Okay, before we get the video started uh, i am looking for a new uh service technician now uh in a perfect world, i'm looking for that unicorn tech, that's experienced in restaurant refrigeration and air conditioning um. I prefer that you live in the inland empire of southern california. You're already close to me. I'd love to have a talk with you if you're interested and your experience now on the flip side, i am also considering bringing on another apprentice.

My existing apprentice is going to be branching off and starting to do light service calls on his own he's doing really really well, so i will have time to go ahead and work with an apprentice and bring him up now. As far as an apprentice technician goes, i'm looking for someone that has gone through schooling, um is uh, mechanically inclined can work with people can talk and communicate as in good physical health. You know all that good stuff same thing goes for the experienced technician uh. If anybody's interested in potentially working with me feel free to send me an email, hvacr videos, gmail.com uh, also again remember i work and live in the inland empire of southern california.

You kind of got to live close to there because it's not practical to live 50 miles away from my office. It just doesn't work. I work primarily in the inland empire um. I do minor work in orange county, but not very much so i really need the person to be in the inland empire if they are looking for potential employment with me.

So please send me an email, hvacr, videos, gmail.com and as far as the video. This is an older video from a couple months, back we're gon na go and get on with it and uh we'll talk to you at the end. This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition. Today, we've got a walk-in freezer.

That is not working. The customer said it was iced up. I mean i see frost, but it's not iced up something going on here. Switch works.

This isn't good insulation's, all jacked up what a mess right. Well, it's obviously not cold enough. It sounds like it's feeding. Vapor to the expansion valve, so i got to get up there under the roof.

Fortunately this is a shopping mall. So it's going to be a process to get up there but um. So i'm going to jump up there and see what we can figure out. All right, my freezer, unit's right here i already pulled the cover off when i walked up the unit was short cycling.

It just turns on and turns off, i'm kind of looking around we'll see if it does it again, but we're waiting for the temp control to turn on, but i'm just looking around definitely see some oil right here yeah. It's short cycling like it's low in refrigerant, possibly so with that being said, turn it off we'll put some service gauges on it. Well, this system is pretty much out of refrigerant. There's not really anything left in it.

So my guess is: is that there's going to be a leak at that flare nut back there? It wasn't at this because there's no oil on the valve stem right there, so i felt confident putting my gauges on it, but yeah. That's not good! So i'm gon na go get leak, detectors and uh. Some big blue and we're gon na try to pinpoint this guy i'm hoping it's up here i mean: there's always the possibility it could be in the attic or down in the evaporator too um. This is a saturday afternoon, it's saturday september 18th, at about 1 p.m.

Right now, so this is an overtime service call, but we're gon na do what we got to do to get them operational all right. I went ahead and equalized my system out just open high side and low side, and i'm just got my leak detector on turbo and i'm just running across the flare joints. I don't think it's at a flare joint, because all the oil was up on that t up there. The cool thing is: is it's windy and loud up here, but this leak detector has got the light on it.

So if it goes off, it'll light up makes it kind of nice. There might not be enough pressure in this system - hmm, not picking anything up, interesting, okay, so the only leaks that i can't repair are on the high side once we get gas in the system. So we're just gon na double check all the high side, ports making sure it's not on the high side, not on the condenser, we'll look down here. If we don't pick up a leak here, we can put gas in it and we can fix everything else later.

I don't see any signs of anything. There might be something downstairs too. I'm like really heavily leaning towards this up in here there was oil there, but i am just not picking up a single thing. It could have been this there's a gasket in the cap, though, so i don't think it was gon na be the cap wasn't covered in oil.

Interesting bottom of the fan cycle control. Nothing, nothing interesting, not picking anything up, insulation's all jacked up up there, but i'm doing a quick, no, nothing, nothing! Okay, um, we're gon na turn this guy on and put some gas in it and uh get some higher pressure. So we can leak check a little bit better because we really still have pretty low refrigerant pressures. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't a giant leak.

