Hi people i'm going to go over some leak detection processes and just like practical tips on how to do it really good how to do it right how to actually find a leak leak searching can actually when you're new and you haven't done it a lot. Be really intimidating and you can get it wrong and when you do it's a really big deal, you get that wrong causes all sorts of problems with the customer call backs major repairs, get done that didn't need to get done first, step on a leak detection. You actually need to confirm that your system's low on refrigerant i've done lots of leak detections on systems that didn't have a leak, because i actually just had a failed txv understanding, good diagnosis on confirming your system's low, and then you need to estimate how low is This system trying to figure out you know how fast is my leak going to be. If i show up to a system and it's two pounds - low customers at home, they just notice it's not keeping up in the last couple weeks.

I got an idea that i probably have a slow leak, only a small amount of refrigerants lost, and this is a recent problem. This isn't recurring. Have that conversation with the customer when's the last time you added refrigerant, as this kind of thing happened before it's time now, to actually find this leak. Where do we begin? As always, visual inspection, a good technician and all of their diagnosis process starts out with a visual inspection.

So we're going to be looking over the system for problem areas. Some of the most commonly places are areas that humans have touched. The system joint spots boom boom boom. How am i doing a visual inspection and actually looking for a leak on a joint spot? Refrigerant, as you know, is invisible.

You can actually see it when it's leaking out well, you're. Looking for the trace it gives, when refrigerant leaks, it always leaves a trail almost always unless that trail has been washed away by rain water or something like that, there's an oil trail. So if we had our leak here, you would notice that the normal shine and clearness or maybe dryness of the pipe, suddenly becomes a little bit more dull and your pipe looks wet in this area. Maybe you have some drips under here.

Maybe it's following the pipe down like that, so you look at your oil spots. Let's say we have a leak on our suction joint over time. It was done poorly, the vibration of the system. We started a leak.

It's pretty easy to see once you pull this back everything's going to be coated in oil you're, going to be able to feel that get used to noticing the difference between something that's wet and actually oily. You rub it rub your fingers together very oily. It's going to stand out. Another sign that you're going to look for is the bottom of your pan.

It's got water in it. Look to see if you see the discoloration of oil on the top of that water i'll often shine the light in there. That will, let me know that my leak source is somewhere inside here and the water draining off the coil is carrying it into the pan. Visual check the entire system, so we're looking at this we're pulling back.

We might have a joint look for 90 joints, sometimes i'll. Just stick my finger underneath the insulation on the suction line. If it's dry and clean, then i don't have a leak that leaked five pounds right here, because there would be a bunch of oil inside of there taking service cap and points out and looking for hissing and things like that outside of your system. Is your high pressure side? What does that mean for refrigerant leaks? That means they're going to be large, fast and usually everywhere.

Now you do have low pressure element in your system with common leak points on your condenser that you need to look for, but if your condenser coils leaking, i recently had a call condenser coils leaking another cus company diagnosed and we came out and it's actually leaking From the top of our cap here - and they were just getting hits with their electronic leak detector in the area, and so it's easy to misdiagnose that unless you understand that, if your condenser is leaking you're, going to dump all your refrigerant really really fast. There's going to be an oil stain, there's going to be wet, there's going to be dirt, sticking to that oil spot. If i didn't already mention it till power visual check. Look for your common points! Is your accumulator rusted out? Okay, we're going to be looking at that you have uh really common areas.

You have the small capillary tubes that come in from your common suction port right here on your suction line. If you see a leak in here, you're going to have an oil line, things below that are going to be covered in oil things above that are going to be as dry as this. If you have a fast like a discharge, leak you're going to have it sprayed and just follow that trail back to your league. So now it's time to do electronic leak detection.

If you found a spot visually, then put bubbles on it, but we haven't found our leak personally. This is what i have on my van the h10. I like the h10 pro because it also has a battery for portable. This is a heated diode, which is the type of leak detector that you have a sensor in there that actually gets really hot and you can pick up really precise leaks, but you will also sometimes get hits on chemicals that aren't your refrigerant.

Like a dead rat know that from experience, there are other types of leak detectors that are more sensitive any time that you turn this on. It actually needs the sensor to heat up. So you give that a couple minute minutes you're going to see all this in your manual, my portable leak detectors. These are fine.

I've noticed that each one has some sort of a learning curve. You got this one right here. It can go off pretty easy. Just by like air moving in so you can see that the wind hitting it actually set it off or if you're bumping it against something.

Sometimes it'll go off so you're going back into your air handler and you hit something and it goes crazy. It goes off, or even just how quick you're moving it around you're, pushing it and you're forcing air into there. That's inaccurate, or if it's windy outside like this thing's gon na, go crazy. You turn it on give it a test with the calibration port, make sure it actually responds it's time for me to do a leak detection, hopefully, in the visual inspection, i've actually found some sort of trail.

