So today's call is on a glycol unit for a beer system. So this is a system where they have a beer. Walkin that's located in the back of the restaurant and they have a bar with taps in the front of the restaurant and the beer lines run from the beer walk-in all the way to the front of the restaurant. This system needs to cool those beer lines in between the beer walked in and the taps.

So that way we keep our beer under forty degrees, preferably around thirty, seven. Thirty six, so we have a chiller unit or a glycol unit that chills glycol and that's what these lines are. These lines are glycol inside those lines and then it goes around all the beer lines they all run together through a chase underground. These lines wrap around that all the way around it as it's going through the entire chase.

So that way it keeps all those lines nice and cool, and those lines are insulated like crazy too. So the complaint is is that the glycol unit is not working. The way that this works, this is a newer style, so this one has a reservoir right here that has a flat plate heat exchanger inside of it and then have a condensing unit that cools that, and then they have pumps down here that are kind of hidden Back in there that pump the glycol, so the complaint is: is that it's seventy degrees coming out the taps, but the temperature inside the beer walkin is thirty five degrees, so that to me indicates that the beer walkin is working, but the glycol lines are not cooling. The beer lines, so it just shows you the need for the glycol unit to because if we've got 35 degree, beer walk in 35 degree kegs but coming out of the taps is 75 degrees.

That shows you how much heat you're gaining on that run. So we're gon na dive into this thing. I'll tell you right now. The first thing I see is my thermostat does not have a display at all.

So, that's why I'm actually going to start I'm going to open up that electrical section and test to see if we've got power coming to that thermostat, so we'll start there and then we'll diagnose further. So I went ahead and repositioned this unit. I was lucky because it's just sitting up here - and these are flexible glycol lines - you got to be careful, but I just twisted the unit around so I could get into this control a little bit better. So this is a Ronco etc', one 11000 electronic temperature controller.

It is multi hole, it can do 115 or 208 volts look down in there. We've got a set of power contacts on the left on the right over here. Can we focus and then your contacts for the system over here on the left, so we're gon na test voltage and see what we get right here? So that's where I have my leaves on both, so I'm getting no voltage come into this temperature controller. So looks like it's gon na be a bigger problem than just the control, so we need to open this up and figure out where the power is coming from.

We've got three power switches down here. This switch right here is kind of like halfway in between and then the rest of them. I don't know so we will see I'm going to open it up right now, so once I opened it up this power switch that looks kind of funky on the front. Is bad I tested power to ground and I've got power coming into the switch, but no power going out of the switch and it won't.

Let me switch it so we've got a bad switch. I'm gon na go out to the truck and see if I have one of those we'll get that replaced out and then we'll test the rest of the system, all right. So here's what we did when I pulled this apart, I had a power switch, let's see which one it is it's this one right here that was burnt out. Okay, when I arrived, the manager told me that they have had their beverage company that people that service their beer systems come out a couple days ago and found that they had two bad pumps.

Pumps are over here: okay, they've got actually they've got three pumps on this guy that they told him. No. I said they had two bad pumps. It's a little disturbing to me because it doesn't look like they have two new pumps here regardless.

So that's what was told to me and then a few days later, and they said the unit worked, but then a few days later it stopped working. So then I came out today and the power switch was bad. Well, this power switch controls, one of those pumps. Okay, so I found that it was burned out and these stupid little toggle switches burn out all the time, they're just not very great switches.

So when I pulled that out, I had one but I started looking at everything and when I opened up the temperature controller, I see that discoloration up in the temperature controller and I don't like that. So out of precaution, I changed the temperature controller because I could tell it was overheating inside there and then I changed the other two switches, because I had a few of them on my truck just to be safe. These things burn out quite often they're cheesy little switches. They can't handle very much amperage.

So when people don't clean condensers or when motors overheat, it's common for these things to fail. Now, I'm still not done. I inspected the last of the rest of the electrical inside. Here didn't see anything else going on now, I'm gon na go through there anything else.

I can find I'm gon na investigate the power core check everything else out and I'm gon na watch the unit come down in temperature. I don't necessarily know if I'm gon na throw serviced gauges on this unit because of the low refrigerant charge, but I'm gon na watch it. If I don't see a noticeable change in temperature in ten minutes, then I'll decide whether or not to put gauges on it. While I'm waiting for this to come down to temp, I'm gon na pick up everybody else's trash, I can't handle one people leave their crap up on top of these walk-ins clean up after yourselves.

