They have a 12 by 12 opening for the return. It's tricky look at that this video is brought to you by sport'ln quality, integrity and tradition. All right, we have a call today. The customer complaint is that they've got a water leak downstairs.

I haven't opened this up yet compressors running. I can hear it. I don't see any signs of a water leak. I said yet there's a drain line.

I've always thought was the funniest thing. It's a mess, but I'll explain why it's like that in a little while, hmm, okay, taking vitals looking around it's ice, coils iced up to open this up, let's open up this section and see! What's going on, I had a service call on this fairly recently, where we had an electrical short and it ended up being a short, I think, in the economizer wiring. If I remember right, but filters are nasty, they use these pupae ass filters here. Skip these pulldown good grief, I don't even know how to get oh there's stuck to the ice.

There's ice all in there all right. I got to get these out. That's interesting! It's only half the coil. That's iced up yeah only half of its iced up.

So I bet you it's gon na be a refrigerant leak issue all right. So next question is: is this supposed to be running right now, I'm going to dive into the electrical because they're not even open yet got the electrical section opened up. Yeah we've got 24 volts from common to y1, so the thermostat is telling the compressor to run right now, so we're gon na jump downstairs and go. Take a look at that.

Stat make sure that we're supposed to be calling right now. It just seems odd because it's like 9 in the morning and their dining-room wall there diamond, is not open because the whole virus thing, but you know their kitchen AC - is not even running right now, so here's their thermostat and apparently right now. It should be satisfied because it's set for 73 and it's 73 in here and it doesn't say, cool on and might have just satisfied literally when I walked up here. So I don't want to disturb anything.

I don't want to pull it off the wall yet because I want to find out if it's like got a stuck contact or something like that, so we're gon na jump back up there yeah this bad boy still running poor. I wonder if we have a bad thermostat interesting again, we want to be cautious, pushing and pulling because we don't want to solve the problem without you know, figuring out exactly where it is all right. This is interesting. Look at this.

I disconnected the thermostat wire the. Why one call - and we don't have a control voltage - call like 10 volts? That's not it! But if I go up here, I still have 24 volts without a thermostat wire connected. So there's a problem in here I haven't pulled out the schematic yet, but I think I figured it out. So if you look right here, someone has a jumper between R and G.

They shouldn't that means that the blower is gon na run 24/7. Even though there's a thermostat G wire and then, if you come over here, you've got your 24 volt going to the thermostat terminal board. You have here 24 volts, going to your compressor lockout board, and then you have this jumper wire going all the way over here to the indoor blower motor contactor. Why is that? That jumper wire should not be going from y1 to the indoor blower motor contactor? That's kind of funky now the question is: is the indoor blower motor contactor still running when I disconnected this because it should be yeah? I don't know what the heck that jumper wires doing there.

That's a mess, yeah indoor blow murder still running without that stupid, jumper wire, this jumper wire shouldn't be here. There's no reason for that, because your call for your indoor blower is happening on this white wire, which is running into your terminal board over here, which is sending power on this black wire right here. I don't even know what's going on here, but on top of that, we can't just like ignore the fact that there was a jumper wire there. Why? I don't know, but look at the way that it's iced up.

This thing has been running for how long and it's only half the coil, which makes me think that we've got a refrigerant, related problem, interesting, okay! Well, we got a defrost this evaporator first. This makes me laugh. Oh, I don't know why I've never noticed this before. I guess I probably never pee in this unit, but I've worked on this one or two times.

I must not add refrigerant related issues, but I pulled out the economizer because it's not working so to help it defrost and look at this. The others return. You think they're gon na have some airflow problems. They have a 12 by 12, the opening for the returning picture.

He could look at that. Some of these things that have been exist in existence for so long - and this makes me laugh so hard kind of just blocking off the upper part of that evaporator. So that way, I'm forcing more air through this little part in hopes that it starts to defrost the bottom part. It's just kind of a hurry-up-and-wait kind of a thing.