That leads me where to check. First, with my leak detector, and so what i'll do is just put in a clip from in the field earlier today, i did leak detection i'll put a clip in, and you can see what that might look like on a system where you actually have a trail Of oil and you can pinpoint where to look first in your visual check. What you're looking for is oil stains like stuff that shows you that there's actually been a trace of a leak here? The oil has come out, so you look for a different color in your copper, like maybe the difference between here and here also you're looking for wet spots like maybe you have dry, copper everywhere and then one of your fins is still wet. It's wet because there's oil on it.

If the system's been running, of course, it's going to be wet because there'll be condensation on it. So look at the the way the condensation is sitting on it's like down here before i start doing my leak detection. I know where to look: the water is beating up on this, so this is wet too, but the water is not beating up on it in the same way that this is so there's been oil sitting on here. So in this area, i'm already knowing bring my lead detector to this area, you're confirming visually and, at the same time, speeding up your leak detection process.

Well, i want to talk about the process so understanding that your refrigerant, when it leaks it's heavier than air. So if there's a leak here, then your refrigerant is going to come out and then sink down into the system. If i'm moving my leak detector around here and i'm getting a hit in this area, then i can't just immediately assume that my leak's right here it could be above that at any point, so the pinpoint you're going to travel above the area where your leak detector Is going off and then bring it back down to that first point that you get your hit for efficiency's sake when you do a leak detection go to the most common places where you have a leak like the bottom of your coils are going to be rusted Out checking our joints checking rust points right boom. I got a hit on our super awesome leak in the coil.

You get a hit like that in order to ensure that it's not a fault, hit we're going to go around our coil in different areas, down low separate spots on our fin, we're not getting a hit, then we're going to come back to that same area and Run it over there again, we've confirmed we actually have a leak right at this point. Our leak detector actually is picking up something serious. It's not just going off based on airflow around here or different fumes, so i will do that probably three or four times i'll. Be checking other joints areas that might look like trouble, i'm not getting a hit and then consistently i'm getting a hit on that one spot you need to confirm confirm, confirm confirm this is a real, important part of leak detection.

So again, let me show you in the field how i confirmed with bubbles. So what i'm going to do is i have a leak in this area, i'm going to spray bubbles on it and i'm actually going to let you see the the bubbles spraying out to confirm now that my leak detector is not like going off on random stuff. I'll start it in an area that i don't like suspect, there's a leak and then i'm going to travel to the area that i now suspect has a leak boom. And then i just pull back and repeat that process using my leak detector to hit the same spot a couple times in a row, so now we've nailed it down to an area and whenever possible, you want to confirm with bubbles.

So we're going to get some big blue on here from viper and we're gon na spray. A lot of the connection points for metal meets metal possible leak areas in this in this spot, a really fast leak, you're gon na, be able to see it right away. A really slowly give it a couple minutes: we've actually sprayed our bubbles and we've waited a couple minutes. You need to understand the difference between bubbles, you create by spraying aggressively and actual bubbles in a leak.

So you can see these are moving because it's still flowing down it's sagging! That's why you give it a couple minutes sometimes, but a bubble, that's leaking! It's gon na have that constant movement and if it's really slow there'll be this tiny trail of the white on the top. Here you see that little white spot yeah that's a bubble and it's slowly getting larger and then underneath it there's actually a much larger one. So this is a great example of two different types of leaks. The larger one showed up right away the bigger bubbles down here you can see movement by sitting there watching it with a smaller one.

It's just a little white cloud that slowly gets larger and larger. As the leak progresses, if you have a leak in your fins like back in here, you're, not going to be able to confirm that with bubbles and that's fine - you just take extra time to do that. Process. Pulling away coming back to your spot, actually know.

You're hitting it that you're not just picking up some leak, that's happening in the area with one of your copper. Maybe you have the copper run underneath the unit through the return area, and you have a really fast leak every once in a while. The leak is so fast that your leak detector will not let you get close to the to the actual leak, and you can change uh the leak size large medium on here and actually pinpoint larger leaks. You can also on the h10 switch to manual, and then i can calibrate exactly where i want my leak detector to get a hit.

I usually slow this down to about one hit per second, which is based on my manual now. I've changed it to a larger leak size and if it's going crazy in the whole area, now it's not going off as strong, and i can pinpoint where it is and find it with bubbles. Once i've found it with bubbles, i need to evaluate. Is it somewhere? I can repair.

