I really like the the spoiling catch on see all our sight, glass and dryer, but i like the flare with the male female sight glass, because then it just couples in there and i've said it before. I'm a huge fan of using the flare dryers on the roof um, because, theoretically, if there's ever an evaporator leak, i don't have to bring my torches on the roof to change the dryer. You just come up here swap out the dryer, with your tools, pull the evacuation and you're good to go. So this video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition.

So uh we got a call on the walk-in cooler, not working. We're saying it's at, like almost 50 degrees, thermostat says 48 back in the coil. It's really dirty, but problem likely gon na be on the roof. My uh condensed unit is over here, so we have a beer walk-in.

We have walk-in freezer and then we have walk-in cooler. So this is the one we need to jump into and try to figure out where our problem might be. I noticed that it seemed kind of warm in here. Compressor is really hot condenser.

I bet you this guy's off on high pressure. That compressor is really hot and uh. The condenser doesn't look plugged, but i bet you it's dirty on the inside. I can kind of see some light through it and it just turned on all by itself.

I didn't do anything. I bet you it's going off on high pressure. We're gon na get some service gauges on this guy, all right, um! You can see the high side. Pressure is at 397 at the moment and the unit shut off again.

So it looks like we're going to have dirty condenser on this one. More than likely, because both the fan motors were running, the fan cycle switch was turning the fans on, so i think it's just gon na be a plugged up condenser. So, let's start with cleaning the condenser and uh see where that gets us. So i came from the inside out.

I pulled the motors out too by the way and just kind of set them up there, but like and there's barely anything even coming out of this condenser. So this guy's hammered so we're just gon na get it nice and wet from both sides and then go ahead and put some coil cleaner on there and let it penetrate and do its job we'll go ahead and rinse these other guys too. These ones, i'm not going to disassemble, i'm just going to rinse them because they're working, but i will turn the power off and give them a quick once-over. So right now we're just getting them wet, basically and then uh yeah.

Let's go ahead and mix up some coil cleaner and see what we can do. I just got done spraying that one i'm gon na give it a second, i'm spraying the non brightener, the yellow, cleaner on these other ones, because it's also micro channel safe. So we're just gon na get it on there. Let it soak in there again these ones aren't as bad for some reason, so i'm not going to disassemble them, but um i'm going to go ahead and rinse this guy right now, because we can get that brightener off of there man.

This condenser has taken two passes, and this stuff is still coming out black look at that that thing's dirty. So this is a second pass of letting it sit on there. It's crazy see on this side right here, yeah still nice and dirty in there all right. I'm gon na dig in a little bit deeper check out these clouds.

It's a trip. How they're like right in front of the sun, it's kind of pretty all right. We are back on and running um. The fan cycle switch is holding the condenser fan motors off the coil's wet, so i would imagine 250 260 ish there we go 230, something like that.

Both condenser fan motors are running and see they're. Turning on and off so that's going to happen as the coil dries out. Um sight glass is clear at the moment, but let's let it run for a little bit and see what happens. I've never been a fan of fan cycle controls, especially when they do both motors.

I really think that they should have two separate fan cycle controls. I mean you can see now granted it's about ish degrees outside right now and we still have a wet condenser, but i mean look at how much we're cycling on and off the condenser fan motors turn on head pressure drops down immediately and then boom turns back Off you know - and it's like this is a vicious cycle even on cool days. This is the same thing. It doesn't run for very long and then boom it'll shut off, and then you know this is the longest.

It stayed on right here. I'll be honest. It's weird because look at my i'm at 205 now now granted, that is liquid line pressure. So i do have to be careful about that, because the fan cycle is on the discharge line, but um it's weird how quick it was turning on and off, i'm not liking.

How that fan cycle switch is working. We might have to change that all right. Well, it's running. I don't like that fan cycle switch because of how much it was turning on and off on and off, and then it was it's out of whack like it was turning on and off at these pressures last time, so i am gon na bypass the fan cycle.

Switch um and i'm not a fan of these, because the um there's no way to get this out without doing like a pinch off or something like that, they should have put a schrader port right there. That's kind of frustrating because to put a fan cycle switch on the high side, i would have to put it on the liquid line and the pressures are lower on the liquid line. So you really want it to be on the discharge line. So we've got a couple options here: we could come in and braise in a tea.

