This video is brought to you by spore'ln quality, integrity and tradition. I want to start this off with a quick explanation, because I know there's a lot of confusion about these units. Okay, I am working on a glycol unit, a beer chiller, a power pack. Okay, there's a couple different names for them.

Essentially, if we have a restaurant that has a long draw beer system. Okay, what that means is that you've got a beer walk-in, that's somewhere in the restaurant, and you have a bar with beer taps that you, you know, fill your glasses with right, but usually that's at a remote location at another end of the restaurant. Well, the problem is, is that we need the beer to be as cold as it is inside the beer walkin anywhere from 32 to 36 degrees. We needed to pour out of the beer taps at 32 to 36 degrees right, because, if you don't, what happens? Is the beer starts to foam and the foam is a loss of beer sales? Essentially it's waste.

Okay, if you don't already know alcohol is one of the the craziest marked-up items in a restaurant, it's a serious moneymaker form with that being said, any waste of alcohol is a revenue loss for the restaurant, so they want to control their product as much as possible. Now there is an argument for warmer beer than colder beer. That's a whole nother subject: okay, because different types of beers require different temperatures all right, but for the most part, the piss beers or the the watery beers. They need to be as cold as possible to taste good and any foam makes them.

You know no good and it's a waste of beer, so we have a cold beer walkin, let's just say at 34 degrees, and we have a long draw beer system. The the bar is, you know, 200 feet 300 feet away from the beer walkin. Well, we've got to have beer lines because you have kegs okay, storage containers of beer inside the beer walkin, and we have lines that have the beer in it and they have to run from the kegs to the beer taps wherever it is in the restaurant. The problem is: is that whether or not those keg lines go underground or through the attic there's going to be a temperature loss, because if they go underground, you're probably going to have a ground temperature of 68 degrees? Something like that, if they go up in the attic to what part of the country you're in you might have an attic temperature of 115 degrees.

Who knows you know, so we got to keep that beer cold from the beer walk into the beer tap. What we do is we have a glycolic our pack unit, whatever you want to call it, and essentially it has two lines or even four lines. Depending on how big of a trunk line, there is okay of beer lines, because the beer lines are usually it's just a bunch of beer lines encapsulated in a round foam cavity. Basically - and it's super super long, just like a big piece of wire, but it has a bunch of different strands of beer lines in it.

Okay and there's usually one two - maybe three sets of glycol lines run through that beer line. Typically, there's you know one to two and they're run right through the middle and then all the beer lines surround them. So we have. Let's just say we have a simple system that just has two glycol lines in there.

What that is, is you have a supply line in a return line, so the supply line is going to pump the glycol all the way to the tap head, usually some weird stuff, depending on the type of tap that is going on in there, then it's going To return all the way back in that same line to the glycol unit to be chilled again and that fluid is actually colder. Okay, we typically run the glycol temperature or the liquid temperature - hmm 26 degrees. Something like that. It you know: different manufacturers might change depending on what type of heads you have.

If you have Cobra tap heads they might get colder. You know I'm not a beer expert, but different ones require different temperatures, but for the most part we use glycol because glycol is a mixture of water and antifreeze. Essentially, okay, and it doesn't let it freeze. So we can get it below freezing right, because if we were circulating water in those lines and we got the water down to 26 degrees, while those lines would freeze and we'd have a problem.

So we have a perfect mixture of glycol and water that allows us to get the fluid temperature around the beer lines below freezing so that way in between the beer, walken and the beer tap. We can keep the beer temperature stable. Basically, okay, so we don't have a waste and then your piss beer doesn't taste more like piss right, okay, so I'm gon na go and get on with the video and then we'll talk about what happened in the end, all right weapon, a tight glycol room today, The complaint is, is that the beer is pouring warm out of the beer tap, so got one glycol unit with three pumps and got another glycol unit with three pumps. So I've got to jump in here and see what's going on.

I would assume it's this one, because it's not running this thing looks to be like someone was in here ripping things apart. It's like we have a disconnect switch that looks to be on fluid is moving in there, which again seems like that would be normal. Compressor is hot to touch pretty hot condenser fan motor is hot. To touch fan motor doesn't appear to be locked up, some creative wiring going on there.

So we need to open this up and see if we've got power going to that compressor, because it's hot I'll actually start at this pressure control. Let's say everything is loose. That's weird! So we'll start on this pressure control alright. So that is a temperature controller.

It is, it looks like a pressure control policy, it just turned on. It was weird but - and I don't know if I did that when I tapped it all of a sudden, it turned on. Let's watch it for a minute and see what happens. That was really weird, so a suction line is an ice cold now and it's cooling and all I did was when I was talking to you guys.