Is it this tube capillary tube coming into the suction line? This is actually the bulb, but the capillary tube comes into the suction line. Similar to this, is it a braze joint over vibration? Is it somewhere on the aluminum? Maybe i have an aluminum kit that i can actually repair. We have a seam, evaluate that i don't advise doing any kind of repair on a coil that is under warranty. Just have that manufacturer replacement actually done, because if it's leaked here from the manufacturer, we do our repair, we charge our customer for that labor and refrigerant, and it's probably going to leak somewhere else in the near future.

Never stop at that. First leak evaluate your system. Your scenario situation, your customer and how low you are in refrigerant. You show up to a system, that's almost flat and you are trying to do a leak protection.

You get a small hit on your coil, that's not your leak. You need to find actually what dumped that refrigerant quickly, what dumped it fast it could be in the line set. Maybe you have to get access to that line set chase wherever that line, sits, traveling and confirm if your leak is somewhere in there use your judgment on how much refrigerant is missing and continuing to look for that leak. If you find a leak inside your air handler, you've confirmed it electronically oftentimes, a detailed visual check on the condenser is fine.

You will see when there's a lot of oil there we pull out the leak detector outside as well. If there's any area of suspicion, oil or something like that on the high pressure side, one of my worst pet peeves is, when you see the notes from the technician that i found the system four pounds low in refrigerant. I i looked for the leak and the straighter the straighter pin at my service port was leaking. I replaced the straighter and added four pounds of refrigerant.

Most of the time that's used in an excuse that we actually haven't found our our real league. However, it is possible to have that there. So when i am walking up to a system, i know there's a leak or not i'm always looking at the valves around here. Do i have a lot of oil stains? Is it excessive? Is it coming onto the unit? If there is an oil stain here, has somebody serviced the unit in the last six months? Maybe it has regular service and taking off your gauges, you spray oil in the area really easy to get a false hit on your leak detector, because you had your gauges hooked up when you first showed up, and then you come out here, you've taken off your Gauges maybe and there's oil there's refrigerant all around in this area.

If you actually think there's a leak here, you have to confirm it with bubbles. Second thing: i want to talk about oftentimes, taking off your gauge. You might have a pinhole leak that you've created in the process with the straighter. It didn't sit back in well enough.

That does need to be addressed, but it should always be assumed, as the last possible reason for why you found the system low. You have a cap that actually has a seal in it, then there's no reason for you to uh immediately assume that this is your leak point, because you took it off or after you took off your gauge. You noticed there was a little bit of a bubble or a hiss from your straighter port likely. You caused that if your cap has a good seal in it and you didn't have oil all the way down around your condenser dripping down, then it's not likely that this is your leak point next.

If it has been leaking in your cap, you're going to take it out, flip it around and there's going to be oil in there. Your cap is going to hold oil you'll notice. When you take it off, you can even tap it and you might see oil hit the concrete or whatever you might see. Oil actually drip out of there.

You've leaked a lot of refrigerant. The oil has set into the back of the cap, so we've found a leak. What do we do? Next? We evaluate system age whether the repair is going to be important to the customer, get all the information we need to actually move forward. You found the leak you have a coil, that's leaking inside, we've confirmed it.

We need to check. Do we have some type of parts labor on this coil? We need to get all the information for replacing that coil and give that customer the option. So data tag inside are there things in front of the coil? That's going to block being able to pull it out and put it back in. Is it in an attic? We have a lot of extra labor going into this.

You need to think about where's the location of the line. Dryer. Is it in here we're not going to be able to pump down during that repair, we're going to have to recover all the refrigerant and actually remove that line dryer and the person quoting our parts. Guy needs to know that so that information crucial that you give to them also how much refrigerant is missing it's nearly flat.

Okay, then we actually need to collect the amount of refrigerant needed. That's a major repair! That's a huge issue on the system. How old is it? Is it past its parts, warranty? Okay, then we need to talk with the customer about full system replacement and actually go over that option with them. Last thing we can't find our leak anywhere.

We've done electronic leak detection out here, because we couldn't find it inside. We went over our joints. We've sprayed bubbles on common areas. What do we do next? Our process is we're going to talk to the customer about the fact that we can't find the leak, but we know it's low.

It had to leak out somewhere next step that we need to do is quote a line, isolation test, and so my next video is going to be showing the process of a line, isolation test and how to perform that accurately and enjoy getting better at finding leaks. Thanks for watching our video, if you enjoyed it and got something out of it, if you wouldn't mind hitting the thumbs up button to like the video subscribe to the channel and click, the notifications bell to be notified when new videos come out, hvac school is far More than a youtube channel, you can find out more by going to hvacrschool.com, which is our website and hub for all of our content, including tech tips, videos, podcasts and so much more. You can also subscribe to the podcast on any podcast app of your choosing. You can also join our facebook group if you want to weigh in on the conversation yourself thanks again for watching you.