That would be one of the better ideas raise in a tea and then have that to access the system pressures put a schrader on it and then a schrader depressor. We might do that and i'll talk the customer into. Let me come in here and put two fan cycle switches, like i said, put a t right here, we'll recover the charge knock it out. It sounds like a plan really system's still running and it's coming down to temperature, i'm just kind of looking at everything else.

What i'm gon na do i talk to the customer we're gon na go ahead and do this uh we're gon na come back. We're gon na go ahead and recover the charge, we're gon na go ahead and put in the t up there and we'll put a swivel t on it. That way, we can put two fan cycle switches, one for each motor, we'll go ahead and change the dryer, uh sight; glass, probably clean it all up um and then we're gon na clean that evaporator coil too. That was all messed up uh.

I was just kind of looking at everything else, while i'm waiting for it to come down to temp. Looking at the defrost clock, it was a little bit off. It said 1pm when it's four or something yeah, it's almost four right now, so i changed the time on that. Don't really see anything else going on with that um i'll pull the cover to this guy, just to see what it looks like if we have to we'll change that to two.

So this is a fan cycle switch right here and it's set to turn on at 250 or turn off no turn the fans on at 250 with a differential of 55 so below 200. Basically - and it wasn't doing that, like you guys saw it - was like on off on off on off at weird pressures and stuff granted. I was on the liquid line, but still it was kind of wonky, so we're gon na put something here and because they braise these in you can't easily change them. It's kind of a pain, so we'll come in here with two of them.

Like i said all right, we are back, i brought half my van up on the roof and then we still got to bring up torches, nitrogen, a few other things too, but i you know when possible, i like to bring up certain things and then like the Recovery machine um recovery tank we'll take that down, then we'll bring up other stuff, so we don't have to do a whole lot. I've currently got a guy cleaning, the evaporator coil, so i'm going to go ahead and disassemble this guy. It's been working fine through the night, so i'll disassemble it get the recovery process started and go from there. I've got a brand new recovery cylinder here.

You've got to make sure you understand the difference between the brand new ones that come with nitrogen, the ones that come evacuated. You've got to make sure you got what you know what's going on um, because i'm recovering the gas from this guy and then going to put the gas back in because there's nothing wrong with it. So you got to make sure your cylinder is properly evacuated. You're not mixing gases.

Anything like that, so we're pulling a vacuum on this and then i'm going to finish continuing to get it set up for the recovery. You know a lot goes into these manufacturers. Making these units and a little extra thought would make it easy for the service technician. This is a factory ran suction line.

I can't even get my wrench really on there. You know to properly get on that stuff, liquid line's too close to that these guys. Really don't think about the service technician when they make these units. It's all about profit, and i get a company needs to make a profit.

I get that but make your equipment serviceable guys. I have never been a fan of these rdi units because they're just not service friendly at all the unit just turned on from a pump down. We look over here, yeah we're running so we're gon na go ahead and uh to make things. Go faster.

We're gon na go ahead and pump it down into the receiver, so we're not pulling from the evaporator core we're gon na. Let the compressor do the work, sucking all the gas out of the evaporator and we're gon na just pull from the receiver. Oh wait! You know what no we can't you guys are getting my thought process here that stupid receiver valve i'm pretty sure shuts off the flow when you front seat or when you uh front seat the king valve on that receiver. I believe the flow shuts off to that port, so we're just gon na, have to go and do it as it is right now, so we're going to uh, kill the power and then just recover like it is all right.

We're getting ready to set up the recovery machine, and i want to stress the importance of having a scale underneath your cylinder. You need to understand how much refrigerant is the max refrigerant. Just because that's a 30 pound cylinder does not mean you could put 30 pounds of gas in there. Okay, you got ta uh.

Do the calculations or find a chart online that'll tell you for the type of refrigerant um, how much gas you can add uh. I didn't do the calculation myself right now, but i'm pretty sure with 404a it's right around 17 18 pounds or something like that. So we're going to go ahead and hook our hose up to it right and then we're going to once we have our hose hooked up to it, we're going to zero out our scale that way. We know how much gas is going into that guy.