It's always a possibility. It could be a leak downstairs too. Unfortunately, this is one of those really awkward situations where i'm on top of a shopping mall and i'm not kidding with you. It takes me about 15 minutes to get down to the the the tenant or the customer that i'm working on and then you know 15 minutes back up.

So you got to be very smart about what you bring up when i went down to get the leak detector. I brought refrigerant. I weighed it downstairs because the up and down sucks now, if we end up having to do any major repairs, i'll bring another technician back with me, and then that makes it a lot easier because we do have uh like access to the side of the building And at the side of the building we can drop a rope down the mall kind of frowns on that, but it's back behind a service bay um and i can have a technician down there. Handing me stuff, you know up down up down, because if i had to bring everything up here i mean i'll, do what i have to do, but it would suck so all right before we do anything got the refrigerant cylinder turned upside down.

We're going to purge till we get liquid that purges the lines and verifies we're only charging with liquid everything's good open that up process port, then we're going to dump it into the high side for a minute i'll, just dump some gas into there. That way, we don't have to charge it with it. Turning on off on off enough on off kind of a thing, um we're just going to get some refrigerant in this guy, and then you know, of course, in a perfect world i'd say you know what we should go leak check downstairs and do everything, but because Of the really inconvenient up down up down that, i have to do i'm listening for leaks right now. I thought i heard something: um we're just going to put some gas in it and see what happens, get the pressures up a little bit higher.

That's about enough. Let's turn this guy on uh, it's going to take a second and it's going to shut off because it has a digital temperature controller and it's got ta, wait a second to load. So there it just opened up put some gas into the low side. Obviously, sight glass is flashing like crazy, i'm gon na get it to turn on and run something that i just thought about.

Right now is the customer's work order said it was iced up when i got here. It wasn't iced up and there was ice all over the boxes in there. It makes me wonder if they tried to de-ice it themselves and they put a hole in the evaporator coil. That's a very good possibility.

So once we get enough gas in here to do a proper leak check, we'll turn it off equalize out the gauges and go downstairs and do a leak search. But we just needed to get some pressure in here. Come downstairs to the evaporator and there's oil. All right here looks like there's been a repair right here before too the leak detector in here this whole thing has oil on it.

Yeah, there's something going on in here: something's, not right to get some soap bubbles in here right on the back side of this guy is a leak and the big blue is really helping you to see it. So that's the source of our oil um, i'm gon na figure out what we're gon na do here. This equipment's in really bad shape, looks like it needs a new distribution tube because it's been repaired. The equipment on the roof is junk.

We just put a compressor in that earlier this year, but i'll have to talk to the customer and see what they want to do. I think, in the meantime, we're just going to throw a braised joint on this, at least just braise. It up real, quick and then we'll talk to them, possibly about some replacement equipment. All right we're gon na go ahead and do a repair on this guy, get it operational um i front seated the king valve on the receiver, so the stem went all the way up into there.

It's gon na stop the flow we're gon na pump the system down close off my gauges. I have the high and the low side equalized out, so it's really important that i knew that. If i didn't have a leak on the high side, then i could put gas in the system. If it was a leak on the high side, then i would have to take the refrigerant out put nitrogen in the system and repair it.

But i i knew that the odds of it being a giant leak were pretty slim, so i just put some gas in there to build my pressures up that way. It didn't contaminate all the refrigerant okay, we're turned back on and we're going to watch the low side drop. It's going to take a second for the temp control to kick in, but it's just going to keep running and it's stopping the refrigerant flow in the receiver and this particular system. I've worked on them before the way they designed it.

You lose high side pressure, which is silly. I hate that we're going to let it build up, turn on and off a few times and then we'll open up the low side and do what we need to do to repair it. Actually, it doesn't look like it's going to build up too fast, so yeah we're good, we'll go ahead and do that take off the low side hose. So you have a place for the pressure to be relieved when we braise on the system downstairs.

So we got to get in here and sand. This really good, i'm assuming it's a crack, because maybe the support's missing or something i don't know. So we just sand it up really good. Then we'll lay a couple braised joints on it.

