Oh look at see there you go it just turned on, so maybe the main power switch wasn't on. So this is why you never put your hands in a weird place. It wasn't running when i got up here, but i didn't stick my hands on it and it just magically turned on this. Video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition.

So today we have a call that exhaust fans are not working properly. So first thing: whenever you're working on exhaust fans is always make sure the hood filters are clean. These ones are not great and also they can be misleading where they look clean on the outside, but they're dirty on the inside. So you always want to look into that, but you can tell because the grease build up, that these aren't cleaned regularly same thing over here.

These things look pretty bad and actually they're they're broken. You may not be able to see it, but i can tell that they're broken inside, so hood filters definitely are dirty, so we're going to jump up onto the roof and look at the exhaust fans themselves walking up onto the roof. This is our exhaust lineup. So the fans from the outside, you know they look kind of beat up.

This one is vibrating to all heck and then we're just going to go through so, first and foremost, more than likely, we have multiple fan issues. They don't do routine primitive maintenance here. So i bet you're gon na have broken belts and stuff like that. So this one, judging by the vibration, there's gon na be internal damage, we'll see, but we're just gon na start from this one, which would be their fryers that one's priority and then we'll work.

Our way down and see what's going on with them all right, come up into here, there's a little bit of wind blowing. So i apologize if it's hitting the camera, but the fan is moving like i can tell that it's moving freely, but i don't know if it's on it's not running um. Try to turn the power switch on nothing, nothing happens with the power switch, so uh the motor is not hot, so we need to check for power first and then more than likely, our problem is going to be down in a motor starter, so checking i'm making. I did make sure that we are going into the wire i physically looked in there.

We have no voltage. Okay, i've already checked all three legs to ground. Whenever you do stick it into a wire nut, you got to make sure that it's actually connecting with the wire, because sometimes the wire nuts can be stripped up or the wires can be stripped so high. That you're actually just touching the jacket of the wire.

But i'm confident that we have no power. So here's what we're going to do we're going to turn off the hood switch right here and then we're going to go downstairs and investigate breakers motor starters that kind of stuff. But we want to make sure it's off because just in case there's a direct short or something going on in the motor. We don't want it to turn on when we're not up here, and we can't hear whatever the problem is or potentially see it.

So, we'll make sure we isolate the power, then go downstairs and try to find out why we have no power up here. As far as the other fans, this one, the belt is jacked up, looks up, look at it, see there you go it just turned on, so maybe the main power switch wasn't on. So this is why you never put your hands in a weird place. It wasn't running when i got up here, but i didn't stick my hands on it and it just magically turned on.

So we need to make sure that it's running in the right direction and everything else is good, so anyways. What i was saying, though, is this: guy has a bad belt. This guy's vibrating, like crazy, looks like the whole inside is completely trashed, so we'll definitely be looking into all of that. So i turn the fan off at the power switch.

So i can check the belt tension. It's actually not that bad they're a little loose, but i mean really not bad. We're gon na get the belt information just so we have it we're just doing a visual inspection. Now i did test current on the motor.

It was running at 5.5, amps um. I don't think i can see the data plate because it's covered in grease, but i'll give it a shot. But, judging by this size of this motor, it's probably going to be a 5 horsepower. Motor 5.5 amps should be good.

Of course we want to see the actual data, but sometimes you can't so really depends on. What's going on but 5.5 amps that doesn't scare me at all. We still need to make sure it's going in the right direction also, and it was because i can tell by looking at the wheel. It was spinning in a clockwise rotation which would be correct on this one um, judging by the veins down there, but they look really dirty, so they definitely need to have this fan cleaned so yeah we're just going to get the belt information turn it back on.

So they were complaining mainly on the fryer hood. So what i'm thinking? If i don't find anything else wrong? It's probably just going to be plugged up grease filters which didn't look horrible, but i guarantee they're saturated here and then we'll definitely get and get belts on these other fans that are messed up and then we'll talk to them about replacing that one. Because we come over here and look at it, there's not much! You can do to fix this. This whole inside bracket here is just completely busted apart and it's vibrating to all heck um on a fan, this old look at the lid top and feet down.

