This video is brought to you by Sporland. Quality, integrity and tradition. All right. I Got an ice machine and this is an interesting one.

So when I walked up it had it was running but it had this error on it. Okay, when you click the arrow pointing to the left, it says T2 fault. That's that's an irrelevant fault. As long as the board's been updated, it no longer pays attention to the sensors and they're just used for Diagnostic purposes.

That's it. But when we look in here, there's a big old chunk of ice and look at all that calcium. Now when you see calcium like that, it's usually when it's that bad, it's because of a dump valve or a drain line. The dump valve is either not working.

every beginning of every cycle, it dumps out all the remaining water. Understand how an ice machine works? Naturally, there's minerals in water and we have water filters over there. Okay, water filters right there. But naturally there's going to be impurities, minerals always in the water and the minerals through the ice cycle.

They Don't Really freeze okay and they fall down to the sump. and so after every cycle, they dump out all the water out of the cycle. Okay, and it's You have filters to reduce the scale and then uh, the the way the machine operates with a dump valve right here. So every time the cycle starts, it should open the dump valve and then the water pump turns on and it dumps all the water out.

But let's see if I can show you guys what I'm finding. So if we go into menu service Diagnostics Control board enable relays I should have power as that dump valve and I don't so let's pull it out. you can see I enabled the relays so this should have power and it doesn't We have no power so there's a problem coming from the board. Where are the problems that I don't know yet.

So turn it off and I'll keep diagnosing. We're going to follow the electrical wires, make sure there's no brakes or anything. So I'm moving around in here and I cut the zip tie off so I can access these and when I did that, this guy just fell right out of there and my board lost display I Don't know if that's a coincidence or if that has to do with my problem, but basically these wires are labeled and this is going back up to the board. so I'm just kind of tracing it out trying to figure out where it's going before.

I grab the schematic. More than likely it's going to be at that box right there or that Molex plug would be my guess, but I'm just kind of working my way through it. So I got to fix this, put this back together and see if problem continues coming over here. I Found this, but this has nothing to do with my problem.

but the sensor looks like it was melted or broken or something. All right. So if I follow this Rolex plug which is right here. okay, that's the power.

We come up here and I'm tracing it back right there. It comes up to this board up in this top corner right here. this black wire right there. So I'm set up on the board right there and we're going to verify.

So let's go in here to menu service Diagnostics Control Board enable relays Nothing at this point I mean I've traced it back to the board. We've got no power at the board coming out of the board so you know it's very rare. but it actually is a bad board in this situation because there's no other place that it's getting lost at. So I'm gonna have to talk to the customer and order a new replacement circuit board for this guy if I can find one.

All right. we are recovering from the other machine. so I've already purged turning it on. we're pulling the gas out.

So what happened on this machine was it was off and it had a long Harvest and you could tell it's been off for months because it's sparkly, clean and that one's filthy. So um, it made a batch for the first batch and I'm not going to play around. I'm just recovering the charge to verify. More than likely it'll end up being low on charge I bet because it was off on a long Harvest it made actually two batches.

no problem right now. So something's happening. so we're just starting by recovering so we'll just wait. Uh, this guy takes 12 and a half pounds of gas.

So so this guy is slightly low on refrigerant, but not enough to cause a problem. It takes 12 and a half pounds, so we're basically just ever so slightly low. So I don't think it's a refrigerant related issue, but it's weird because it made ice in front of me. So I'm gonna go ahead and put the gas back in, top it off, get it to the 12 and a half pounds.

I Shut it off for now and then we'll uh, we'll um, finish diagnosing. All right, it's an interesting thing going on here. So what we're going to do is we're going to put it into a freeze cycle and I'm going to see if it'll do it again for you guys. So we're gonna watch it for a second and then once it goes into a freeze cycle, I'll turn the camera back on.

All right. It's now in the pre-chill so that's the point at which it gets the evaporator nice and cold before it turns on the water pump. So let's give it a second and see what happens. There we go see it's immediately going into a harvest and I know it ran into this issue before and for some reason I'm I'm remembering there's something going on with the water level probe that causes it to go and I know that sounds odd, but there's something there I think so.

I'm gonna look into that right now. test the water level pregnancy I swear there was something with the water level pose in safe mode and going directly into Harvest Right I Everything's testing okay I did a tap test on the water or the ice thickness probe the microphone. It's fine. I did a continuity test on this and I have proper connection and everything.

So what I'm going to do before I go any further is we're going to update the firmware on the board. I've got a thing right here I do have thickness Pro Band water level Pro but I don't think those are the problems I'm waiting on a circuit board for this machine because the relay is not engaging so and then I'll have someone clean it if the circuit board fixes a problem but this one. I'm going to try updating the firmware and seeing what that does. So to update the firmware if I can remember how to do this, service is a USB setup USB stick download firmware insert Drive This should be one of the most recent ones.

so insert the drive, press the check mark and it should be updating the firmware now. So a second ago I got a download failed message I've never had that before when trying to update the firmware so I started it over again. Let's see if it does it again. I think it worked this time.

All right. Cool. That's odd. I've never seen it do download fail.

