Today we have a video that i had actually made and prepared for brian orr's hvacr training, symposium um. This was uh a few examples of how not looking at the big picture and or missing some simple installation errors led to a giant snowball that turned into a disaster for the customer. Okay, you may recognize some of these videos. These are past videos.

I i picked a few of my favorite videos where they were kind of epic repairs and most of the time it was really simple things that either people didn't follow the proper installation, instructions, people didn't commission the equipment properly. People just missed some really obvious things and it led to the snowball effect that got bigger and bigger and bigger. In some cases growing up in the trade i was taught by multiple people. I was taught by my father.

I was taught by a lead service technician that worked with us and i went to trade school okay. In no way do i expect my youtube videos to be a sole training aid for any one service technician out there. Okay, i'm a firm believer in a a regular education. Okay, i'm a firm believer in a student learning from a trade school, but i think there could be some benefit.

You know similar to my experience where i learned from my father from the senior mechanic and school at the same time, so i make these youtube videos as a training aid. Okay, here's the things that i run into the problems that i see the mistakes that i make. Yes, i make mistakes just like every one of you guys makes mistakes too; okay, anybody that tells you that they don't make mistakes. They're, lying; okay, we're human! It's part of our dna.

Okay, we some of us learn from mistakes. Some of us don't learn from mistakes. You know the hope is is that we do learn from them all right. So i've kind of compiled a few videos here all right, and these are short clips from the videos.

If you guys follow my channel hvacr videos on youtube, you guys may recognize some of these videos. Okay, maybe not some of them are pretty old videos, but i think that the few videos that i picked here have some really cool clips and have some very good lessons that we could all learn from okay uh. I certainly learn from even watching my own videos. You know i even learn from the comments from people that they make on my videos and say: hey, you know what you actually did that a little bit wrong or hey.

You know what you could have done it this way and i grow from that as a service technician too. Okay, every day, i'm learning every day. All of us should be learning, there's always something new, as you guys have been going through the seminars today, i'm sure you guys all picked up a little bit of something from each one of these little sessions that you guys had. Okay um.

Unfortunately, i'm not able to be there in person this year. I was in person last year and it was an awesome event. I could only imagine that you guys are having a great time - and i know you guys still have another two days of of stuff to go through. Okay and that's awesome, i'm envious of all you guys for being there right now, i'm currently stuck in california um.

I got a small business and it's kind of crazy right now and it's just not a good time for me to to get away from work. Okay, so let's go ahead and get on with the first two videos right now: okay, the the thing that i want to reiterate throughout this whole presentation, i'm doing right now is: let's take a step back and look at the big picture. Okay, it's really easy for myself, other people, other companies, other service technicians, to make the simplest of mistakes. We all make them right.

But if you don't catch those mistakes, they can just start to snowball and get bigger and bigger and bigger. And if a service company is sending another service tech out to fix someone else's mistake and that service tech isn't competent, then maybe they're going to create a mistake, and it's just going to start to compound and get worse and worse right. This next video that i'm going to show you is going to be a great example of that. Okay, this is a video where i went out for one of my really good customers to a location that i do not normally service that to this day, i do not service.

Okay, this video was from about a year and a half ago i was doing my customer a favor by helping them out with a problematic walk-in freezer that they were having issues with okay. I went out there as a second opinion um. The previous company had been there multiple times and the customer just said that they weren't figuring it out. Okay, so let's get on with the video and we'll talk about it after i'm on a walk-in freezer right now and i'm not kidding with you, the customer says that the previous company has had nothing but problems since they installed.

The equipment continuously have had to come back and she's, trying to get me documentation to help me to understand exactly what it is that they've done, so i walked up to it right now. This is a qrc system, the quick response controller in the left right there uh there's currently no power to the qrc uh. I need to kind of figure it out from there. I have not got my meter out yet, but i noticed there's a bunch of ice over here, but this is what's concerning to me: they've got so cords or sj cords.

Oh, i think that's the main power i think. Okay, i was tripping out thinking. What are they doing here? Huh? This is interesting yeah. This looks like we got a switch on the back wall.

I haven't flipped anything yet this panel was literally playing right here. So when it comes to me being a second opinion, you kind of got ta undo. What other people have done? You've kinda got ta, look really really hard at the big picture to try to unravel what it is that, potentially they might have made a mistake on so that way you can then find the actual problem, so the coil looks to be frozen up back there. Definitely there's a bunch of ice back in this side, there's ice all in here um.

I need to open that up and see what's going on in there, so i've got an sj cord or so cord and they're only using the black and then they've got another one and they're only using the black. What the heck is up - hmm um! So just doing a visual inspection fan, blades spin compressor is warm. It's not hot um, there's a defrost clock which there shouldn't be, but they don't have any defrost in it. So it's not being used.