Lay a fat bead, hopefully that'll get us by in the meantime. Okay, thank you so through wet towel on there. Of course you don't want to cool a braze joint because you can compromise it, but when you have a sensitive component such as an expansion valve, you got to do what you got to do so i went a little crazy, put a big giant bead on that. Guy uh, just because i don't know what was going on there, that should be good cooled it off.

So we got to go upstairs change the dryer and pull a vacuum. Now i've got everything that i need and i left it down here and then i just dropped my rope down now. It's kind of sketchy leaving right here, because customers can come and take it and stuff. But i tried to be quick about it, so we're gon na get this stuff up here and then hopefully, uh get this guy finished up all right, so we're gon na get this guy off real, quick, so so take a little uh dialogue right here.

This guy tightened on, i love the spoiling catch-all, see all set up with the male female sight glass. It's my favorite. It really is little nylon. There nylog there a little bit of nylon on the mating surface, so i should have brought up my normal wrenches.

I like these canipix wrenches, but they're, not the best on flare nuts good to go, certainly not the most ideal location for the dryer, but it's on it's tight. We should be good um, we're going to. I got to find a receptacle on this roof and then get vacuuming down on this guy another one of those situations where we're vacuuming down a pump down system and we're only pulling on the line set. So i'm just going to pull through my gauges, i'm not going to bother bringing up all my crazy stuff if we were doing a full evacuation where it had no refrigerant left in it, then i'd consider getting my big hoses and everything, but so we're just pulling On the low side, essentially so i've got the gas ballast open at the moment, i'm using the bpx7 pump that's way oversized for pulling through a manifold, but the cool thing about the vpx7 is actually the lightest pump so and it's a 10 cfm.

So when you do need it it's available, you know but uh be practical and understand that pulling through gauge hoses and schraders you're you're, you know restricting the flow massively. So all right, we are back up and running uh. This does not have a head pressure. Control valve so we're just going to clear the sight, glass um, just gon na, add refrigerant right now it's bubbling like crazy, so we just need to give it some time.

Add some gas a little bit out of time on the low side and then clear that bad boy up all right, um pressures are looking. Okay, i don't have air probes downstairs sight. Glass is clear: system's operating, i'm gon na go ahead and start assembling everything. Taking my service gauges off and then we're gon na have to go downstairs, make sure the box is coming down to temp and go from there all right.

This guy is kicking butt. Looking good in here, thermostat says 15 degrees. It's gon na be some time manager was telling me this has been down since yesterday, so i got all the information off the unit. The only thing i need to do is take measurements of the inside of the box, just in case they want to replace the equipment, we'll do a load calculation, so okay, um working on shopping malls can be fun.

It can be a challenge too, though, because you know there's a lot of up and down uh you in. In my experience, you need to be very, very um thoughtful about what you're gon na do right and think ahead of time predict what you're gon na need and take it up there with you uh. You know trying to use ropes whenever possible. Most of the time to be honest with you, when you're working on the shopping, mall you're, not in a situation like i was here where i was at the edge of the building uh, you know most of the time you just got to lug your stuff up And truck it across the roof, so having like hand carts or something like that in your van does benefit.

When you do a lot of shopping, mall work now i used to do a lot of it and i used to keep rolling hand carts and different things in my van that would you know getting compressors across the roof that was like, you know absolutely needed, but Anyways you just want to try as be prepared as possible and also something to understand when you are working on shopping malls. Sometimes you know, management can be a pain in the butt they want you to go up and down through certain exits, different things like that. If you're not a jerk to them and you're courteous oftentimes, you can convince them to open up other doors, and what i mean by that is some shopping. Malls have multiple roof accesses right, but oftentimes the shopping malls want you to go through one specific one, but if you can give them a compelling reason as to why you need to go up to a roof access, that's closer to where you're working then do so.

You sometimes have to get creative in your wording. Um. You know i'll, tell you, for instance, whenever i work at shopping malls, they always want advanced notice when you're going there, even if it's like preventative maintenance work, they want you to. Oh, we want to know 24 hours in advance.

