All right check this out, so this head pressure control valve is messed up, so discharge line, temp 143 degrees, liquid line temp 85 and liquid drain forget suction, it's the liquid drain at the bottom of the condenser 64.. So when we come over here, this line is 64 degrees. That's coming out the bottom of the condenser this valve is bypassing taking discharge gas and dumping it directly in the receiver. The valve is stuck open that stinks.

This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition. All right we got a walk-in cooler that is tempting high customer says it's in the 50s. I don't know if you guys can see that or not, and they said it was totally iced up. I'd say so: that's top to bottom front to back, that's, either going to be getting too cold or a door being left open.

It is extremely windy outside today, like just the palm trees, are just going crazy, crazy, crazy, like gus, i mean whatever, but it's our 22 system. It doesn't really mean anything to me at the moment: the sight, glass and stuff, because the unit's iced up, we need to get it defrosted. First, first and foremost we're gon na shut. This disconnect switch off.

Now we can go downstairs to the evaporator and start disassembling. It but this way the evaporator is running and while i'm getting all my stuff ready, it's running the fans with no refrigeration, but we'll get this whole condensing unit taken off and look at it. Judging from back here looks like actually no, i thought there was an oil leak, but it actually doesn't look that bad doesn't look that bad at all. Everything looks decent in here, so all right, let's get downstairs, try to be as organized as possible.

Put a drip leg in the sink so that way, if the hose leaks it leaks into the sink and doesn't run on the floor, then try to be as discreet as possible and uh. You know just try to keep the hose, ran nice and neat. That's the way that i always try to do it that way, i don't make a big mess and reduce the amount of trip hazards that we have once it goes into the box again. Try to keep it as organized as possible.

All right talk about some ice that is really really thick. Now i mentioned that this is probably from them, leaving a door open. They have a history of that. It's always possible that we could have a liquid line.

Solenoid valve that's stuck open or you know bad defrost clock, but even still, if it's a bad defrost clock, it's really only icing up because they're leaving the door open too long more than likely um, but we're gon na get this defrosted one of the downsides. It's so iced up. I can't get the motors out. It's inevitable.

They're gon na get a little wet, but luckily i have my wand and i can go slow with it. So i've got my wand, everybody that i asked you get this from lowe's it's made by orbit and it's got a mist feature. So i'm able to do this without getting the motor too wet like you, can see, it's barely getting wet and i'm just getting the ice just kind of up to the motor and around it until we can get the motor to drop out once we get the Motor to drop out, then we can go to town like on the shower mode and get it all to come out all right. I got both the motors out safely, see it just took a little bit of melting right there to be able to get them both sitting right there.

It's funny. Those are both oem motors too um. So now we can really go to town, but i'm also limited by my drain, because it's running really slow and i don't want to get any water on the floor so we're just waiting for it to drain out. Then we'll start again, it's just a process.

This one, this particular one, is piped in with other stuff it's going into their walk-in freezer and their beer walk and they're all interconnected, so they always run a little slow and it's also really difficult to blow them out by yourself. You typically have to have another person because they just back up into each other, so uh, i just put a bunch of the brightener cleaner, which is the super heavy duty one. You got to be careful, but this coil is already trashed, but i got it all on the back side too, just kind of letting it work it's magic and then we're going to give it a rinse and hopefully it'll clear the coil up, because it seems like It's just dirty inside. I can somewhat see light through it now, but it's not perfect and let me tell you what's happening if we look down in the bottom of the drain, pan you're going to see a lot of metal.

Okay, that's all metal! That is from the coil. The coil is disintegrating, but it's not just happening right here. It's happening all throughout the coil and that is actually plugging it up. I can tell by looking at it with a flashlight: it's not ice, it's not dirt, but you can tell it's metallic and you can see that this is just disintegrating, so this customer definitely has to replace this evaporator asap, and this is an r22 system, so we're Gon na go ahead and uh probably upgrade the entire system to a 448 a system, but i need to get them operational for tonight, so we're gon na assemble it get.

It turned back on and make sure there's no other major issues. All right. We are running um, it is 7, 13 p.m. Let's have a look at the defrost clock.