So now let's run it through a cycle again see if it goes into its weird funky thing. real-time data time and time. I Always go to real-time data so you can monitor what operations going on and stuff. So I'm gonna watch it now.

All right, we're in a pre-chill again see if it goes directly into a harvest. which it should never do that this one because it's been off for so long. It's pretty clean. The water level or ice thickness probe's got a little bit of calcium on it, but the water level probe's clean.

The sump is clean. Here we go. What's going to happen going into a freeze Or a harvest? Now we're in a freeze. Let's see if it goes into a harvest.

See, it kept going into a harvest earlier, so it's odd, huh? It's important to watch several. Cycles Um, just watching the system operation. The pressures were, uh, the fan cycle control is turning on and off or maintaining consistent head pressure. It's probably about 55 degrees outside right now.

maybe maybe 60.. this right here is just this. inside. it's just cold, but um, looking pretty good.

maintaining a good, solid, consistent head pressure. Um, suction pressure looks good. We're going to watch it through the freeze and then obviously through the Harvest too. And I'm going to watch a couple Cycles to see if that problem.

Springs Its head back up if it doesn't, What I'm going to do is I have another technician bringing me a circuit board as soon as he brings it I'll put it on there, make sure it works, and then I'll have him empty out all the ice which there isn't that much and properly clean the machine. There's so much calcium, there's no way you could clean it safely with the ice in the bin. So I'll have them clean it and then we'll let them watch it through the weekend because it's Friday May 5th today. So uh, but we'll see.

We'll see if the board fixes our problem on that one. and we're just about to go into a harvest right now. There we go. There's our first harvest after the update, so we'll watch it make ice.

The thickness is a little bit on the thick side, but not too bad. So we'll watch it make ice and watch our gauges. see what our pressures do in a harvest. I Tend to see low head pressure which isn't a good.

The book tells you it shouldn't be this low, but that's a very common thing on these Manitowoc machines is low head pressure. It's weird suction pressure is doing good so when we know the charge is right. but yeah, the low head, that's low. That's really low for these Manitowocs I Want to say 130 or 140 is what they want to see for head pressure from here.

Make sure we actually release. So the right one is starting to slide off at the moment and the left one's getting ready to slide off. There goes the right one. Come in here any second.

let's see the vacuum just got released, see the water traveling there we go and it went through its pre-chill and then went right into freeze mode. So again, it's not reproducing its problem. Interesting. Now that I updated the firmware, at least.

All right. Got a new board so we're gonna put this guy on again because the dump valve relay isn't energizing this guy right here. so we're gonna swap it out. I'm waiting for someone to shut off power, swap it out, and then if it works like I said I'm gonna have them clean that machine up and get rid of that calcium.

Hopefully get them all up and running all right. We've got a big old chunk of ice over there, but what I'm most concerned about Oh, there goes the ice. it just fell out is when we turn on power if this guy. Well, I gotta program the board real quick and then I'll do manual setup and then I'll just input all the information and then once we do that, then we'll turn it on and see if the dump valve opens up.

It should open up right away. All right, we are set up and ready to turn on. There it goes, Dump valve just opened. So now it's actually dumping the water out down the dramp.

sorry about that, down the drain, right down in here. Yep, it's actually dumping. so it's time to clean this guy now. Uh, it's not under warranty.

No need to save the board like I said. I'm handing it off to my other technician. He's gonna do a cleaning on this guy. tear it down, rip everything apart, clean the heck out of it.

I had shut this machine off because I didn't want it to make any more ice. I've been emptying out, almost got their bin cleared out. They got a little bit more in there so we're going to work on getting that out and then the rest is just going to have to be burned with hot water. so that's it on.

this one. Should be good to go now. I Do a lot of work on ice machines and you know to be fair: I Never really intend on these videos to be like a full tutorial I Realize that a lot of the times they are this one you kind of saw me. I do a lot of this kind of stuff where I go in here and I'm going around solving big problems, troubleshooting, problems, dealing with a lot of refrigeration stuff, and then oftentimes like this situation.

once I diagnosed and fixed the problem I had another technician come in behind me and go ahead and do the cleaning on the ice machine because I needed to go to do some other calls. Plus you know, uh, we're We're getting busier right now, but we're not like super busy. so I always like to make sure that my guys are getting their hours and you know, keeping moving kind of a thing. So if I can go out and do a little bit of work, troubleshoot a little bit, then let someone else come in and do the cleaning and the tear down I try to do that that way we can keep everybody moving and keep everybody happy kind of, you know? um, but this was a pretty common for me to have two machine issues and have to troubleshoot multiple problems now I did take some steps when you know, uh, the the left side machine when I noticed that it had a long I think it was a long freeze cycle I wasn't even going to play with things.

we hadn't worked on that machine in a very long time. The first thing I did was just recover the gas. took me about 25 minutes, 20 minutes just recover the charge, weigh in the factory charge, figure out if it was low or not. It was a little bit low, but honestly not enough in my opinion to cause a serious issue.