It's! It's going to be time to replace it, so we'll definitely be getting lots of information off of all these fans. The importance of having good hinges now. This fan is old and beat up, and you can see it's been repaired. I did this years ago to try to save it, put unistrut or a uh angle iron on the inside and then put a super hinge on the outside, but it made it last.

I mean we told him. This fan was a lost cause 15 years ago, and then we put this hinge kit on it, and it's still here so it shows you what a good quality hinge kit could do for you even saving the day, putting angle iron on it. You know, but anyways open this guy up to look at the bottom of the wheel, make sure there was no major obstructions. It's definitely dirty on the outside.

It doesn't look so bad on the inside, but since i had it open, i measured the wheel, um, the the diameter and the height. So that way we can boys heavy um, get all the information. I'm gon na go ahead and get the information since i have it turned off just in case we ever needed to replace it. We're gon na, get it preemptively and put it on our system.

So we got the information we need to measure the curve. We need to get the motor horsepower, the diameter and height of the wheel, the information from greenheck the model and serial number. It's a cube, fan belt information and pulley information, and then from that we could replace the fan and - or you know just have it for later, just in case, if we needed to now this one, i'm not necessarily saying has to be replaced, it's still working, but It certainly needs some cleaning for sure, so they originally complained about the fry hood, not working, but what i'm wondering is. This is the one that has the shredded belt.

Maybe it was this one and they just couldn't tell because they're right next to each other. So this is literally across from their fryers, but look at that belt. That's kind of a problem right, so i went ahead and threw one of their spare belts they're, not in the greatest shape, but at least i can get it going. But to me these things are not aligned, really they're like way off.

I don't know if the camera shows that or not, but the motor pulley's a good quarter of an inch lower than the driven pulley. So i got to drop this pulley down um. You can use a level or a straight edge will tell you, but, like my eyes, can tell me that uh so we'll adjust that real, quick. You know, i don't have all the fancy stuff and there's nothing wrong with using alignment tools and different things like that.

But you know once you've been doing it for a while. You can rely on your eyes pretty well, but again, i'm i'm not an advocate for not using good tools. You know so i dropped this one about a quarter of an inch. You can kind of see the shaft move, the key down, everything's good, we're going to fire it up nice and quiet, no more vibrating, because the belt's not banging around.

So this one's going to be good. We definitely still need to get some new belts, because the belt that i put on is not, in the greatest shape, we're going to keep on investigating the uh motor pulley on this one is what worn out too. If you stick your finger in it, i have power, isolated and turned off at the disconnect switch. So if you stick your finger in here, it's going to be hard for you guys to know, but there's a ridge and there shouldn't be.

It should be a straight tapered um line basically and there's a ridge. So that's not good um belt tension is fine. Everything else is fine. Besides the fan just being older, but it doesn't mean it has to be replaced because it's old, let's turn it back.

On nice and smooth that looks, fine, uh direction is correct, so that's cool uh. Last but not least, we got ta get to this guy all right. I turned this guy off and this is just a dumpster fire man. This this whole thing, there's there's no repairing these things when they're this old and they're vibrating this bad, the whole fan everything is coming apart inside the tops messed up.

You know you can do things to get them running, but it ain't gon na work belts loose, but here's the thing i'll try to tighten that belt up, but it might makes the vibration worse. We'll definitely have an inspection on the wheel too. We might have to leave the belt loose because of how bad it's vibrating, when you tension it up, it'll run faster and theoretically, if the wheel's damaged it'll basically make the the off-balance vibration that is usually caused by the wheel, you know make it the whole fan. Just come apart, so you open this up.

Look at this. The whole inside of this thing is coming apart. This is metal like it's rubbing itself, raw yeah, this whole thing's trash, so we're gon na get the wheel, specs and everything off of it, and then we'll definitely have to be replacing this one so yeah. I was just investigating this guy and this whole upper.