I still can't believe that return air twelve by twelve return air hole for this. I'm assuming this is probably like a five ton or a four time. That's too funny! I'm waiting for this guy to defrost it's getting there if we're just gon na take a while, while I'm waiting might as well keep busy. So I'm gon na go ahead and straighten out the fins on this condenser.

So when I'm straightening out the fans, I prefer using these individual fin combs. I don't know if this one's super comb - I don't know who makes it. I don't know if it's sup Co or what one of those there's a million different people out there, but this one I like the individual ones, though so this is an individual one and the trick to these someone told me that's a while back get the condenser Wet okay, get the condenser wet and for some reason I mean it's like a lubricant. It allows these things to flow better, now notice, something that, as I'm doing this, this condenser is disintegrating.

So, there's only so much we can do here, but when it's wet it makes it a little bit easier. Yeah. This thing is pretty beat down man, it does not want to straighten, but you can only do so much yeah, nothing, it's just feet and see. It's just disintegrating, so yeah there's not a whole lot.

I can do here. You can try down here. Nope see it's just bending these fins are pretty beat down man, oh yeah they're. I mean you can finger push them and they just go so there's not a whole lot.

I'm gon na try a little bit and we're gon na go ahead and clean this guy as best as possible. Yeah this side we might be a little bit more successful. One of the things that I like to do is start from a clean edge, build yourself, yeah see. This thing is just I mean it's kind of good, but if you start from a good edge and then work your way towards the bad part, it helps a little bit once you get these things bent this way, I mean, if I rinsed it really hard, it Would probably mess it up even more look at that, it's just not sticking in there yeah there's really.

No hope this is kind of a lost cause. So this is a five ton unit and I like to point out that even on the 5 tons, we got split row condensers got two rows there. Unfortunately, Kari makes it a little difficult because they put this panel right here that the electrical goes through and it split all the way around and it's like almost impossible to get this off so to clean it properly, which is just a major design flaw. But I'm gon na do my best.

It's not horrendous inside. If I kind of pull it apart, a little bit you can see in there it's not horrible, it's a little dirty, so we're gon na give it a rinse again. I'm just waiting for this thing to defrost so going very slowly. I took some water and just sprayed above this just back and forth a little bit, and it finally got to the point where this whole thing will just kind of pull off.

So I got ta, lift it out of there right now, for the most part got all the I saw. I was able to pull it out so now we're gon na clean the evaporator. There's still I guarantee ice on the other side, so we're just gon na. Let it keep running like this and then once we gets all gone, then we'll probably finish: cleaning up the unit, it's just as easy to unhook the condenser fan motor wires and pull the top of this unit.

So this split roll yeah, it's not too bad. It's a little bit dirty down in there it's kind of hard for with a shadow, but I'm gon na clean it real quick and you notice it actually splits actually yeah. It creases all the way back to here where it splits and you can't really get in there and clean that, because of the way that they did this stupid, anyways uhm down in here I'm just we can pull this off before it damages the evaporator and, let's See what it looks like back here: oh yeah, nice, big old chunk of ice down there, so we'll get that out. Sanitize this evaporator real, quick, give it a cleaning and yeah go from there.

That is a better shot of that twelve by twelve returned, and so what happened here more than likely is whenever this unit was installed in 2001. So whenever it was installed, they didn't use a curb adapter. Sometimes the duct works not right and they thought I have. No idea, I didn't do it so my logic died.

It's sometimes hard to understand people's logic, cleaned off all the big stuff, and I put some foam in evaporative cooler on there, letting it sit for a few minutes and we'll give it a rinse we're trying to you know, I'm doing all this with trying to get The least amount of water and stuff in the duct work, even though they're already complaining of a water leak. I still don't want to flood him out down there so, but you can see like this is all the stuff I've gotten just out of the drain pan. It's nasty also running some foaming condenser coil cleaner, trying to clean it off as best as possible. Like I said, it's gon na be almost impossible to split this thing, so I'm doing my best to kind of pry it apart washing the inside out rinse down that doing everything I can.