I will eliminate that from the picture looks like they eliminated the time delay too, which is good because you shouldn't have a time delay on a qrc or a intelligent unit. All right i wish i could show you guys the invoices that i just read holy moly for for this customer again, i don't want to knock the other company, but um. I realized that there was some problems and i went up on the roof and i realized that i saw that voltage was it looked like it was coming from on the roof. Well, in fact it's actually not, but when they first installed the equipment.

Yes, they were powering it from the roof. They did have that defrost clock in the system and uh. That was some of the original problems that they had. I have been reading through their invoices and it's funny too, because the customer was charged for all that which is a trip because they made an installation error.

I don't like to talk crap all right, but anyways so reading some of that stuff again, i haven't even gone through anything. Yet i found like one of the last invoices that said they finally got to hold the heat craft tech support and it looked like they'd been talking to a bunch of different people at heat, craft tech support and someone finally figured out that the evaporator did not Have its own dedicated power supply and they powered it dedicated okay, so we are powered and you notice that we're in the tripped position right now. So that's why my evaporator is not running and i have three phase on the roof. So what we're gon na do at this point is: go ahead and power this down and we're gon na defrost that coil and then try to see if we can find some sort of an electrical short or see what's going on.

Maybe the ice pull the wire nut off. Who knows all right, so we got a a lot of ice in this thing and it's very interesting how there's more ice on the left and more ice on the right than there is in the middle. But it's also interesting how there's a ton of ice in the drain pan on the left and a ton of ice in the drain pan on the right. One thing i've seen before is people not doing the drain right? It kind of looks like it see how there's like a pitch going up and uh.

If there's too much stress the drain, pan can actually get pushed up okay. Well, we need to de-ice it first. So we're going to get this de-ice. Remember: we've got power off.

So i'm going to pull the motors out, we got to be careful because things are going to get wet, but it kind of sucks. But we'll get this all on look at. We got different motors too evaporator. This is not a factory motor yeah.

It is they've changed one of these before so that's a mcmillan motor! That's interesting! That's not right! Something's! Funky about that! So i walked into their beer walk-in because i'm trying to trace out where the drain is going and it's actually teed into the beer walking right there. Then it runs over tees into the walking cooler right over here between those wine bottles and then goes down to the drain and it's barely draining see. I've got a full drain pan and that's all i'm getting out of that drain. So we've got a plugged up drain too all right.

I noticed that if i grab this and pull down on it, it seems like it drains faster, and my theory is - is that this is binding and pushing up on the drain pan, because when i pull down on it, it seems to drain so yeah. It's what i think it is first off this, it's kind of hard to tell on camera, but this is going up when it's leaving right and what happened was when they they had a pre-existing coil. I know what they did because um i've had my employees. Do this before too, and you know, took me a minute to figure it out, but they didn't line up the drain line you need to when you're doing one of these coils.

You really need to line up that drain line 100. Okay um and it's it's actually not that bad. I don't maybe they're trying to do something with the 45, but also the other problem is that the drain line's coming up at a weird angle. So it's awkward at that.

Okay. But if you look, i don't know if you guys will be able to see this, but when i pull down on this there's a lot of flex like this drain. Pan should not be pushed up, see it's being pushed up like it it's pulling down and when i pull down on it it drains and all the water drains out, but without it the middle is high and the sides are low, which would make sense again. I'm guessing right now as to why there's so much ice on the left and so much ice on the right, because the middle of the pan is being pushed up.

So any drain or any condensation during defrost, goes to the left and to the right until it gets high enough to go down the drain. Also, you can tell from the backseat here that this thing has been iced up a million times and that's also reflected in all the previous invoices. That i read is that they've iced this thing up so many times it almost looks like. I think this is the original motor and i think these two have been replaced, the left and the right, which would again make sense.

So all right. Well, i need to finish defrosting, but i'm trying to figure out how to make this drain faster. I don't have a union with me right now, but i kind of want to pop this and just let it drain into a bucket temporarily. I ended up finding a union, but this is what i'm talking about.

I broke it. Free and all i did was just pull down just a little bit. There was no water draining before and now look at all that water. Now i need to get that because i don't want water draining on the floor, but that's what's going on that drain is messed up all right.

I ended up finding the union, so i'm gon na put a water hose on this temporarily and drained it out to the floor, sink and then finished de-icing it look at how silly this is. I literally made a chingus, i found all the pieces, so i could drain because i i'll worry about fixing that a little while, but the biggest thing is. I want to get this defrosted, so i can figure out where the electrical short is. So i have these pieces already for blown out other drains, so i just connected them and ran the drain to a hose, ran it outside that way.