Bearing is completely gone, the whole thing's just pivoting the top bearing's bad. So i am not going to try to tighten that belt because it's only going to accentuate problems, we're going to be lucky. If i can get this to start back up, so it started back up and it's running, but we're you got to be careful on this stuff when it says bad, i'm telling you you tighten that up and you're gon na run into issues so we're gon na Leave that be like it is we're gon na definitely recommend a replacement on this one and then we're working our way through um. I'm gon na go ahead and uh since these ones in such poor shape.

I know this customer i'm going to check belts on all their package units too, make sure those are all good. So i couldn't get to the motor information and it was i needed it to size this fan, because we need to know what size motors in it. Unfortunately, i had to loosen it up and take the belt off. So when i do put it back on, i'm gon na have to be very careful not to over, tighten it.

So it vibrates like crazy, but i was able to pull the motor back a little bit to where i can get in there with a towel and clean it up, and then now we can see that we have a one horsepower that that lat one right up There it says hp right there, so it's a one horsepower 208, three phase: i know they're not wired for 460 here. I know that for a fact, so it's a one horsepower. So the information we need to size. This fan is the pulley sizes, the motor size.

The wheel size the curb size now in a perfect world, we take the model and serial number and they match it up, but oftentimes, i'm really old fans that might not work. We might not be able to get a green heck, then it just depends. So we get all the information just in case we had to change it over to something else that we were not stuck in a weird place, so it's always important to get as much information as you can, but we're going to put this guy back together. Now put the wheel back, i mean the motor back on and the belt back on and tighten it up all right got it back on.

I didn't tighten it too tight. It's snug, though it's a little bit tighter than it was. You got to watch out when you turn these on, especially after you've tightened them up because they could blow stuff out. So, let's see if this guy rattles, like crazy, looks like it kind of centered itself out it's not too bad, but yeah.

They definitely are going to have to get this thing, replaced asap, i'm not going to go any tighter than that because it is kind of vibrating a little bit and what that's going to start doing is busting light bulbs because they have incandescent bulbs in the hood. So the hood downstairs is shaking so this will ruin the light. Bulbs and they'll have all kinds of issues, because the vibrations so, but this is good for now, we're going to put all the lids on we're gon na talk to them about getting replacement for this. One a new pulley for that one and then uh the other two are okay and i still got ta check the belts on everything else, all right, so the custard's original complaint was, they didn't feel like the hoods were doing what they're supposed to be doing and They were making a weird noise, so the noise, more than likely, is coming from this one vibrating to all heck and partially from these two, because the belts were kind of jacked up.

This one had that really messed up belt and that was kind of vibrating too went in and replaced the belt on that this one's fine. We thought it was the fryer hood, but i don't think it is well, let's step back. All these fans are now running this one needs to be replaced. Asap also went through and checked all the belts on everything else kind of okay, no real big issues, these makeup air units don't run here.

So the other thing, though, is that those hood filters are plugs. Um, i'm going to go down and look at them and have the customer pull them out, but they are plugged. They need to get those hood filters replaced. They are beyond cleaning now.

I know this from personal experience. You need to pull them out and analyze them yourselves, but i know this customer and uh. I know that they haven't cleaned their hood filters in a very long time and eventually they become so impacted that there's nothing you can do so, i'm going to tell them they have to get those replaced, but we're going to give them a fan. Asap for this.

All right we are back this morning, uh customer approved a new fan, so we're going to go ahead and get this thing taken apart, we're just verifying everything is the same and uh once we do that, we'll get it pulled off, get the new one on so Uh we were able to come on over here. We got a brand new fan right here. New green heck fan like for like everything's the same, so it's all good. Now, when i measured up this fan, i talked about measuring all the pulleys and everything, and we did so so that way.

Now we built this fan and we put the right size pulleys on it, so we're good to basically just start it up. We already mounted the electrical switch and everything so we bring in power and boom. We're done all right got the new fan installed um. We use the existing hinge kit because these things are bulletproof and we sold it to the customer years ago.

They have them on all their fans. They're still good, there's nothing wrong with it. So this is a pinch. Style hinge kit, so it pinches in there and it doesn't necessarily penetrate the side.