This is the stuff. Do you want to watch out for look at these big old chunks of rocks and mud, I'm getting out of here? It's all back looking at in the bottom of this, because you've got to get back here where a lot of people have a hard time seen down in here yeah and there's a whole drain area down there. That a lot of people forget about it's currently full of mud, so I'm rinsing it all out. So if you look from the front there's a hole back here, there's a hole right here and then it goes around this side and whenever you clean it all that stuff gets stuck on the back side and causes drain leakage issues so yeah.

That's a problem! Look at those chunks, big old chunks, coming out of that drain. Right now, uh yeah! That's good! Overflowing right! There gnarly this thing is uh caked up Junkers all right, it's about as clean as this bad boys gon na get rinse. The condenser really well got all the cleaner out of it got down in there as best as I could clean the evaporator drain pan as much as possible. Now, I'm just I just let the hose run and kind of rinse the residual cleaner off the roof kind of move it around a little bit yeah.

I was here about three months ago or something like that, and we worked on this kitchen a/c. We had a bad thermostat and I warned them as I was leaving a how-to bad condenser fan motor and that fan motors failed. It's locked up, not running. I can hear it we'll bring that up to them again, but I'm gon na start assembling this guy.

All right, I'm slowly putting the unit back together, I'm leaving the filter out. I don't have filters for this unit, but that's stupid media filter that the filter changing company puts in was plugged and not even put in right anyway, so I left them there framed know. So they don't about that. I ended up pulling the actuator motor for the economizer damper because the motor itself was locked up and this building runs extremely negative.

In fact, I've been trying to talk them into. Let me do an air balance on it for a very long time. So in the meantime, because we saw that airflow issue, what I ended up doing was manually opening the outside air damper and then of fixing it. So it can't close so we're pulling minimal, building air and we're pulling more outside air, so at least we get, hopefully the full potential of the unit, even though it's gon na be pulling outside air, it's better than suffocating it by not pulling enough building air and, Like I said, this building runs extremely negative as it is so it's a long story short, but the reason why they don't why they run so negative is because they've shut off their make up air units and they're, relying just on the the ACS outside air dampers.

If I remember right, but yeah, it's just a mess, this building has always been horrible, so I'm I did that and I'm just kind of putting the unit back together, everything's looking good, everything's, nice and clean the belts, nice and tight yeah we're getting there. I'm using the field piece, JobLink probes and we're going to go ahead and dial these in, so we've got high side, low side pressure ratings. We have outdoor air return, air supply, air discharge line, liquid line and suction line, and we're gon na do a whole lot with all those. Not all those tools where I really dig about the field piece probes is they've got this rapid rail, whatever they call it technology and it's meant to make contact across the pipe and if it doesn't make contact like right here, it flashes, yellow, but all you have To do is it's meant to scratch the surface with the probe they design them that way.

So there we go. You can just do that spot. Should we get a nice good connection, yeah we're good we're just going along. So that's my liquid mine, I mean that's my discharge line and now we're gon na hit my liquid line.

It's going for my liquid line right here before the header. We go we're going to get the air probes and the pressure probes on. So I noticed that there's a bunch of oil around this suction line and when I pulled the cap off, you could tell it was leaking oil, so we're gon na pay attention to that suction Schrader. That might be the source of a leak right.

We have our discharge line pressure, suction line pressure in a perfect world. We have our return air, you know far away from the evaporator coil, but in a package unit situation that has an outdoor air damper. Even if you don't open it all the way like I did, you need to get the mixed air reading and not just the return air down in the ductwork, so packaged units. You know this is probably going to end up being the best places up in here where it gets mixed air.

The supply air is the hard one. You really shouldn't be getting supply air that close to the evaporator outlet, but I'm not climbing down into the ductwork. It's not very practical, so at least we're not in this area up in here and we're on the other side of the blower motor, where it's going to get the air pressure blowing down. So this thing has control voltage, or at least the thermostat should be telling it to turn the fan on, and it's not now, that's probably why they had a jumper running from R to G.