As far as the recovery process itself, we're using the field piece set up here, the cool thing is, is that you have the scale weight on the manifold too. This is the s man 480.. So right now we have redundant it'll, it'll measure right here and it'll measure on that handle um we're ready to go on this, we're going to open up the high side and then what i suggest you do when you're doing this process is leave this guy loose Right there, okay, then, when you open this up, your system is now purged right. You purged all the way to here and you're ready to go so we're going to go ahead and uh open this guy up.

We have a vacuum down recovery cylinder. So it's going to pull in as much as it can we're going to go ahead and get my extension cord over here hooked up and then start up the recovery machine. All right. It's already pulled in almost two pounds of gas.

Even before the recovery machine was turned on we're set to recover we're purged we're gon na go ahead and turn it on. It's got a soft start which is really cool and we're pumping refrigerant into this thing. Right. There uh i'll go ahead and open up my low side because we're pulling from that side too now um.

I am pulling from a schrader on this one right here and technically i'm pulling from a schrader on that. One too, i probably should have taken those out, but i'm not in a huge hurry right now. So it's okay, but um this one, it's hard to get the schrader out, but i'm going to show you the solution for that when we're done with this repair, because we're gon na eliminate this valve right here. There's no need for this valve because we have that one right there so we'll eliminate that valve, make a connection right here, go directly into the dryer setup and we'll be good to go one of the cool things i like about this is the auto shutoff feature.

So this guy went ahead and pulled down now. What we can do is uh. We could start it again, but my suction pressure's not rising, so it auto shuts off and then, if you hit it again, it'll pull down even further um, but i don't think we need to so. While i was waiting, i went ahead and mounted the fan cycle.

Switches, i'm gon na go ahead and get rid of the recovery stuff and then go get my torches and nitrogen and we'll do what we have to do all right. We've got nitrogen flowing through this guy, so we're gon na braise up these fittings, real quick. So so try not to light the place on fire. We've got a bunch of uh leaves right there, so i don't want to burn them down, put a little wet towel there, okay and last one over here.

All right! That's it we're good all right! We got everything brazed up. We need to go ahead and tighten up the flare, nuts and everything and get those taken care of um and then we'll go ahead and put service fittings on these and work through it. All right, dryers, installed. Sight glass is installed, we'll support it right here with something, but it's all brazed in for this guy right here.

So i put two ports and i put schraders in them. Okay, these guys right here have schrader core depressors in them. So now you'll be able to change them. If you do fan cycle and or eventually a high pressure, you'll be able to change them with pressure in the system, because you can always unscrew this fitting and the schrader will close all right.

But you just got to make sure you got the schrader depressors in there now on this side, i'm going to take the schraders out and because these guys right here do not have schrader depressors in them. So we're going to put the fan cycles on this one, and then this one right here will just be for high pressure, if need be so when it comes to the schrader fit or to these guys right here i use nylon, nylock blue universal for poe. You can use it for mineral too. It's not a big deal, but it's not a thread.

Sealant. Okay, it's a thread lubricant. So what i do is put it right here on the mating surface right where the flare nut is going to spin, and then you spin it all right and then yes, i do put a little bit on the threads. It doesn't take much okay, it's just a lubricant um.

If you are going to use this on the threads, you got to be careful if you're using a torque wrench, because it could kind of mess with your settings schrader depressor in there, and then it's just gon na screw down and then tighten on there. Okay, so we'll go ahead and torque it on okay, we got the vacuum pump running now we're pulling through the system we're going to start cleaning up our messes because i got crap everywhere, but i want you guys to understand the logic here: okay, so high side Pressure port with a schrader for both the fan cycle controls. Okay, i put another tee right here and braised in or braised in another tee, with an access fitting and then also put a service tee. I put a schrader in here and a schrader on both sides.

This is so if we ever have a high pressure control failure, which is this guy right here, we'll be able to add another pressure, control port right here without having to recover the charge or anything. So i'm thinking ahead trying to make it easier for the next guy. Okay plus, it gives me a port to measure the high pressure itself instead of just having the liquid line port on the receiver. Now i did eliminate this service valve right here, because it's not needed as there's a king valve right here.

So this is just redundant really just makes it accessible, but still there's a cage, so it doesn't need to be there we'll strap it down. So we're pulling the evacuation. I've got the vacuum ballast open right now, we'll let it close. Once we get down we're at about 3 700 microns and we're just kind of cleaning things up, wiring up the pressure controls or the fan cycle controls and just got a giant mess everywhere.