I can defrost this coil before i couldn't put any water in the drain pan for more than you know. Five. Second bursts now it's instantly draining out and we're not even plugging up at all, so we'll get this defrosted really quick, still trying to keep water from dripping down on the box, because we don't want to make a mess in here looks like we got a little Drip drip, so i need to tighten that up. Look at how much damage there is from ice.

It's been consistently icing up for a very long time on the left and the right. I already de-iced behind that. But this is what's scary over here. There's a a transformer back there that gets high voltage and steps it down to low voltage.

It's tucked back behind there and it's completely encased in ice, and i have to defrost it in case it. You know and get it all wet. Well, i went to go unplug this ecm motor and the wire just came off in my hand. That's not good, because it goes up into the motor and it's no bueno.

My equipment is running. I ran into a lot of problems um. I did a major repair on the drain line. The drain line was totally pitched.

They had this thing there somehow before. Also it's pretty plugged up, there's a bunch of gunk in there, but the drain line was pitched in the wrong direction. Um i was able to bend the stuff behind the wall. Put a massive pole on that brazed on or soldered on this union.

As i was taking the drain line heater off, i felt it crackling and you can see it's exposed, so we can't put that back on. So i have to come back for that and we had a broken fan bracket and a bad fan. Motor right here totally broken shorted, you can see it's burnt and that went up into the motor so went ahead and replaced that there's still a lot more to come on this, i'm not done uh that s-a-s-o-s-j cord, whatever is a joke. I don't know why.

They're using just the black wire from each cord, but this will get them through the weekend. It's cooling i'm going to jump on the roof and clean up my messes up there um it's getting late already. It is 8 34. On friday night as usual.

One thing leads to another right: all right: we are back and we're gon na finish this guy up, so the drain pan was iced up like i thought it was going to be, and it actually blew apart because it froze and expanded the copper without the drain Line heater, even with the pitch that we had, it still blew it apart. So we're going to repair that and then we're also. I brought another person with me today, so we're also going to properly put a heater on there insulate it, but we're going to blow out all the drain lines because they're interconnected between the walk-in cooler, the beer, cooler and the walk-in freezer. So we're going to blow them out, make sure that's all good new fan bracket and then we're going to get to the bottom of all that weird electrical crap going on in there all kinds of issues up here.

Sensors are too close to the heater, looks like one had shorted out right there. I ended up going to the other side, pulling it out of the tee, because they're using a shark bite fitting over there sliding it in making it one solid piece coming up. No leaks, we blew out the drain so now we're going to wrap the drain line heater. So i had a six foot drain heater.

It's way too big, but it's perfect size. So i didn't have to use the cut to fit stuff so uh. I can promise that drains not gon na ice up, that's way over wrapped, but that's fine. We've got a nice piece of insulation and then we're gon na run it on over properly all right and over here i got rid of those sjo cords, whatever ran them up top nice and clean two wires coming in drain line heaters wired in.

We just need to tape these seams right here. I made sure that everything is secured and not going to touch any of the brackets down below, because there was stuff made sure everything's, nice and good, so we're looking good so far. All right so was that ever a crazy service call, i mean for real. I had to unravel all the craziness okay, so the previous company.

You know they went out there and they installed of a piece of equipment and they didn't quite follow the installation instructions. They didn't pitch the drain, the right way and it snowballed and turned into a giant mess of which they sent other service technicians out to try to repair. But they weren't competent in the diagnoses and ended up creating more problems and replacing parts. And they really just started throwing parts at it all together on this walk-in freezer uh.

Looking at the customer's invoice, okay they've replaced a circuit board. Multiple sensors they've replaced a transformer they've replaced two evaporator fan motors. They replaced a condenser fan motor on the roof. They did some work to the drain line and they rewired and added a new circuit breaker for the evaporative coil, and all of this all right was because they were chasing a ghost okay.

What started as a simple, they didn't run a dedicated circuit for the evaporator and they didn't pitch the drain correctly snowballed into all these problems of people throwing parts at this, because they couldn't figure out why the evaporator kept icing up and icing up and icing up And they thought maybe it had a bad board and they thought maybe the sensors were bad and you know they. I think they even changed the expansion valve. If i remember correctly too, this is an eev system. I mean it was just one thing after another and then just reading the notes.

It was really interesting too, because they were totally incriminated in their invoices like found this, this wasn't installed right and it's like wow. I couldn't believe that anyways we got the customer up and running and they've been extremely happy ever since okay, so this next call was another interesting one where i went behind another service company - okay, actually not just a service company, but i went behind another service technician At a little hotel that i did some work at okay, they had their own in-house technicians and uh. I feel, like the technician quite didn't, understand what he was working on: okay and uh kind of made a few guesses, and i again i don't know for sure, because i was i was behind him, so i was just trying to clean up the mess okay. So this is an ice machine, let's get on with it and we'll talk about it after all, right guys.