It actually doesn't look too bad, it says eight, but let's see if it oh, it doesn't rotate yeah defrost clock is stitching, so yeah nothing's stuck. So we need to change the defrost clock tonight. Um. We have to have this operational, even though we're going to tell them to replace the equipment we got to get it going to where, hopefully, it's not going to ice up, because it'll take them about a month to probably get the equipment with the way things are Going they buy their own stuff, so refrigerant pressures i mean they aren't the end of the world, the condenser tds a little bit high for the ambient temperature um.

I wonder what's going on with that, all right check this out, so this head pressure control valve is messed up, so discharge line, temp 143 degrees, liquid line temp 85 and liquid drain forget suction it's the liquid drain at the bottom of the condenser 64.. So when we come over here, this line is 64 degrees. That's coming out the bottom of the condenser this valve is bypassing taking discharge gas and dumping it directly in the receiver. The valve is stuck open.

That stinks all right. I want to jump in here real, quick and talk about this head pressure control valve, because i know a bunch of people are going to tell me the way that they thought i could have fixed this out in the field and i'm going to prove why that Wouldn't have been possible. Okay, you guys will see as we get further in the video what caused this valve to fail, but i just want to make sure that people understand a lot of people. Think that if you cut the power head element out of the picture, if you clip this tip right here, you would theoretically release the dome charge right, because there's a charge of 180 pounds of pressure 180 psig inside um that dome right there pushing down on that Spring: that's how this valve bypasses whenever the system pressure drops below whatever the bypass pressure.

In the case of the video it's 180 psi, whenever the system pressure drops below that the power head element pushes on that rod pushes this seat down with the spring, opposing it right, but it overcomes that spring pressure and allows the gas to bypass through here. Okay, now um in our situation, you guys will see when i get to the point in the video something was causing that valve to not shut, because our system pressure was above the dome pressure. Our system pressure was above 180 psi. So if i was to cut the tip on this, it wouldn't do anything because we were already overcoming the pressure in that dome.

That dome is trying to open the valve. My system pressure was above that so therefore, this pressure that was in there had nothing to do with why that valve was stuck open, so clipping the tip on there would not have done anything. I did mention that. Sometimes you can beat the valves.

I've never had success with that. I've heard of people doing that, hitting them so hard that you get them to shut. I mean realistically, when you guys get to the point in the video of this one. When you see what was causing that valve to stick open.

You'll understand why that wouldn't do anything either we're gon na have to uh. I'm not gon na. Do it tonight, because we've got cool weather for the rest of the weekend. I think we're gon na be okay, we're running slightly elevated, but we're probably going to have to come out monday and pull this head pressure control valve out.

We'll talk to the customer. I don't think they're going to want to replace it because um they're going to replace the equipment, so we could temporarily recover the gas pull the head pressure. Control valve out. You know weld it so that way, it's not even in the picture and then throw a fan cycle switch on here temporarily until they get a uh a replacement or we may be able to get away without a fan cycle just depends but yeah.

That's why we're running elevated head pressure, so normally normal flow for the head pressure control valve goes in and stops and says you know what it doesn't want to bypass. So then it goes through. The condenser comes out of the condenser out of the liquid drain, goes into the receiver right here and then comes out the receiver. So in this situation this head pressure control valve.

Well, you know i do need to verify, but it should be 180 psi head pressure, control valve uh, so at this moment right now we're running 192 psi, so that valve should be completely not bypassing, and it is so. The valve has probably got some stuff stuck in it. Now. There's a couple different things you can try to hit the valve.

You can try because sometimes it's just a piece of sediment - i'm not going to get that far into this tonight, because i don't want to be here all night, so it's operating it's cold outside and it's going to get colder as the night goes on. So it'll be okay for now, but we are going to have to address that either tomorrow or the next day before it starts to warm up because we are starting to get warmer weather all right. I swapped out the defrost clock um. Let's see i'm gon na watch, it work it's 7, 52 now uh.