So they work really nice. All right. We've got the fan mounted, so we're waiting for someone to get here with a 2x4 electrical box, we'll mount it just like on the other ones. So you got a 2x4 right there uh we're going to go ahead and get conduit ran.

Now you can see on these older buildings uh they didn't use grounds, they were using the ground or the conduit as a ground. So you know i don't know, what's up to code, i'm sure they're still allowed to get away with that stuff, but that's a job for an electrician. I'm not pulling a ground i'll pull a ground in my conduit. So from the j box, we'll ground the j box and then we'll pull the ground into the exhaust fan itself, because we pre-wired everything, we should be good to go.

Just take this off pull the switch out mount the electrical on there we're going to come in through the vent right here, and we did rotate this guy around. So let's go ahead and hinge it down um, but yeah. We did rotate this guy around because we're trying to see if we can run this uh the other direction. I don't see it kind of hits a little bit, so this is why we play with it, and it's not so much that the fan is hitting it's.

There's a there's a baffle plate inside there or something so we'll have to play with that, but um so far, so good we just got to play around with it all right. We've got it all pretty much kind of coming together now uh important thing. The way that i like to do things when i do conduit, i prefer that it not droop as much as possible now over time. That is going to weigh down a little bit, but i don't like a droop, because that becomes a trap for water, not that you want water to get in here at all, but we're wiring it up into the fan up over here into the disconnect switch.

Now, the way that we mounted it happened to be super convenient because the electrical is on the top, so we don't have to pull the whole switch out so that made that nice, yeah and important thing to understand in the past there's some exhaust fan manufacturers that Do not allow you to wire through the breather tube or the vent. This is a vent for the motor, so that way the motor can breathe because technically the motor is separate from the grease cavity. Well, not hundred percent, but greenheck allows you to so. You need to make sure you look at the installation instructions and make sure that you're approved to mount things, but there they say basically in one instance, they allow you to push through the breather tube and then there's another thing on the other side too over here.

It also shows being able to push through the breather tube and it gives instructions, so always keep that in mind. Now on the bottom of the fan, there's actually a knockout in the bottom right here, but we're not going to use that. So sometimes you can bring the conduit up through the duct work, which i'm not a huge fan of, but you can do that. I would, i would highly suggest, high temp wiring, if you're going to do that, but yeah you can bring it up and then the conduit stays inside the fan.

The downside to that is that it has to be flexible enough for the fan to be hinged and so where's that flex gon na go and in the future. How are you gon na replace that if it ever failed, it's just a nightmare, so i prefer exterior mounted conduit whenever possible. All right at this point, everything's connected the fans all installed, we're waiting for someone to go downstairs and turn on power. So we can check the phase rotation, because this is a three-phase exhaust fan, got to make sure it's going in the right direction and if it's not going in the right direction, we can interchange any two leads all right: we've got the fan, uh wired up and Started up and it is going in the right direction, so the rotation is clockwise shaft end and they actually have a directional arrow right here to tell you that that is the right rotation.

So what you typically want to do is go ahead and run this for about 10 minutes, then turn it off and double tighten everything um i have in the past, had fans come loose and different things like that, so you just want to let it run for A few minutes then double tighten everything, so we're going to turn this guy back on, let it run and then we'll shut it off in a few minutes to verify everything else is good. All right. It's going to be difficult to see, but the cool thing is is right in here you can see all the information and right up top, you see rpm and then you say: fla full load, amps, the fla says 3 amps for 230 volt and we are running 3.2, so it's not bad, but we're slightly over, so we are going to actually slow this guy down, just maybe like a half a turn to see if we can get it down under the proper current all right. So we got it right at about 2.9 amps.

2.87 right in there, so we still need to tighten up a few things, but it's been running long enough that we can double check everything now uh. We also need to verify alignment and everything, because since we opened up the pulley, we technically changed the alignment. So we need to make sure that we're still within range so we'll have to play with that a little bit we like how a lot of these manufacturers are doing. This and green does a good job.

This is a qr code and we'll scan it right now, and then it pulls you up to a web page and gives you all the information for this equipment. It's really nice all right and we are all good uh. The fan matches the current of the old fan, meaning uh. We don't need to worry about the motor starter or anything, because it's an identical fan with a one horsepower motor.