So we'll clean some of that up. I'm waiting for the evacuation to finish, and i kind of cleaned this up a little bit in here. It's still ugly as i'll get up, but fans are wired in uh. What about 1100 microns right now and dropping so we're getting there we're just uh trying to clean up our messes, like, i said, all right, we're all good we're charging the system we're putting as much gas into the high side as we can.

Although i can't front seat the king valve so we'll have to start it up before we get it all in there, but anyways i'm rambling um, but yeah we're looking good we're going to do an electronic leak search. Even though we passed the pressure test in the vacuum decay test, we're still going to do an electronic leak check too, so so we're still adding refrigerant but um, i'm watching uh the fans, because i want to make sure that they're set okay. So this one turned on at about 215 - that's too low, so we need to adjust it. I want this one to turn on about 225 ish we're going to try to maintain about 90 degree condensing temp, but trying to keep a separation between the two all right.

So again, we're trying to maintain about 90 degree, condensing temp, because that's how the expansion valve was sized for the the delta p or the pressure differential across it. So we shut off about 198, which was about 88 87 degrees, saturation temperature, and then, let's see what it turns on at, i still have to add a lot of gas to this system. I'm purposely leaving it low. So that way i can test the fan cycle.

Controls and see where they're cutting in so i would like to see about 235 ish on this guy right about there. We're gon na go a little bit higher okay, so we got that guy operating. So this is now gon na, be the last one to shut off and then we're gon na go ahead and set this one up now this one i'm gon na set to uh cut in around 250 and that's actually what it's about set for. So we're going to add some gas and see if that guy turns on about 250.

Now all right, this guy should be cutting in the second fan any minute now, but we got to make sure too that the pressure cut ends like when that fan turns on. We want to make sure it doesn't drop. The pressure for this fan. Doing dual fan cycles can be a pain again, i'm not a huge fan of fan cycling, but that's what this system has.

So i'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here. Um we're almost there. It should be cutting in any second now there we go all right now it cut in so, let's make sure the head pressure doesn't drop too much to drop the other fan and it doesn't look like it's really doing. It looks like it's.

Okay, i'm gon na keep adding gas, we're still uh we're just putting in what we pulled out so just adding refrigerant. That's why my suction pressure was so high, so yeah i look like it dropped and then that second fan turned off, but the first one's still running, which is good and also the fan that we cycle uh, the least, is gon na, be the one closest to The inlet, the header uh, the one furthest, is the one that we're gon na cycle, the most all right, cool, we're looking good so far, we're just gon na keep charging the system. It looks like the sight glass just cleared, i'm gon na run over all my braze joints with the leak detector make sure we don't got nothing over these little fittings just to make sure again, even though we did a pressure test and everything i still want to Check everything not picking anything up, i wouldn't be surprised if we picked something up around the packing glands, but no nothing. The only thing i wish i would have done different is.

I wish i would have brought some insulation to clean that up, but we're just gon na i'm gon na have someone repair it with some foam tape. It's not gon na look the prettiest, but the insulation is still good. It's just so. You know like getting uh.

It's like the foam tape that someone used on top went bad or something i really like the the spoiling catch on see all our sight, glass and dryer, but i like the flare with the male female sight glass, because then it just couples in there and i've Said it before i'm a huge fan of using the flare dryers on the roof, because, theoretically, if there's ever an evaporator leak, i don't have to bring my torches on the roof to change the dryer. You just come up here swap out the dryer with your tools. Pull the evacuation and you're good to go so yeah, i'm a huge fan of using the flare dryers, but the sporelin combination here does a great job and of course, you get the protection that it provides too by cleaning the system um. I, like the really big sight, glass too, super nice to be able to see the system all right.

The box is down to temp it's working good. We got the evaporator cleaned up. The coil itself is not in too bad of shape. It's fine so uh they got a little more life out of this guy and it'll last a little bit longer all right.

So this one was kind of an urgent call, because the customer called and the health department had showed up and the walk-in was just you know ever so slightly too warm and they were really frantic um to the point that they were actually mad at me when I got there earlier than i said. I was going to get there because you know they. They had told us. You know the health department's here.