So today i've got an interesting one uh. This was a real head, scratcher um and it kind of threw me for a loop, but once we figured it out, you got that great satisfaction, feeling okay, um. What i want to point out is uh that you can't just always assume that the first problem you find solves. What's going on, okay, um we're gon na be looking at an ice machine right now and we found a major problem right from the get-go and it took me a few minutes to find this problem too.

Okay, i was doing my ice machine paper where i write down all my pressures and i was noticing that we had high suction pressure but normal head pressure, but we had really long freeze cycles and we were going off on a three beep or you know. I think was a three beep long. Whatever the long freeze cycle freeze, backup, timer on a hoshi machine was, and it was causing them to constantly have to reset the machine and they'd had their techs out at this particular rest or this particular hotel chain. They had their restaurant or their techs out and they couldn't figure out what was going on.

It was a real and, and i'm not knocking anybody they. You know that this was a very complex problem, but what happened was a few steps were skipped in someone's diagnosis and they misdiagnosed something. Okay - and you guys are gon na see what i think happened at the end of the video and then we'll do a recap and talk about it too. All right when i'm working on ice machines, i like to take a notepad and write down the refrigerant pressures.

Okay, i was working on a hoshazaki ice machine and if anybody knows anything about hoshizaki machines, they have uh in their tech specs book they have the recorded pressures at five minutes into the free cycle. But i like to go above and beyond. It does a couple different things, but it helps me to observe the machine while it's operating and start to see, trends and notice, things that are happening. So anybody that's paying attention to this sheet right now.

They may be able to understand some of our scribble, but this machine obviously has a really long freeze cycle, okay, so what i do is, i start with the two minute mark four minute mark and every two minutes, except for i note the five minute mark when I'm marching on a hoshi, okay, so hoshizaki ice machines and just depending on how warm it is and stuff you're gon na be like 28 29 minute freeze cycle and then you know short harvest cycle in there too. But you notice this machine went all the way to 36 minute, freeze cycle and actually at that point in time, actually 38 minutes at that point in time i initiated a harvest cycle because something was going on all right, so i'm going to show you guys on The video right now what happened, but i want you guys to see and understand how these books work too. Okay, so you got to pay attention inside the books. The machine that i was working on was a water cooled machine, so um.

What i do is i keep my notes for myself to review okay model and serial number and then i have 70 degree water for condenser and for water inlet valve okay, because this is a water cooled, coaxial condenser, so the condenser inlet was 70 degrees. When i started and the water inlet for the machine that actually you know the consumable water was 70 degrees. Also, okay, so um pay attention in your book. You know it has all the information.

You need water, cooled head pressure controls and it tells you all km models. The temperature range should be 104 to 115 degrees should have about 270 psig water, uh or refrigerant pressures. Okay, so um, that's the temperature range coming out. The water coming out of the valve.

Okay and then also, i put little notes right here - we'll go ahead and scroll back to the data information. You find your model number right here, excuse my crude little bookmarks find your model number, so 70 degrees ambient temp, and then you find your water. So we're doing a water cooled machine and you go down and i'm looking for refrigerant pressures, and then it asks you what the water inlet temp is for the consumable water and that was 70 degrees. So my head pressure should have been about 271 and my suction pressure should have been about 52 psi.

Okay. So let's look at my five minute mark. We were at 69 and 261. something's going on there right, so i'm gon na go ahead and pan on over to the video, and you guys will see what actually happened and mind you too.

I'm monitoring, because this is water cooled. I had my temperature clamps and i was looking at inlet and outlet on the condenser so notice. We had about 70 to 73 degrees, the entire time we were making ice inlet and then notice your outlet temperature pretty much maintained 103 degrees outlet. Okay, now once i found the problem, those numbers changed and you guys will see all of that, so so we're working on a water cooled potions off you today.

We just kind of ran across an interesting problem in that this is my outlet and i've got water. Coming into it, i've got a cold outlet and a hot inlet we've got lines switched is what it looks like. So i've got 100 degree. I see your water valves going out and that should be our hotline and they're feeding the wrong direction.

I believe, but what's interesting is when did this start happening? They may have just installed this machine here we're at a hotel, so they have their own people. Okay, so i switched my manifold because what i did was. I went ahead and recovered the charge out of this unit. It was screaming.

I could tell other people have been working on it. So, first off to recap: we found that the water lines were switched, the inlet and the outlet on the water cooled system. Okay, so they had cold water going into the valve which hot water should be coming out. Basically, it's a water cooled coaxial condenser, but my pressures were out of whack.