Also, i use the adapter kit because this used to be a paragon housing. You got to make sure you put those little plastic bushings in there, the old clock. What happens? The old clock had room on the back on the new clock when you, when these poles come up, they they ground themselves out and it'll, create a direct short, so you've got to use those little plastic bushings uh. I know that from experience.

So, let's see 18 or that's 8 am there's 8 p.m, and we're just going to throw a bunch of defrost. In this thing, real, quick, all right, it's taking a while, but the box temp is at 45 degrees. It's gon na take a while to bring the box temp down. We are running a little bit of an elevated head pressure.

We should be fine for now, like i said, um tomorrow is supposed to be a cool day, so we should make it through we'll. Just you know, run a little high and then we'll address it on monday, see what the customer wants to do, but they're definitely going to have to replace the equipment all right, so we are back today. The box is down to temperature, it's 39 degrees. The coil is ice free, even though it's deteriorated so uh.

We are going to go about changing the head pressure control valve talk to the customer, um they're having a hard time getting equipment. I could go pick it up from the supply house today and have new equipment tomorrow, but they like to order it themselves. So um we're gon na jump on the roof, uh recover the charge, change the head pressure, control valve and then uh get it back into normal operation, i'm a nut about trying to stay organized on the roof. So i just lifted half my van up onto the roof right, but my rope.

The way that i store it is, i store the hook end down there. Okay, it's ready for me to lift more stuff up and i try to keep my rope off the ground and typically wrap it up on the the roof hatch and then that way in case i hose off or anything like that, my rope's not getting wet because I'm just peculiar about having everything, nice and organized, so i'm currently doing a recovery uh pulling the refrigerant out of this unit. Okay, when you're doing a recovery, you want to do everything to the best of your ability to make it go as fast as possible. So i'm still pulling through a manifold gauge set, but i put a large diameter output hose a 3 8 okay going into the machine and a 3 8 going out uh.

You could put the tank and ice if need be, and i have a schrader core removal tool on this suction service port right here. So you always want to try your best getting ready to install a new sight, glass and dryer on this unit, and i get people asking me all the time, the information on these. So this is a flare. I love using flare dryers, a flare spoiling catch.

All this is a 16 cubic inch, 3 8 diameter with a male female flare sight glass, so an sa-13 fm, 3, 8, 3 8 and a c 16 3 flare dryer, and they couple together - and i love that and the point of using flares is, i don't Got to bring my torches up, maybe next time to change the dryer all right, so we are going to open this valve up real quick, so i've already pulled or loosened everything, but i haven't opened it it's hot too. By the way, it's kind of burning my hands because we just unsweat it: okay, all right, first and foremost, look at the grime in there. Okay, that's dead, giveaway, we're going to open this valve up and it's going to be full of crap and that's that's a major problem. So it's getting hotter and hotter.

The inside of that valve is totally caked with grime and nastiness and that's probably what's causing it to stick. So i don't think it's gon na show in here, but it's the same thing. The whole valve is cooked inside completely. So this isn't a fault of the valve.

This is a fault of contamination. That's not allowing the valve to shut properly. So, okay, we're going to have a little closer look at this valve. So this is the head pressure control valve now i kind of showed in the video how caked that is with like burnt oil and all kinds of weird grime build up in there.

Okay, it's really really bad, but the one thing i want to point out is this: pin to get this out: it damaged it, but that's not the point. This pin didn't move freely throughout it's gummed up inside there there's so much build up that this pin isn't able to move fluidly back and forth. That's supposed to slide in and out easily you see like this is a pin from another valve that had failed, but this one isn't even damaged like the other valve, so that pin needs to be able to easily move back and forth having proper oil flowing through The system helps to oil these, but this guy clearly had been overheating. You can see inside just all the black nastiness.

The oil in the system is just probably destroyed from overheating situations constantly, and this is why discharge line temperature is so important. Not only does it affect the compressor right and the operation, but it affects the whole system, because if the oil is overheating and cooking and turning into this nastiness, it's affecting everything expec imagine what the expansion valve looks like i mean just everything in the system, so This valve, it's not the valve's fault that this fare failed. Okay or it's not the manufacturer's fault that this valve failed. It's the customer's fault for not doing proper preventative maintenance, maintaining their equipment, keeping the condensers clean, prolonged dirty, condensers causes system breakdown, oil breakdown system contamination like we're.