Well, you know it just so happens that every time i go to work on a shopping mall, it's an emergency and i'm there to work on a walk-in freezer. If you catch my drift okay, every single time, don't give them the benefit of saying yo yeah. You need to schedule this because that's just a nightmare, okay and then don't even get me started on the malls. Losing your insurance paperwork too, because that's a whole nother conversation we can have maybe we'll have that on the overtime show or something.

But if you guys don't know what i'm talking about uh friday evenings about 605 pm pacific, i uh do a show with my friends. Adam bill and joe called the hvac overtime show it's on the hvac overtime youtube channel, so check it out if you're interested so anyways. As far as the video goes try to be thoughtful when i'm going up under the roof. Thinking about what i need to take up there with me, oftentimes having multiple bags does benefit and sometimes i'll even reduce the amount of stuff in my bag and put other things that i might need.

So that way, i have everything when i get up there. Okay, cheater chords are really important, but can also be very dangerous, so be careful with those okay, cheater, chords or suicide or widowmaker cords. Basically uh. You can create a 115 volt circuit as long as you have 208 volts on the roof, okay and a ground wire.

If you can't get a receptacle within reason, but again, cheater cords can be dangerous because you don't want to get electrocuted so be cautious about them, but they do basically exist for shopping mall work now. Another thing that i will say when you're working on shopping malls, at least in my area, whenever i'm on shopping malls. Typically majority of the equipment is 480 volts. Okay, so keep that in mind if you're trying to use a cheater cord, the last thing you need is a 277 volts.

You know going to your 115 volt appliance or whatever you know, vacuum pump or something like that. So always pay attention and measure voltage. Don't assume when you're on a rooftop? Okay, not that it's ever okay to assume but seriously you don't want to watch a vacuum pump go up in smoke because you hooked it up to a 480 volt circuit. That would not be good, okay, so um! Basically, i was lucky enough in this situation.

I had a receptacle up on the roof, so i brought everything up and i was able to repair the refrigerant leak. Okay in a perfect world, i told the customer hey. You really need to consider replacing this equipment but bottom line. I had to get it operational.

It was their walk-in freezer. Okay, so i did find a refrigerant leak um. I know i went crazy with the solder. I goobed it up uh.

I always do that. Okay, especially if you're fixing a broken braised, joint or a cracked, braised joint or something i typically go super crazy with the solder and just kind of goober that stuff on there now uh, i you know people will say too hey how come i didn't uh. You know, use a heat blocking compound or wrap the txv and a wet towel or something you know. Honestly.

I was just in a hurry. Uh, the heat blocking compounds are great uh refrigeration technologies has the wet rag, one that works great, but sometimes i'm just not really in the mood and i just jumped in there now. I will say too that i was working on a walk-in freezer. It was, you know, probably 10 degrees inside the box, 20 degrees, or something like that, so that was aiding and reducing the amount of heat that the valve took, but still you're, you're brazing on it.

It's going to get hot okay. So keep that in mind when you're doing that um, you know just you can't always be perfect. Okay, so once i repaired the leak and i went upstairs again, i was trying to do everything calculated. So i didn't have a bunch of up and downs.

I would say, probably this day that i was there. I bet you anything all together in the probably four and a half hours that i was there five hours that i was there. I was probably only up and down a total of five times um. You know maybe four times at the the you know least or whatever, but um i try to be as efficient as possible when i'm doing that.

Okay and then i wanted to kind of touch on the whole evacuation thing understand something. When you have a system that is pumped down, you can't really pull on the high side most of the time, okay, because of the way that the refrigerant gets trapped in the receiver and the condenser. So you're really only able to evacuate on the low side. Now, in certain situations yeah it it could be beneficial to grab a schrader core removal tool, remove the schrader put on a big hose and evacuate the system.