So we slowed it down to match the the previous motor everything's cool. It's all put together. As good as possible, it's kind of polishing a turd, but we got it marked with the name of what they call it fan number three. Everything else is good, so we're gon na close this one out.

Customers should be happy now now as far as the other fans go. They didn't want to do anything else with those because they're operating at this moment this one's in pretty bad shape. I did tell them it's kind of vibrating that one's on the list to get replaced, but this one had to be replaced, so they they authorized this one asap. So that's it when you're working with exhaust fans, it's always important, and this kind of goes for other stuff too, to start at the basics.

Right when you have an exhaust fan, the theory of the exhaust fan is that it extracts unwanted air from one place to another right and just relocates it. So in this situation this is a kitchen exhaust, so they're pulling out smoke and kind of pulling out a little bit of heat too. Okay, it's its primary purpose is to get smoke out of the air. You know out of the area, but it does pull some heat and extract it out of the building too.

But with that being said, the way exhaust fans are designed they're not designed to pull grease up to the roof. Okay, they're technically designed to have a grease filter in line and that grease filter supposed to be what catches the grease and then it's supposed to go into like a grease cup and whatever so always start at your grease filters. When you're working on exhaust fans are they plugged up? Okay, if you have a customer that doesn't do a lot of normal routine maintenance, their problem may just be that they have plugged up hood filters. So i start there then i work my way up now.

I i showed a very valuable lesson here. Just because i went on the roof and the exhaust fan was not running does not mean that it wasn't gon na randomly turn on. So you never want to stick your hands in there because you never know. What's going to happen in this situation, what actually happened was there was multiple switches, so basically there was a power switch for every exhaust fan and the kooks.

While i was up, there turned on the power switch for the fry hood. Okay, the the one exhaust fan that wasn't running so again. That's why you'd be very careful because you never know when the power can turn on okay. So once we got that turned on, i think what the customers complained.

They said that their fry hood wasn't working well, i think what was happening was. It was actually the hood across from it because it had a shredded belt um and then we worked our way down. But then, obviously we found the fan that the whole fan was just completely destroyed and you know falling apart and we talked a customer into replacing it. So when it comes to replacing the fans, you always want to try to put the exact like for, like uh fan, whether it doesn't have to be the same brand, but it needs to move the same amount of air because you're working with the building air balance.

Okay, the building air balance - i've explained it many times simply puts if you pull air out of a building, you have to replace that air or the building is going to go into a negative air pressure. Okay, so if you think about it, take a paper bag. Put it around your face and inhale, the bag is going to collapse, but if you cut a hole in the bottom of the bag, the air is going to pass through. Okay.

So in this situation, when we're putting a new exhaust fan up there, we want to make sure that fan is a like for, like replacement as far as the amount of air that it removes now, there's a couple different ways to do so. In my situation, i put a like for like exhaust fan with the same exact pulleys, and i matched the motor current. So therefore, you know we can assume within a pretty good um, with pretty good accuracy that that fan is moving the same amount of air. Now, of course, the only way to be a hundred percent sure is to get a tab person to test and air balance person in here to actually measure the air flow going across those hood filters um, but i'm not a certified test and air balance person.

I just have my crude way of testing air balance. So, of course, if the customer wants to go that route, they can get a test and air balance person in to verify the actual airflow of the exhaust fan. Okay, a couple other things i want to touch on is hinges. Look for a good high quality hinge kit for the exhaust fans.

I prefer to use the ones that i use in this video and um they last forever, so they're, a great great quality hinge they're. Actually made by a company called omni containment, so that's pretty much it. I really appreciate you all, please uh, consider subscribing to the channel if you haven't already uh. Thank you so very much um, there's all kinds of information in the show notes different methods of how to support the channel if you're interested in doing so.

I do want to leave you with one last note, as that is simply just to be good humans. Okay, be kind to one another um, it's crazy out there right now. Just just remember: you never know what the other person's going through. Okay, i really appreciate you all and we will catch you on the next one.

Okay.