I touched this sensing bolt like that with a mere probe and it turned on so I have a feeling we got a temp control going bad, so we're gon na watch it for a bit and see if it acts up again. I haven't put my gauges on it yet because that's gon na kind of be a pain in the butt, but I don't see the need to. As of yet for your investigation. I finally stuck my hand in the glycol and it's ice-cold - it's 30-something degrees in there.

So this thing was satisfied on temperature and, what's actually happening is we have three pumps in this pump is not working, so I can actually stick my hand and right here, there's two lines: there's an outlet and an inlet, and I have nothing coming out of the Outlet right here on this pump, while we are on this return line so which pump that is, is a good question. I'll have to stick in there, for one of these pumps is down, that's why it was satisfied on temperature. So I don't know for sure. If this is the unit it could, I need to check out this unit too.

Sometimes these things can be very confusing to figure out which one's the problem so we're gon na keep going with this unit for the moment, but right now we've got one bad pump for sure all right. At this point, it's late at night. I do not have a pump and motor on me right now. I shouldn't say it's late and that's like five o'clock in the afternoon it's a evening, so I'm gon na give him the option.

I'm not gon na open up a supply house for one of these pumps, because it's going to take me forever to get it so I'll offer to let them or have them. They come back out tomorrow with a pump and motor, or they can actually call the beverage company to the beer people and they stock bees. I don't sometimes I do, but I actually went by my shop and I didn't have one today so I'll, give them the option, but I'm gon na put this back together. We know the refrigeration systems working and again I don't mind changing these.

I just don't have one and if I wanted to go pick it up, I can go pick it up from a Granger warehouse. That's about two and a half hours away, and then I got to do the whole emergency. Pickup thing: it's not gon na fly. So I'm not gon na do that tonight, so I'm just gon na put it back together and then I give them all the options and let them make the decision they may have me fix it.

They may have the beverage company come on change upon. Who knows all right? So these things are always difficult for me to figure out which one it is. But best bet I can is the pump. Housing is cold, the pump housing is cold and the pump housing is hot on this one.

So this pump is not moving fluid. I tried to do it by sticking my hand in there and feeling the inlet and the outlet, but they've got some common suction thing going on. So I don't know it's kind of weird, but I'm not like a pro and the glycol stuff, but this one looks like this is my problem. It looks like not us, but another company just changed that back in September, but I can tell you that from the look of this glycol again, I'm not an expert in beverage systems.

But since I stuck my hand in there looking at cloudy, it got it's like. There's a bunch of silt on the bottom and just like nasty crowd. They need to have this glycol clean for sure. Again, I'm not an expert with glycol, but some common-sense stuff telling me right here and if you pull the pump off the motor, it looks like it's completely spinning inside there it doesn't even look like it'll grab anymore.

I think it's what's happening here and the pump is really hard to turn to oh yeah, that motor will spin right inside that bumper. So that's the problem, so we need to get a new pump and motor it's gon na be tricky, but it's all good whoa. I talked to the management and they want me to go ahead and bring the pump back tomorrow, so we're gon na pump the motor and then hopefully that I'll take care of these problems. One all right we have returned is tied up yeah.

I don't know if I can express a little tight room that I'm by essentially and like for snug in here, but so we're going to go ahead and remove the loader and then we'll work on getting the pump out to got a new motor here. And I got a new pump, but I'm gon na work on getting the electrical cord into the new mode work on getting a pump out right. There got the pump installed. It's really tight.

I guess that a million times right up here, pumps unplugged. I saw the motor carbonate a motor. I've got the new pump right here, just need to basically on writing back in so shouldn't be too difficult, a little bit more to go kind of a pain in the flood, and it takes a minute, but he gets this little clamp right here that holds it On but you got to make sure that it grabs the two lifts: the lift from the carbonator motor and the lift from the pump, but now we're on and we're ready to fire this guy up. And then I need to go.

Get some insulation tape. Also because this is going to sweat like crazy, so we got to answer all right. It's running and it's already getting frosty like for two seconds: that's what I've got to insulate it fast, but nice and cold pumps running all as well. I am gon na tell them, though, that they need to get someone out here to clean this glycol.

That's not my thing, it's very silty and when you, when you I was moving things around, I got completely cloudy. So one would think that that's possibly the reason why this pump failed so fast because they had there was a date on there of September and 2019, and here we are in March of 2020 - that's not very long for one of these pumps, so I have a Feeling it has to do with the fact that the glycol is really dirty and it's probably coming up. The inside of that foam is my assumption again so we'll see, but I'm going to insulate this guy up right now and watch this thing come down in town. Always want to test the current draw the motor, especially while it's under a heavy load like it, is right now.

Well, actually, no to be honest with you, it's probably not under as heavy of a load as when the glycol gets colder. To be honest, but we're right at run, load amps right now, so we're gon na watch you for a little bit and last but not least, as usual, I'm gon na clean up everybody's trash. That's only half of it. We go over here, a bunch over there.