It's probably because we've got a bad thermostat that are a bad fan. Wire, we should be getting a call for cooling here any minute to see oh yeah, so we're gon na give it a minute and see if we get a call for cooling. There's some funky crap going on here. This I just jumped from R to G and the compressor turned on what the heck.

I thought, when I disconnected that jumper it fix it. This is a mess. Our problem is in the thermostat, there's something funky going on in the thermostat. So if I jump from R to G with the Y one wire removed, my compressor does not come on and if I go from common to y1, I've got nothing.

Okay. If I go from common to this guy, I've got like 12 volts. It's weird there's getting some weird back feed on the thermostat and for whatever reason that was causing C, it's not doing it right now, but that was causing the the thing to turn on to run the compressor. So it's something in the stat, let's see if we there, it goes again see we just turned it on again and then, if I disconnect it, I disconnect the blower wire and it turns off.

So it's something in the thermostat, because when I disconnect this it doesn't happen so yeah there's a bad thermostat and but why all those jumper wires were there. I have no idea, I thought the jumper wires were the problem, but I guess not. I don't know. That's weird, there's an interesting problem, so we're gon na change out that stat and probably gon na solve this problem.

Okay, we got a new stat installed, we're reading indoor air temperature through a remote sensor. I do not like how they put Honeywell home. The old ones used to just say, honey wall. This is a commercial thermostat.

It's not a home thermostat. What the heck it's a two-stage, whatever anyways we're gon na go up and let's hope we solved all of our problems, so I jumped from R to G the indoor fan turned on. The compressor did not turn on. So that's a plus.

Now we need to chest out we're waiting for it to send a signal up here. Right now. Jumping it out, we've got a call for cooling, so it works like it's supposed to, but we need to make sure that the thermostat gives us the call. So I'm gon na pull the jumper off and make sure that the thermostat actually delivers it, and I know that thing was in a delay.

I went downstairs because it was taking a long time to turn on and it it hit the it's kind of weird but anyways it just wasn't calling. So I reset it came back up. It's already running. I've got a call for 24 volts.

I've got a call for y1. We're gon na disconnect y1 make sure that we still have a call for 24 volts double-check that real quick still got a call for 24 volts indoor fan is still running and so we're going to go ahead and hook back up on y1. We are good to go okay. The unit is running now now I need to take the screw out of this.

I just flipped it over and put a screw through it and check out magic, quick and see how the units operating well. This isn't looking good. So we got low suction pressure, a little bit low on the head pressure, but look at that Superman 45 degrees. This is a fixed, orifice metering device.

Look at that suction line, 85 degrees suction line, and I grabbed it it's pretty warm surprisingly, but it might just be low on charge. I don't know it's kind of weird, though that's such a line. Temperatures awfully high, it's kind of goofy, I'm gon na try adding a little bit of refrigerant and seeing what it does. Also, I guess maybe a way to look at this - is because of how bent up this condenser is.

I would expect our our head pressure to be much higher, because I know that condenser is pretty beat up so yeah we're gon na, add a little refrigerant and see how that reacts. So I've shown this a bunch of times when I'm charging with the JobLink probes. I have a little tee right there. I use a hose with a low loss fitting on that end, and then you got to purge the line and then, as you're screwing it on crack it again just to make sure that you get all the air like that.

Close it off and then that way we're good flip over the tank in charge. Measure quick seems to be happy and I'm pretty satisfied with those pressures too we're on the HUD. Just the tail end of the high side of the pressure range for the condensing temperature. This is a five-ton r22.

It's about a 10 C air unit. Super heat is right within range. Now everything else we're getting green on all that, so we're right within range. Let's keep going approaches on the tail end of being low, but then kind of going back and forth.