Just didn't seem right to me and i kind of feel like they have their own maintenance people and they've been playing with it. So i went ahead and recovered the charge and found that it was undercharged, so um vacuumed it down put in the factory charge and now we're running 270 or 77 over 254 for about five seven minutes in and the head of, my compressor is ice cold. So we've got a bad expansion of it's over feeding and uh the previous tech, probably let some gas out to try to compensate for it so and uh. The head pressure was on point because the water regulating valve was regulating that bringing the head pressure up to where it should be.

But then we had a weird back pressure, so yeah, so we weighed in the charge. It's got. A bad expansion valve we're gon na. Go ahead and order it, let them know what's up and it will come back out, but on these things you can't just assume you know you run into all kinds of weird stuff.

The other thing too, like there was a wire that was just dangling in here. I put a wire nut on it it just i could tell people have been working on this. I was called out for that ice machine and i really didn't know much about it. All that they told me was they've had a couple of their own service.

Techs. Look at it and nobody really knew what was going on so again, i had to unravel what they did all right, so just investigating monitoring the system and how it worked. I had to look at everything looking at the big picture right um and i realized that they had switched the water, inlet and outlet feeds for the the water cooled condenser. Okay, so that right alone can start a problem.

But i don't think that was the initial problem again, i'm just kind of making an educated guess. I feel, like the initial problem, was a failed expansion valve on this system. Okay, a simple failed expansion valve, but i feel like the service technician that was out before me. Just couldn't quite diagnose the failed expansion valve and was kind of reaching for a few things.

Okay, i feel like. Maybe he let some refrigerant out of the system, thinking that that it was overcharged and i feel like maybe he switched the water lines, not understanding how a water cooled. Condenser works. Okay, the water inlet and the water outlet on the water cooled condenser is very important.

Okay, you got to make sure you get those right so once we got the water lines fixed, we couldn't just stop there, okay, because we don't just stop at the first symptom if you're looking for a leak on a system. When you find a leak, you don't just stop there. You continue to leak check because maybe there's multiple leaks, okay same thing, maybe there's multiple problems like there was in this video okay, so i fixed the water lines, but then, once i did that i watched the machine and it felt like it might have been a Little low on refrigerant went ahead and recovered the charge and weighed in the factory charge which, on one of these little critically charged ice machines. That's very important manufacturers all tell you that if you're concerned about the charge recover it and you know, weigh in the factory charge, okay, so that's what i did and once i did that i was able to diagnose that the system had a failed expansion valve the Expansion valve was flooding back to the compressor, causing all kinds of issues causing a long freeze cycle so again taking an educated guess after i unraveled everything.

I believe that was the initial problem, and i just believe that the service technician that came before me there's nothing wrong with the fact that he couldn't fix it. It's just. I don't think he was very familiar with how these ice machines work and he just wasn't quite able to diagnose it. Okay, i want to make it clear with these examples that i'm showing you guys is i'm not trying to gloat i'm not trying to brag or anything like that.

Okay, i'm just trying to show you guys that you got ta step back and look at the big picture when you're making these diagnoses. Okay, when you're doing an installation, you got ta, understand the sequence of operation. Okay, you got ta, understand and or read the installation manual, so you know how things are supposed to be installed: okay, even when you're doing service on equipment grab the installation manual give it a read figure it out. That will help you to diagnose.

Okay, all right. This next call that we're going to talk about is another one, where taking a step back and look at the big picture. Okay, the customer was complaining about a walk-in cooler that kept icing up over and over and over again, okay, and they had multiple people come out and look at it and it just kept icing up and they threw all kinds of stuff at it. Now.

First, right off the bat, i'm going to tell you that this evaporator for this walk-in freight walk-in cooler is extremely deteriorated and it is in horrible shape and right off the bat right when i walked up to it. I said this equipment needs to be replaced. It's done, it's lost its efficiency. Okay, you guys will see in the video okay, it's just completely destroyed, but looking at everything i told the customer right off the bat hey, it needs to be replaced, but i'm going to do what i can to get it operational.

Okay, i'm going to go ahead and get on to the video with you guys and then we'll talk about it after this is the walking cooler. I've got someone cleaning the evaporator right now and defrosting it. You can see, we've already cleaned majority of it and it's it's pretty plugged up. This is years of neglect.

Uh, you know people not maintaining it, not blaming it on the previous company. You can see it's nice, nice step too, but i'm also looking at some invoices from the previous company, and they just worked on this about two months ago three months ago, and they were making expansion valve adjustments. Well. Expansion valve adjustments are useless when your coil is plugged okay and to make matters even worse, the more i look at it.

They just got the blades on backwards. Every motor look it. This is the blade if it spins this way. It's a reverse.

Airflow sucks the air up blows it out the coil. No wonder this! Damn thing is iced up. These idiots put the blades on backwards. Look at so it's spinning that direction and if i put that on it scoops the air and blows it up.