They want to know when you're going to be here and we were like. I don't know you know with traffic and everything it could be a couple hours and then we showed up in like an hour and the lady was like almost in tears and i i feel bad, but i mean you know i i don't like to under promise. Basically right so i i had told her, you know it's going to be a little while and then she uh when i showed up she was like freaking out she's. Like you said you weren't going to be here till 5.

and now i failed my inspection and i'm like what what do i do. I said i dropped another job and rushed here as fast as i could. Whatever you know it's, you can never please anybody with this stuff, but it is what it is right. So we got out there and mainly it was a dirty condenser right.

That was the big issue, but again guys big picture diagnosis right, so condenser was plugged cleaned the condenser, but i didn't like the way that the fan cycle switch was operating. It was going on off on off, it was acting really wonky and i went ahead and talked to the customer and got them to approve us to come in and replace the fan cycle switch and instead i put two fan cycle switches which i've talked about it. Many times, but when you have uh fan cycle switches, i'm not a huge fan of using those because of how violent they are on the system. But the way that i set this up is much better than what they had.

Okay, because what they had is just on off on off and if you ever watch a sight glass when both of those condenser fan motors are turning off every time, they turn off and turn on that sight. Glass is going to empty and then fill up and start flashing for a minute and all that vapor is going down to the expansion valve and it just messes everything up. So if you can cycle them in stages like i did it's much better and it's much easier on the system. Of course, the best bet is to go ahead and put a head pressure control valve in there um.

But again i wasn't trying to reinvent everything. I just threw fan cycles on there. It's gon na be fine all right, but you know when i talk about the fan cycle switches because we have mild weather here in california - that's where it really comes into play because you get that violent on off on off, because if it's you know, 70 degrees Outside um, you know right when the fans turn off, you know the they turn back on and it's just a back and forth, and it's just super violent. If you go to the midwest or back east, where it gets really cold, like you know, unlike california, with our 60 degree, winters um, you know fan cycling might be better because they're not going to jam on and off as fast as they do here all right.

So um again looking at the big picture and thinking about the next guy, i went ahead and added that extra set of ports in case we ever have to put a high pressure control on here for when and if that fails, those little peanut controls on these Systems they fail all the time. So when the high pressure control fills now, it's super easy and nobody has to recover the entire charge like i did, and i really think manufacturers should do that more often just like i did on this because there's nothing worse than having to recover the charge. To put a high pressure control on there like that, just seems like a waste of the customer's money um, you know it's just silly and i'm not a fan of doing the pinch off thing. You know if it's under warranty, like manitowoc ice machines.

You know warranty only pays to use the pinch-off tool. Okay, fine, but when you use the pinch-off tool you you weaken the copper and it's just a pain in the butt. So that's why i talked to the customer. They were good with it.

We went ahead and recovered the entire charge. Did it right put in a new sight, glass and dryer? I love using those flare dryers. You just got to make sure you tighten them appropriately. You don't want to over tighten them.

I would say i mean either way if you under tighten them. Obviously they're going to leave, but over tightening them you leave and it's going to that flare. Nut is going to back off and you're going to come back and it's going to be leaking. You know and it's just a pain in the butt.

So just don't over. Tighten the flare nuts okay, so went ahead and took care of all of that got the system operational had another tech with me that helped me out, because i had to take all that crap on the roof and i had him cleaning the evaporator coil too. So it was a big help to be able to have someone else with me, especially all those multiple trips to the van and stuff. You know i was able to rely on him to help me go get some stuff while i was doing things so that way, we could keep moving with the entire system, and it wasn't me having to go.

Take 10 minutes to walk down to the van to get a part you know. So that way i was able to stay productive and he was bouncing back and forth and helping out so when it, when you can get a helper, it really does help out to make things go smoother. Okay, so um we got the system operational. I set up the fan cycle switches.

The way that i wanted to um. You know that way, they're slowly, you know staging on and off, and i think it's going to be much better. So time will tell how it works. I really really appreciate you guys making it to the end of this video.

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This monday, which should be 4 4 within, i think, they'll, be on monday. We'll see they're scheduled to be delivered, so maybe tuesday is one we'll get them up on the website, but once we get them up, you know we got a hundred more that i ordered so they should be in stock and they should last a little while so Um stay tuned for that uh. You can also become a youtube channel member, which is just like a a monthly commitment. You know, like you commit or pledge to you, know, give this much a month or whatever check in the show notes.

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