But you know you're never going to achieve a perfect evacuation on a pump down system, because everything in that system leaks, okay and if you understand the refrigeration circuit, when you pump a system down, you shut off the refrigerant flow at the king valve at the outlet Of the receiver and the compressor continues to pull refrigerant right. It's still pumping refrigerant, it's pulling back through the low side, but as it's coming back into the low side, it's moving into the high side via the piston. In this situation, in the compressor right and then you have a reed valve - that's going to stop the refrigerant flow. So when the piston stops moving when the compressor shuts off the refrigerant is then going to be trapped on the other side of the valve.

In the compressor, so the refrigerant is sitting in between the king valve at the receiver and the high side valve of the compressor, and it doesn't go anywhere else, but none of those valves are a hundred percent leak free. I can't stress that enough: i'm not giving people the okay to not pull evacuations, but you just need to understand if you tried to pull a perfect vacuum on a pump down system odds are as you're trying to make this perfect evacuation you're literally going to pull The refrigerant past that that that read on the discharge line or discharge side of the compressor and or you're going to pull it past the king valve in the receiver. Okay, they are not a hundred percent leak, free right, they're there to shut off the flow. When you need to or whatever, but they are not 100 leak-free, so keep that in mind.

Okay, the more you try to pull a perfect evacuation, the more refrigerant you're just going to vent out into the atmosphere in that situation. Now, if i recovered the entire charge from this unit, then yes, i could go in there and try to pull a perfect vacuum because i've had side and low side. Okay, there's also arguments to be made and there is documentation to tell you that the whole time you're you're pulling that evacuation. You know you pull moisture and non-condensables whatever out of the system pretty quickly, and then i shouldn't say you pull non-condensables in air or air or non-condensables out of the system pretty quickly and moisture and refrigerant.

It is what typically takes the longest okay. So if you're, in a situation where i was out in the desert, where it's extremely dry, you know uh, the humidity is in the teens, like barely anything right um, you know the the the there really isn't gon na be that much moisture. That's gon na get into the system and then um you're still basically uh boiling refrigerant out of the compressor oil too, so again, not making an argument for not pulling a vacuum. But i'm saying that you know you don't have to be all crazy when you're just pulling down on the low side like do your best, get it down into the 500 micron range.

You know, watch your decay, but you're not gon na see no 200 microns, like you typically like on a walk-in freezer. You know you typically want to be super careful, uh and pull as low as you can. But you know when you're working on you know this kind of equipment. Sometimes you just can't be perfect, okay and also understand where the placement of your micron gauge is and what it's doing when you use a micron gauge in a manifold gauge set.

You know that sensor is closer to the vacuum pump than the actual system is in a perfect world. You want your micron gauge or your vacuum sensor, to be farthest away from the vacuum pump right. So in a perfect world, you hook your micron gauge up to the low side schrader and you pull down just on the high side or vice versa, and you pull on one side and then you're getting a true reading on the micro gauge. Okay.

So when you have it in your manifold gauge set, it will often times read a lot lower than it is in the system and that's where your decay really comes into play. You open up the high and the low side service ports, you close down the vacuum hose and you just let it sit for 15-20 minutes and you watch how fast it rises. If at all, that's going to be a pretty good indication of the system. Evacuation is where you'll see it in the decay.

Okay, so now that i've rambled forever, i really appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video. You know, i'm just a service technician. I just make you know: videos showing myself doing service work, so this is real. Sometimes you can't always be perfect.

Of course we want to try, but it's not always practical. Sometimes you have equipment down and you got to get it going. We, you know it's it's a saturday, it's it's hard to actually um. You know, take all this time and then the up and down being up on the roof, like it's just a nightmare on the shopping mall.

So i just do my best right. I'm not perfect! Nor will i ever be. I really appreciate you guys making at the end, if you haven't already check out my website, hvacr videos.com, lots of merchandise and hats and sweaters and beanies and shirts, and all that stuff available you can help support the channel hvacrvideos.com yeah. There's a bunch of different links in the show notes of the video.

If you want to help support the channel uh paypal, patreon, youtube, channel memberships, just check it out, you guys will see all the information in the show notes. I really really appreciate you and we will catch you on the next one: okay.