Seeing here all right. We are purging with nitrogen um and in fact i'm gon na turn that off for the second, because we're trying not to waste it, i'm almost out of nitro, so um, okay, going back in with a flare dryer. What i did was i did these fittings. First.

Okay, i remade this put a normal flare nut here. To make it easier, i used a flare nut with a swaged end on it for the bottom. Okay, this is loose and this is backwards for a reason, because i had to sweat the dryer. I'm sorry.

This flare nut. I had to have it connected to the dryer and i didn't want to overheat the sight glass, so i rotated it. So it's not tight and we will rotate it around and put it in the right direction. When we're done.

I was just doing that to hold everything, but we keep it in place that way when we're purging with nitrogen we're flowing through. So now, we've got the head pressure, control valve the new one installed and uh it. It fit right in there. So we're just gon na be able to heat it up uh.

We need to make sure we have it in the right direction. They are labeled, it says d as in discharge. R is in receiver and c is in condenser. So obviously the r goes directly to the receiver.

The c goes towards the condenser, which is the liquid drain coming out of the condenser, and the d goes into the discharge. Okay, so we're going to get it uh protected with some viper wet rag, real quick, protect the valve and then uh we'll get it sweat in okay. So we have some of the viper wet rag heat blocking compound on there we're gon na sweat it. Now.

I like to do the hardest raised joints first, which is the bottom now. Luckily, this valve has been changed before and the solder is goobered up on the bottom. So i'm really not going to have to add a lot of solder i'll be able to draw most of that up into the valve, but i'm going to focus on the bottom one. First then we'll do the side and the top it'll be easy.

That way, just making sure we're getting good pull and we are okay, we'll do this top one again, there's solder still in all the fittings, so it makes it a little bit easier. We want to hurry as fast as possible because the viper wet rag only can dissipate so much heat. So now also, i am using a very small tip. This is a zero.

That's why it's kind of taking a little bit longer. I was a little lazy and didn't want to change over to a bigger tip this one we're going to do a little trick here. So if you guys noticed it was kind of sticking out make sure it cools before i let it go good to go all right. All right got this.

Guy cooling off at the moment got most of the heat blocking compound off we're gon na flip that dryer around and get the evacuation running on this guy trying to be as efficient as possible. So we're cleaning up right now: vacuum pumps running i've already closed the gas ballast we're at 586 microns. So it's kicking, butt valve looks good. It's installed.

We put the side cover back on valve's, not overheated. The viper wet rack does a great job of protecting it. You can use a wet towel too. It's just wet towels can be difficult because they get really bulky.

Sometimes - and i know some people say they use paper towels i mean whatever floats your boat, whatever works for you, i, like the heat blocking compound um, but there's sometimes like the heat blocking compound, can be a little difficult to do the bottom joint. So you just got to make sure it's really sticky and tacky that way it doesn't fall down on you, but dryer is put back in the right direction and it's tightened down so yeah. That's good! We're just vacuuming all right. We isolated everything! So we're isolated right here and i close the king valve and evacuation we're in our decay it's about 450 microns.

We should be good to go. Um we're gon na go ahead and take everything off and get ready to charge this guy up all right. We have uh dumped a lot of gas into this guy um. It's taken seven pounds so far into the high side.

We're gon na go ahead and turn it on it's probably going to pump down, because it's barely cracked at that. Oh wait! No! No! It's not! Never mind no, so now we're just going to add refrigerant um, it's running compressors running we're going to need to add refrigerant, make sure the side glass clears. Okay, i put back exactly all the refrigerant um i pulled it down and uh pumped the receiver down and the receiver's at the three-quarter mark. You can see right.

There is where the temperature change happens now. I know you're kind of seeing the dryer there, but don't worry about that. We're looking at the liquid level and it's right where it's supposed to be at three quarters of the receiver. All right we are back to normal and running.

I got some probes on there. We got everything put away so if we come on over here to this guy, this is my normal operation. The system is still pulling down superheat's a tad bit on the high side, but it's to be expected right now, 75 degree ambient, where you're really going to see it. So it's 41 degrees in the box.