Okay, we got the blades reversed. I want to change the blades because they're all in horrible shape and there's cracks, but again i'm only giving them so much of my time today. So they're only going to get so much but see now it's going the right direction and you could tell it's been going the wrong direction for a very long time, because look at the outside of the blade it shouldn't be dirty and they're filthy. So these things have been running in the wrong direction for more than months, and you can tell that the previous company has had a hard time because they've got the thermostat inserted in the coil, and usually people only do that when they're having freeze-out problems and then Looking at their invoices, i'm seeing they were having a lot of freeze up problems too um go ahead and bump it real, quick or go ahead and leave them on this one's cracked, but we were able to straighten it out now.

We can actually feel air blowing out of the coil. Now i've already told the customer too, though, that this like they need to change this equipment. This is literally going to get them through, but yeah so at least we're operational. So that was a little short and simple one.

It was something as crazy as the technicians didn't understand the proper airflow for that evaporator. Now that was a a bone. Space miser, i think, is what they called that coil back in the day. Okay - and it has reverse air flow, so meaning that the air gets sucked in through the evaporator fan guards and blows out.

So it sucks in that way and blows out of the evaporator coil. And if you don't understand that you're gon na get confused, so the service technicians prior multiple service technicians that had worked on this particular piece of equipment, all came out trying to figure out why this evaporative coil was icing up number one. I'm going to tell you is that the fins the fin pack had completely separated from the copper tube, so you can actually grab the fins and move them back and forth on the copper tube. So right off the bat it's not going to absorb heat properly.

That's going to cause a massive loss in efficiency, and that alone means that it's time to replace the evaporative coil. Okay, but looking at the big picture, we need to get the equipment operating until replacement, mind you. This equipment had already been replaced. I went out there made.

The diagnosis, did the temporary repair and i went back a couple weeks later and i replaced all that equipment. Okay, so and it didn't take much. I didn't even have to try to argue with the customer. I just told them it needed to be replaced and they said: okay cool.

Do it, you know. So it was that easy right. But what i found is that the technicians before had put the fan blades on backwards for the rotation of the motors, so the fan blades were just fighting themselves. Basically, they weren't moving air like they should be.

Airflow is keen when it comes to refrigeration, air, conditioning or heating. You have to have a means of heat transfer. You have to have air moving to transfer that heat. If your compressor on the roof on this refrigeration equipment is pumping its little heart away.

Sending liquid refrigerant down to the expansion valve okay and the expansion valve is feeding refrigerant into that evaporator coil. We have to move air across to transfer the heat of the box so that way the evaporator can work efficiently. We can send the refrigerant back to the compressor to cool it off and we can just continue the process of relocating that heat from the evaporator to the outside space, where the condenser is at okay. So in this situation they had the evaporator fan blades on incorrectly, and they had been that way for a very, very long time and i showed in the video you could tell because of the dirt - and you know junk build up on the fan blades.

It had been like that, for it looks like years and multiple technician after multiple technician could not seem to figure that out it really wasn't, i'm not the smartest person in the room, because i figured that problem out. I was just able to step back and say: okay if multiple people have looked at this, what are they missing and i was able to step back and say: okay, you know, sometimes maybe i would assume you know. I don't know what was in the minds of the technicians that were out there before me, but maybe they were being pressured by the office. Maybe dispatch was on them to get to the next call.

I don't know okay, i've since heard that from many other technicians that have reached out to me saying how is it that you get to spend so much time on these service calls? You know i get people emailing me all the time. How many service calls do you do a day and it's like? I don't have a number. I do as many as i can. You know a service and they say you know people will ask me: how long does it take you? What's your average service call and it's like it is what it is.

If i go out there and equipment needs to be repaired. It is what it is. Okay, of course, keeping the customer in the loop, letting the customer be in the decision-making process, but i don't have a blanket number. You know.

I don't tell my own service technicians that you have two hours to be on that call and move on to the next one. That's just not how i run things. Okay, a call takes as long as a call takes. Okay.

Now, of course, in the middle of the summer sure we got to go out and triage and put fires out, get equipment running, so we can return back and do big picture repairs later. Yes, that does happen. Okay, but i mean we always try to get it done. Okay, i'm not in a hurry as an owner to close out a service call.

I want to finish a service call for me. Making a quick buck from a customer is not beneficial for me. Even if i made a hundred thousand dollars today from a customer - okay, that's not anything to me, because i want to continue working for that customer for the next 20 years. So i'm not going to try to rip them off, i'm not going to try to get them that one time.

Okay, i want to do repairs for them for the next 20 years, honest hard, working, good repairs for that customer. Okay, so i was able to take a step back. Look at the big picture realize that the fan blades were going on backwards. Okay re, you know, fix all the junk they had going on with their change that temperature controller pull it out of the coil.

