrees below it, but you know somewhere in the 20 to 25 range. And in this situation, their freeze point of the glycol hopefully this makes sense to you was not low enough, right? So there was too much water content in the glycol. But I mentioned before, you have to be careful because too much water content can start to affect other things right? But then too much glycol can start to make the the fluid a thicker concentration. so therefore the pumps might struggle a little bit more to pump that fluid through.

All right, Hopefully that helps understanding how these systems at least a general understanding of how they work. Having a refractometer on site and I don't have to like for me for the work that I do. that's not a very expensive refractometer might have cost a hundred bucks or something. Okay, there's very, very expensive refractometers that you can buy at least for what I do I don't need to invest in a really, really expensive one because this does the trick and gets me close enough to where I can call in the beverage company and let them handle the rest and they come in now.

I Mentioned that this video was filmed a long time ago. Uh, you know the one thing that bothers me about the the beverage company. Oftentimes when they come in and and and I hate to throw them all into one bucket. Okay, because I know there's got to be good ones out there too.

But whenever I tell them that the glycol is dirty, they never do anything. at least the companies that I deal with to clean up the glycol like it's it's disgusting I mean that whole thing needs to be stripped. all that silicone needs to be taken off, the inside needs to be drained cleaned. Um, you know, but they don't.

You know the glycol is always nasty and when I see contaminants and different things floating in the glycol that can't be good for the lines. the build up you saw that the silicone was stuck in the the glycol line. you know I mean that's it's just crazy. But anyways, you know I just kind of stay in my lane and do what I know I'm kind of good at and then I let other people handle the other stuff.

okay I really appreciate you making it to the end of the video I Know this was a short one but I thought it was a pretty cool one. Um I was surprised that I could get the refractometer to focus on the camera lens I mean in reality I was putting the into the refractometer on one of those lenses and it was like wow, it actually auto focus. That was pretty cool. So uh, hope you guys enjoyed this one.

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