There's a bunch of blocks that those blocks don't need to be up here, but ceiling tiles I'll leave up here, but it's too much crap, so we're gon na clean all this stuff up that way, we can actually work up here originally when I started on this Call I thought that we were gon na, have a temperature controller issue, okay, but it ended up being that wasn't the case. So the customer called me. They said they had half their bar wasn't working. I went to the beer walk and the beer walkin was nice and cold and down to temp, and then I went immediately up to the glycol units and one of them wasn't running.

So I made an assumption, but by the time I started to get my tools out, the unit actually turned on and then I kind of went on with my diagnosing and realized that it wasn't running simply because it was satisfied. So when I stuck my hands in the glycol, I realized that glycol was below freezing. It was nice and cold. So then that led me to look at the pumps and I actually found again they were doing some weird stuff with their pumps.

They had one line running from another one. I honestly don't know what was going on there. That's a little beyond my paygrade, but one of the pumps essentially was bad and I was able to verify that by feeling the pump housing itself. Okay and then also sticking my hands down into the glycol and then feeling the suction and the lack of suction.

On the pump that wasn't working, so you have a return line and then you have a supply line and I was able to grab the return line or the actually. No. I was able to grab one line, that's pulling from the glycol reservoir, which would have been the supply line and I had no suction so that helped me to figure out that I had a bad pump so anyways I talked to the customer. I wasn't gon na open a supply house that night I gave them the option to call the actual beverage people, because there is beer people that specifically deal with these units and oftentimes they'll have the parts in stock.

If I don't anyways customer chose to go ahead and have me finish it up, came back out. The next day went ahead and put a new pump and motor on there and watched it come down to temperature. So when I turned the unit back on after changing the pumps immediately at the beer taps, my beer temperature was coming out at 65 degrees. Even though the beer walkin was at 35, the the the glycol and the beer in the lines between the beer in the taps was pretty warm because the customer hadn't been using it.

So I went ahead and let the system run and by the time I left, I didn't wait for it to completely come down, but I think I saw it come down to 41 degrees. Typically, you want to see it around 36 degrees pouring out the taps. One thing I will say is I always give the customer an option, and the easiest way to make this process go faster is to just clear the warm beer right. The beer walk-in is 36 32 degrees, whatever it is, and in between the beer, walkin and the taps is where the warm beer is out, because it's been sitting in those lines in this case underground all night, ground, temperatures, 70 degrees or something.

So it brought that temp up so oftentimes. If the customer is willing to what they can actually do is once you've repaired the unit, they can actually run some beer and just waste it. So essentially, it usually takes about one to two pitchers of beer of each one, to clear the lines and to get the cold beer from in the beer walkin to get into the lines, and then they can literally start serving beer again. So it's really at the customer's discretion, but in this situation they were cool with that.

So we went ahead and went to the taps. I think they probably had like 12 taps or something and we just ran two pictures of each beer and we could watch. We started at 60 degrees and then, by the time we got to the second pitcher, we were at 42 degrees. You know so I mean it was instantaneous once it cleared the lines and then once you do that it'll actually help all the other ones come down to temp.

So you know I'm not an expert. I have a feeling that the the pump failed because it was getting gummed up from all the cloudy crap that was in that glycol that I was showing you guys, because if you go back to the video and you watch the very first part when I looked Down into that glycol reservoir, it was clear you could see the bottom, but then, when I started sticking my hands in there it clouded up and it was all silty there was stuff all in there, so that glycol needs to probably be replaced. I don't know if there's an additive, they can add to it to clean it. I have no idea again: that's the beverage people they can deal with that, but I told them that they needed to get that stuff clean, because there was no excuse for that pump to fail that fast.

So you also want to be careful again because I'm not a beverage expert, you got to be careful to make sure you put on the right pumps. Those pumps are adjustable too so, depending on the type of system that you're working on you know, it's not just a simple slap and a pump on there. You've got to make sure you understand that you put the right pumps on you can order one. That's too big: you can order one that's too small, that kind of stuff.

It's also beneficial some of the pumps I've seen them come with strainers. I haven't been seen the strainers lately, though, but other strainers are obviously good too, if they're a fine screen strainer, but anyways I'm going off on a tangent again as usual. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to watch this video. Please please, please leave me.

Some feedback, if you guys work with these bier units a lot these glycol units send me some information, I'm always looking for more information. That's one thing that I find is there's not a lot of training on is the beverage systems, I'm sure you can go to an individual manufacturers training, but I don't find it as easy to find information on these glycol units or these power packs. Whatever you want to call them, I just do a lot of research and download manufacturers information myself, but anyways really appreciate it catch you guys on the next one: okay.