Discharge line tab, our supply or our return air temps a little bit high, but remember we're pulling a lot of outside air through this damper, and I had to do that. To give this thing. Some hair flow yeah air flows on the tail side of being low, which is expected because I don't think this is quite designed to have full air flow through it. But um yeah we're looking good and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if we have supply duct air issues as far as sizing based on the look of our return air down here at guaranty, the supply side has a messed up.

Oh yeah we're looking good temp splits high, but we know we got issues we're going to probably do a quick leak search, see if we can find anything and if we don't find anything we're gon na call it a day notice. Measure quick gave me a red flag, see we're going a little high on the head pressure right now. That's pretty expected with the with the shape of the condenser, it's kind of going back and forth dirty condenser air flows low. We know it kind of is well yeah.

That's gon na be the best that this unit can do so. It was iced up. We found some electrical issues. We found a bad thermostat dirty coil, dirty condenser.

We cleaned it all up, got it some airflow, because the return air duct is jacked up. So we opened up the outside air damper. The building's still running way negative, but it's better than nothing. You can see.

The condenser is really milk. I tried straightening it. No good so we're gon na put this guy back together and just give the customer all the information and I'm gon na recommend that they consider replacing this unit in the future same thing. I've already done a video on that kitchen a/c over there same thing there that things just beat down so this guy.

I always weigh it before. I take it out that way, just a hair over 24 pounds and we're right at about 20 pounds. 8 ounces. So we're just going to call it even at 24, at about 4 pounds about was what I used.

So I like doing that. I like just weighing it cuz, then that's one less thing I have to take onto the roof, even though the scales not a big deal. It's just saves me a headache alright, so I already leaked checked in the evaporator section and just leak checking over here see if I'm really not picking anything up in here using the D text select, which is usually a pretty reliable leak detector. For me, I'm just kind of running up and down the evaporator, nothing going here on the condenser back in there.

Nothing come on up here to these guys traitors, nothing, huh, okay, low-pressure controls make sure those things aren't leaking. Well, the Schrader's one of them was missing a gasket, the caps, so I'm gon na go and replace both of those gasket both of those caps put new caps on there and then we'll just tell me keep an eye on it. So I'll just put new caps on there. I don't think they're gon na get much life out of this unit.

You know we'll just do what they want us to do and keep patching it up as long as they want, but yeah this condensers done now like. I can't even straighten the fins it's just disintegrating so high, we'll send emails and pictures and all that good stuff to the customer and then make their decisions. Some of these calls you just never know what you're gon na run into I'm still laughing. When I was reviewing the footage when I was surprised by that return, air opening, it just makes me laugh that that units been running since 2001 and, like I said I I don't know if it's just been pure dumb luck, that I've never noticed that before or If I've just never really had any refrigerant and lated issues, I don't think we've ever done any leak, repairs or anything you know.

Maybe it just wasn't me that didn't that worked. I don't know. I have no idea, but that just made me laugh. But you know this is the kind of stuff that we come across.

Okay when we're working an HVAC, and you guys have to remember you can't just assume that the first thing's gon na fix your problem. You have to look beyond that. You have to look at the big picture. Okay.

I know I preach that all the time, but I mean this is the kind of stuff we run into now. I will say that I don't run into these calls every single day. Okay, every this videos a couple months old. It was just sitting in my archives and I just figured I'll just go ahead and edit this one down.

I mean you know. Maybe once a month I run into one of these like head-scratcher problems, you know, and you kind of like you have to remember. Sometimes other people have done things. You know.

Other people have worked on this equipment at this restaurant, even though this has been my restaurant forever. They have occasionally called in other companies. Maybe they did this funky wiring. I don't know you know, but you have to sometimes undo what other people have done to try to make sense as to what was going on right.

So the best way I can figure happen with this was that the thermostat was the problem for the longest time. There was an issue with the thermostat because you saw how was intermittent like it would work for a second than it. Wouldn't then it would do the same thing than it wouldn't so I have a feeling the thermostat was intermittent. Someone jumped it out, thought that fixed it, but really the thermostat was just being intermittent okay.