It's really not that hard cans of spray foam boxes from glycol motors packaging just silly, so I'm gon na clean that up, while I'm waiting for this thing to come down at it. Okay, so I've been watching it run for about 15-20 minutes and we started out about 80 degrees or down to about 60 degrees. It's come down quite a bit. I still would have liked to have seen it come down a little bit faster, but you know this is going to take some time, I'm very reluctant to put service gauges on it.

It actually only has a low side port. It doesn't even have a high side. Port, but if you look down here, if I can get a good picture, we look down. That is our calculator to my right there.

Following with that, you notice it goes into a notice that it goes into its little section, I'm going to leave out there, but it's not frosting at the tattoo. That's costing about two inches back. You can barely see that, but the capillary tube goes into that creates a piece of a line going into this block plate heat exchanger and it's frosting about you know two inches after the capillary tube enters, which looks pretty good to me. That's normal and remember right where that cap tube enters the refrigerants boiling off and you will get frost, but you shouldn't see frost coming back on to the capillary to again these are all vital signs that I'm taking.

I amped everything on this unit. I amped the glycol pumps they're all under amping, but not too far. I amped the compressor. It's also under amping under run load.

So it's not over amping, I should say, and the unit as a whole is not over amping. So everything that I could do without adding a high side port to this unit tells me that this unit is working properly and we have dropped in temperatures. So at this point, I'm gon na go ahead and tell the customer to keep an eye on it. Let me know if they have any other problems, yeah and that's pretty much it so I went ahead and cleaned up the roof up here.

On top of this walkin as best as possible, you know just picked up everybody else's trash that was lying around and then I put all the screws back in this unit cuz the last person that worked on it left all the screws out, put everything back in There, I don't see any glycol leaks. I found the cap for the glycol reservoir, which was sitting on top of the walk-in up here. Someone had taken it out, so I put that back on so we're just watching it come down the temp and that's pretty much it guys. So this is my beer walking, as you can see all my lines travel over to here and then this is where the chase is going to ground.

So my glycol lines are gon na, come up from the beer system on this chase right here and over. So that goes up to the roof to my bike whole unit, and they come down into this chase and then split off between these two and there's two chases going underground all the way out to the block. So it's that underground temperature. Sometimes I run through the Attic.

Sometimes they go underground, so these ones are going underground and that glycol system is running through that chase and cooling those lines. So it's going to take some time for this system to come down to temperature. You can see there's a lot of beer thanks for full of beer, so a lot of lines to cool down, but luckily the beer walking wasn't too warm. Because that's what would take forever.

You know it's kind of at their discretion, but I've told them what they can do temporarily is if they go to every one of their taps and run two to three pictures from every tap they'll clear out the warm beer out of the lines, maybe for pitchers, But this is a pretty long run but to them they're a little leery about that, because that's a lot of beer. So it would take some time to clear out those lines, but that would be the quickest way because we get those beer lines underground. You clear out all the warm beer, then the glycol you know doesn't really have much to cool and it with cooler temps. We come down really fast.

So when I got here, their beer was pouring 75 degrees out the taps and right now I just went over there and I think it was pouring 50 54 degrees out of the actual taps. So we've dropped the underground temp 20 degrees, which is good. But it's just going to take some time. Typically, we want that beer to be pouring under 40, like right around 37 usually, and we have our glycol unit, the temperature, the glycol set 26 - so that's pretty much it so they're just keeping an eye on it.

Okay, so the customer complaint on this one was that they were had warm beer pouring out of their beer taps in their bar, as I kind of explained in the video, this is a restaurant that has a beer walkin or a beer cave in the back of The restaurant and then their bar is at the opposite end of the restaurant, so we have beer lines that run underground from the beer walkin to the beer taps in the bar. We have a special unit on there. We call it a glycol unit or you can call it a draught chiller. I just call them glycol units.

Okay, so the glycol unit wasn't working properly. It wasn't cooling the beer from the beer walk-in to the taps and therefore they had warm beer pouring out of the taps. Okay, what I ended up finding was that the glycol unit had a bad power switch, as you saw in the video. I went ahead and changed all three power switches because they were all showing signs of overheating and we also had a temperature controller that had showed signs of overheating that I replaced also.

Okay, everything else was working fine on the unit I watched it come down to temperature. I followed up with the customer the next day. Everything was working good on it and, like I showed you in the video, I did not see a need to put service gauges on it. You really need to evaluate that, because in this particular situation the refrigerant charge was so minimal and there wasn't a there.

Wasn't two service ports on this unit. There was only a low side service port, so I would have had an add the high side service port, which could have been done, but it would have been a process. So I didn't see the need, and since I followed up the next day and the box was working, okay or the the glycol unit was working okay then there was, you know everything was all good. I just want to say thank you guys for taking the time to watch my videos.

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