Look at that evaporator tds 20 degrees, which is a tad bit high, but um and condenser td is only 21. remember. That was almost 40 degrees when the head pressure control valve is bypassing so yeah we're good to go we're operational. We have the right amount of refrigerant in it, um yeah everything's good.

I wish i had a cap for this. I don't it's difficult to find these caps, so whenever you do and you have systems you're taking out of operation, make sure you save those caps, because this one was missing completely just got to make sure the packing is tightened down, but obviously the system's not leaking. Because uh, all the gas that i pulled out was the perfect three-quarter mark right there and when i was showing you guys the receiver with the thermal imaging camera. You were seeing the dryer here, but the liquid level was right about here.

You know these customers, they kind of get what they get um in this situation and - and i kind of understand, they're doing everything they can to stay alive right now, it's hard for the restaurant industry, i get it. I see it. I see all that, but on the flip side, the skipping of preventative maintenance is the elimination of them completely. You know the reactive maintenance, which is what a lot of them do these days and again.

I understand why, but this is what happens. Okay, this is systematic breakdown of five to six years of reactive maintenance. It's really starting to hit the fan. We have massive contamination that system that head pressure control valve should not look like that inside the valve.

Okay, and that is simply because they're breaking down the oil um and the inside of that compressor, has got to be trashed. The whole system in general is just in really bad shape and it's caused by them not cleaning the condensers on a regular basis. It's as easy as cleaning the condensers right, keeping the discharge temperatures down, reducing the breakdown of the oil. You know - and this is what they get so you know it's a bummer um.

Ironically, i remember opening this restaurant now i did not build this restaurant. I was just doing this customer's work when this restaurant opened, so i went to like their opening day and all that fancy stuff and it's it's it's kind of surreal to see the equipment that i remember being brand new. You know going by the wayside and being old. Now it's it.

What do you think that makes me feel like, and i know some of you guys are much older than me - i'm 38 years old, but it's still a trip to see. You know equipment, age out, um. You know that some of the equipment i installed now this particular unit. I did not, but you know it is what it is.

So it's so important to maintain our equipment. I got ta flip to another thing. It's really important for us technicians to understand how our equipment works, understand how those head pressure, control valves, work, understand that you know. In order to use the head pressure control valve, you have to have the proper amount of refrigerant in it, and it's not a guess.

There's calculations that we can do to verify or there's we can check the receiver levels. We can do different things, but you need extra refrigerant in the system that sits in there all year. Long, that's only used in the winter time. It's not stuff that you take out in the summer and put back in in the winter that if you have to do that, that means that your system's not designed correctly.

But if you guys want to know more about head pressure, control valves, just google technical document spoiling 90-30 90-31 - those two documents - they they're great and they explain head pressure, control valve operations, how to charge systems how to calculate the the required flooded charge. Really really good information. Remember um, i will be at the ahr trade show uh this uh. Let's see it is currently january 26th, so i will be at the ahr trade show from monday january 31st through wednesday january 3rd, at the parker sporland booth, monday and tuesday.

For the early morning, hours follow me on social media. I will also be spending time at the refrigeration technologies booth on monday, so follow my social media you'll find out where i'm at, if you guys are going to be at the show, definitely stop by and say hi to me. As for everybody else, i really appreciate you guys watching the videos. It's so humble leave me some feedback down in the comments.

Let me know how much you hate my work, whatever. I really appreciate any feedback, and even if it's criticism i grow from it, okay so feel free, let loose all right. If you guys want to send me an email, hvacr videos gmail.com, if you're interested in supporting the channel, go to truetechtools.com if you're looking at using it or purchasing any tools, i have an offer code, big picture. One word: you get an eight percent discount on checkout shoot me an email, i'll generate an affiliate link.

I get a little bit more of a commission. You can still use the offer code. You can support me on paypal, patreon, youtube, channel memberships, um. The easiest way to support the channel is simply watch the videos from beginning to end without skipping through anything.

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I really appreciate you guys and we will catch you on the next one: okay.