So when I got there, you know, I noticed some weird things: it was like 9:00 in the morning. This is the middle of their dining room. Normally, the dining room is not running by that time because they don't open until 11:00. So usually it starts running about 10:30 ish, so it just seemed odd to me that the compressor was running at 9:00 in the morning.

You know that struck me as odd it. You know got me thinking and then that's when I kind of looked into it and found there was some big issues there. Okay, so once I undid what I thought to be the electrical problem, I went ahead and cleaned up the unit once I cleaned it. Up put it back together, turned it back on.

You know found the return air issues all that good stuff, but then I found hey, you know what it actually was: the thermostat and the jumper wires weren't helping the situation, but the fact that it was still doing almost the same thing when I took the jumper Wires off, you know intermittently told you that more than likely, the thermostat was the issue from the beginning. Whoever worked on it before me tried to jump it out, didn't maybe they didn't know what they were doing. Who knows? Okay. Another thing I want to point out too, and I know that people may comment they may catch this.

They may not is that economizers I've said it so many times, economizers half the time the customers don't want to fix them, so they end up getting disconnected. You know I'd love to fix every single economizer out there, but we can only do what the customer allows us to do. Even in this situation I gave the customer all the information I said. Look this unit is in really bad shape.

It has poor air flow. You know the condenser is rotting out all this different stuff and they just decided to go ahead and let it go for now. They just want to you know let it work and that's fine, it's okay! It's not my place to be upset because they want me to keep fixing it. I mean think about that.

Should I really get upset that the customer doesn't want to change the unit and they want me to keep fixing it. I get to charge every single time. I fix it and I'm not warranty in anything right in a situation like this, the unit that old I'm not warranting anything I mean it's one thing. If I did a braised joint, my braised joint leaked on the spot that I braised it sure, but I mean you know so I have no business being upset with the customer because they don't want to fix it, and you know as much as I get straighted.

Sometimes you know i'm a vent it. You know. Oh my gosh they're not maintaining this unit, it's dirty, but guess what they're paying me to clean it. I mean you know.

I guess I should be thankful right for the work that they're giving me if they're not doing preventative maintenance'iz and we get an emergency call. This wasn't an emergency call, but let's say we did. Let's say it happened on a weekend and they called me out there. I had done all this work on overtime.

You know, I guess I should just be thankful, and sometimes I have to remind myself with that kind of stuff. Okay, so you know I say this all the time, but if you guys can take anything from my videos, if you could only take, I should say if you guys can only take one thing from my videos is just to take a step back and look at The big picture, remember that remember when you walk up to a service, call big picture Diagnostics. You know you saw when I walked up. I said hey that a/c shouldn't be running right now.

It seems odd, big picture Diagnostics. You know, but then guess what I pulled. The jumper wire, the AC, turned off. I didn't stop there, you know kept going down the line.

I saw a weird iced-up pattern. It was low on charge air flow. You know you can't just stop at the first problem, so I really really appreciate you guys taking the time to watch this. You guys, I show all kinds of cool stuff in my videos.

I show all kinds of tools, all kinds of cleaners. You know I didn't mention for whatever reason what I was using. I was using the Viper evaporator coil and condenser coil cleaners by refrigeration technologies. I was using the field piece, JobLink probes.

I did show those I showed them. I was using them move measure quick. If you guys have any interest in any of this stuff that I'm using, I usually shall throw links to all the products that I use in the show notes of this video. You guys, can you know, click on the links.

Some of them are affiliate links with true tech tools. Some of them are just links to other supply houses, different things like that, if you guys choose to purchase tools via my affiliate links, consider using the offer code, big picture, one word with true tech tools: it'll save you a person on your order. Yeah. I guess that's it.

I do live streams Monday evening at 5 p.m. Pacific time, where I usually cover everything that happened in these videos. Answer questions talk about whatever, so, if you guys get an opportunity, come on over to the live stream and check it out. Okay really really appreciate you guys and we will catch you on the next one.