Put a normal defrost clock up on the roof. You know get the system operational until we could replace the equipment. Okay. So again, i'm not a perfect technician guys.

I make mistakes too. This last video is an interesting one, and this is going to show you an example of people not properly commissioning equipment and how sometimes in the restaurants, things can be overlooked for so many years. Okay, this one is a crazy one. Let's get on with the video and we'll talk about it at the end, so the complaint today is is that the exhaust fans won't shut off as they come in the morning.

The switches are off, but they're always running same thing on both of their hoods. So we don't want to mess with the fire suppression system, but up here in the right is our hood control panel and these uh power switches right here should be connected into there somewhere all right. So what we have here is a captive air hood control panel. Okay, this is located in the side of an exhaust hood.

The complaint is, is that the exhaust fans are never shutting off. You turn off the power switch and they continue to run okay. This particular system has in a nutshell, let's call them a temperature controlling device. So we're reading duck temperature of 71 degrees and temperature controller set point of 85 and what they do is if the temperature ever gets above 85, regardless of whether the hood switch is on it turns the exhaust fans on, but you notice on this temperature controlling device.

It says lll: well, that's because it's not reading a temperature, so it's defaulting to run the exhaust fans. But if we go down here, you can see right here is our thermostat wire, it's an 18 three gate or three conductor, 18 gauge thermostat wire, and if we carefully move this, there's not one hooked up to the right one and i actually traced out the sensors In the exhaust ducts and there's never been one hooked up to this, so these exhaust fans have been running 24 7 for eight years go figure. This is the stuff we run into someone never properly commissioned this building and started this system up correctly. So what we need to do now before i go and run a thermostat wire over to my other hood, to get us our control voltage or our control sensor wires.

I got to test the sensors because i don't want to go through all that work to find out that we have bad sensors. Also, so i talked to the manufacturer and they basically told me what the ohm value should be at said temperature. So i'm going to test that now the problem is is getting to these sensors because they're very difficult to get to. So that's where we're at at this point um everything else inside here.

This is just a typical motor starter cabinet. These are overload protected contactors. Essentially, we call them motor starters or they used to be called mag starters, but it's just motor starters and uh. What they do is they have a current sensing device on the bottom of it.

You've got three phase power coming in the top, and then it comes out the bottom when the contactor pulls in well. After that, contactor pulls in this overload. Sensing device right here monitors the amperage and if the amperage gets within you know, a certain gets to the set point. Basically it'll potentially shut off the motor before the motor burns.

Up, that's the theory. At least i mean they're there, basically to protect the motor motor protector, you could call them too, i guess so um. Basically, all those motor starters are being told to turn on by these temperature controlling devices, and you know they shouldn't be so currently at this time. I have all their exhaust fans shut off and all my exhaust fans are still running, so this is on the top side of my exhaust hoods, let's come in here, and that rod right in there is my temperature control here, my temperature, that's the sensor and the Problem is that it's on the top of this hood, and it's sometime where it gets in my dilemma, is that's my exhaust system.

I got ta get up above the drop ceiling down on top of the hoods, because the hood ceiling is right. There, that's all just metal cladding around the hood, so it's like a nightmare to get up there, so i made it up on top of the hood, and this is the one there should be thermostat wire coming into this, because this should be my hookup and there's Nothing there so we're going to open that up and test the existing sensor. The sensors are really pain in the butt to change, so we're gon na see if it's good or we may just have to order a sensor too. Just like, i thought it's never been hooked up since day, one so we're gon na strip it back and test it.

I need to start carrying a leatherman. I got all the way up here and these wires weren't stripped and all i had was my pocketknife. If i had a leatherman, it sure would be nice on me. I forgot to bring up wire strippers because i didn't know these wires, wouldn't be you know stripped at all, so this is just a thermostat wire, so i'm going to secure it carefully with zip ties and i'm just running it.

I'm using my fish stick pushing it over and then basically just going to come down into here. That's my control box down there i'll pop a hole in that and then we'll run this calm wire and get this thing wired up the sensor's tested out. Okay. So some are probably going to criticize me for this, but what i'm doing is i'm just tying to the hanger strap for the drop ceiling, but the way i'm doing it is i'm tying a zip tie to a zip tie, and i don't know if you guys Can see that and that's that way so that the wire doesn't touch the metal and it doesn't rub against the metal.

Can you understand what i'm doing there and it's never going to be super tight, so that way you have a little bit of free movement. In case, you need to pull anything work on it again same thing right here, it's tied to the zip tie. So that way, it's not rubbing against the wire. That way, we don't rub out on the drop ceiling thing and i'll secure it.

On the other side, too, okay, so i landed the three wires. I'm gon na put the covers back on and clean up my mess take the extra wire down and all that good stuff stop wire right here. I have it ran all secured properly coming in here. Tuck it over here run it in there.

We go we're landed on our thing and now we're reading temperature and the hood switch is off and the hood switch is on sounds like we got a loose belt. That'll be another day. Could you imagine that customer? So what happened? Is the customer got a new manager at that location? Okay, the new manager started trying to look at everything and he's like hey how come when i leave at the end of the night. My exhaust fans aren't turning off, so he called me out.

Okay, the service call was the exhaust fans weren't turning off when they turned the switches off and when i walked up. I was kind of surprised to figure out that that exhaust fan had been running for that many years, all the time it never shut off. Unless someone shut off the breakers, that's it and the customer didn't know how to shut off the breakers okay, nobody installed and or commissioned that equipment properly. On the original install that hood has never had the temperature sensor or com wire, i guess i should say, landed on the sensor and brought to the hood control panel.

So therefore, the temperature controlling device always ran the exhaust fans now a lot of new exhaust fans. These days and restaurants have all kinds of safeties built into them like this, and i think it's a good thing. These safeties are good because if you guys have ever done any restaurant work, there's you know lots of weird exhaust situations and i've seen fires happen in kitchens and and fire suppression systems go off because exhaust fans aren't working properly. So i like the idea of the redundant safeties on these things.

We have two temperature controlling devices and if they ever see a temperature above 85 degrees, they automatically turn on the exhaust fans, no matter what and that's a great idea, because it helps okay, even in a fire situation. Turning on the exhaust fan is gon na help to suffocate the fire so long as it turns off the makeup air to the building too okay. So this is one of those situations where the installation tech made a made a mistake. The service company that had been servicing that restaurant for, however many years has made mistakes.

I don't know if it was one company, two companies, i have no idea, but they made mistakes and nobody realized that those exhaust fans were never shutting off very interesting. To think about that, you know, i could imagine that you know if, if you're not a technician, that's really passionate about what you're doing you know and you're not really invested in your in your career. You know, then, then it's easy to overlook things like that. I would imagine right, but i would think that there would be notes and documentation from technicians prior saying you know what i like to do.

Is i like to leave a note on the hood control panel? You know what notified management this has never been here. My name and the date so that way, the next guy. I try to take away any excuse that the next guy has to talk bad on me. Okay, because hey, i don't want to be blamed for this problem.

So, let's just say that i was the previous company and the customer never fixed that problem or never approved the repair. Well, of course, i'm going to leave some sort of a note, because i know that i'm probably not going to work for that customer forever. So i'm going to leave a note to tell the next guy hey: this is, what's going on, i've told them multiple times. Nobody approved it.

Okay, that's another thing dealing in restaurant work that we have to deal with. Quite often, you know just because we give a big picture diagnosis just because we go in there and we look at everything and we step back and we give them a big picture quote doesn't mean that they're always going to approve that big picture quote: okay, the Best that we can do at least the way that i like to think about it is the best that i can do is give the customer all the information document document document give them the facts. Let them make the decisions and just get it all in writing. So that way you are doing your job.

So even if i know that a customer is is a cheap customer or they don't want to spend money or, in my eyes, they're a cheap customer. Maybe i don't know the whole situation you know who knows, but just because in my eyes i think that they're, a cheap customer does not mean that i'm not going to give them a big picture. Diagnosis. Okay, i'm always going to try to take a step back.

Look at everything give them the options and let them make the decisions on what kind of repairs they want to go forward with, with this whole hvacr videos project that i have going on. This has been a very humbling experience. I'm never anticipating it. Turning into what it has turned into, i'm still just a little service technician running a very small service company out here in southern california, okay um, the channel is growing bigger than than than i can even handle it's kind of crazy um.

But i am growing from this channel myself too, because of the feedback from all of you guys, okay, i appreciate the feedback and it helps me to grow and you guys actually keep me on my toes too, because there's times guys, there's times that i go out To a service call and i'm just tired - and i don't want to look at the big picture - and i just want to gas it up and move on, you know or whatever, but i often will find myself thinking. You know, because i i typically film almost every service call whether or not i make a video from every service called that's pretty common, because sometimes things happen, you know you're, recording and then all of a sudden the customer turns on music and it kind of ruins. The video or whatever, so i have tons and tons of footage of stuff. That's not even you know, usable basically, but when i create a video or when i'm filming i'm always thinking you know what no.

I need to be thorough because i'm filming this, i can't show something: that's not thorough, so the point that i'm trying to make is i'm not perfect. Okay, this idea that people have that. I'm this perfect technician that always looks at the big picture that always wants to do things right. I try to be a good technician.

I try to you know always think about everything, but i'm human. I make mistakes, sometimes i'm lazy. Sometimes i don't want to look at the big picture, but i try okay and you guys help me to be that technician. So i want to say thank you to all of you guys.

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