Now if we had extremely low ambient temperatures, maybe that extra pound and a half that it was short could have been a problem. But where we're at right now, we're getting 50 degree nights and you know, sometimes 90 degree days right now. So an extra pound of gas missing from that system, even though it's a problem, it's not good. I Don't think that was our problem.

I Think that the circle board might be having an issue. The fact that both the circuit boards the right side circuit board had a bad relay on it right for the dump valve. The left side was acting kind of wonky starts to make me wonder if either the batteries in the back of the board are going bad. That's a possibility.

Sometimes those batteries can go bad and they can have like a memory loss. The other thing is, um, if they have any weird power issues, you know we're in. Southern California We have a lot of low voltage issues, so it does happen. So I re-uh updated the firmware on the left side ice machine and the problems that we had.

didn't seem to come back so we left it at that of course. I Topped off the charge, looked for a leak. nothing major, you know, little. Traders I Think there was a cat missing on the roof or something.

Like no big deal, you know, just told them to keep an eye on that. But then the right side. Whenever you see a machine that dirty, there's something wrong. it's It's usually not just a cleaning issue in that situation.

It had a bad dump valve and I kind of explained it in the video. but you know the way that almost every ice machine manufacturer out there works is. They usually dump the water at the end of the cycle to get rid of all the nastiness that's in the water and then they start over with fresh water so as it's going through the cycle the minerals they typically don't freeze right so they will go down to the sump and then they're left over in the sump at the end of the cycle. Now in this situation, it wasn't able to rid the machine of that extra water so it was trying to use it and it just kept accumulating in the spray rails and all over the place and it was just causing issues.

So once I was able to solve the problem with the bad circuit board and the bad relay on the board, I went ahead and uh, let my other technician you know do the full tear down and cleaning. We got rid of all the ice, all that stuff and the machines have been working fine for about two weeks now so all was well. okay. Now where in the heck do I figure out all this information about these ice machines? Where do I get the knowledge that I have? It's really not a big secret.

Okay, reach out to the manufacturer of each particular ice machine brand. Hoshizaki Manitowoc Scotsman Fallet Vote? You know Isomatic. Whatever it is, there's a bunch of different other brands too. There's new brands up and coming.

you know, reach out to those manufacturers. They usually have technical documentation that can help you. Manitowoc happens to have these little books. this is the Indigo series quiet Cube book.

So this is for the machine that I was working on and then you have the new books. the Indigo next. Okay, these books. Now where can you get these books from the manufacturer direct? Okay, reach out to your actual distributor.

Now this is something that a lot of people get confused about. If you work on ice machines and you order parts through like Parts town or something like that, they're not really a distributor. Yeah, they sell the parts, but they're You're not going to get anywhere calling companies like that or even just general supply houses. You're not going to get anywhere.

You need to reach out to the authorized Distributors for each ice machine brand that you need to get technical documentation for. So for me, it's a company called Western Pacific Distributors. So I reach out to Western Pacific Distributors they know exactly what I'm talking about I said hey, I want six of these Tech manuals and I don't care what they cost, that's the important thing. Okay, because in the past the manufacturers they used to give these away for free, but they've you know of course started pinching pennies and different things and so they start charging for these.

So a lot of the times the Distributors they you know people think that they're going to get them for free and the Distributors are like ah, we can only part with one right? no up front, call the distributor and say hey, I need technical documents, the tech specs, books, whatever it is, whatever they call them and I want you to get me five of them and I realize I'm gonna have to pay for them. Let them know up front. So that way they think you're not trying to, they don't think you're trying to get it for free kind of a thing. Okay, you'll be more apt to get a handful of them if you're telling them you're willing to pay for them.

So if you like a physical manual, call the manufacturer, call Hoshizaki. they're Parts Distributors All these different people just call them and say you want the technical documentation, make sure they know you're willing to pay for it and just pay whatever it is. 20 30 bucks a book, get a couple of them, give them to all your guys, throw some in your shelf and have them for extra right now if you don't want to pay for them, you can easily go to almost every ice machine manufacturer's website. They have technical documentation on there you can download in PDF format.

you can send it out to all your phones, all your employees and they can have have it on their phones me personally I like to hold a manual in my hands so I don't mind paying a couple extra bucks to have this manual because it makes me money. Okay, it's it's as easy as that. What you got to pay 20 30. Even if I had to pay 100 bucks for this book, it would be worth it for me because it's gonna make me money.

That's where you get the technical knowledge about how these machine works. I mean when you call technical support for Manitowoc Ice machines or Hoshizaki or insert whatever name brand you're going to work on, all they're doing is reading through another version of these Tech manuals. When you say hey, what should the operating pressures be what they're going to do is they're going to open up this Tech book. They're going to go to this section right here right there and it's going to tell me for the 1400 series machine with a 1496 condenser, here's the operating pressures at negative 20 and here's the operating pressures at 110 degrees and it has them all right there.

Okay, it tells you everything. Pay attention to the details though. Some manufacturers such as Hoshizaki Um, yeah, I don't think I have a Hoshizaki book right here. But Hoshizaki.

they publish pressures, but it's five minutes into the freeze cycle, so you have to have technical knowledge to know when it's actually in the freeze cycle and start a timer and then five minutes into the freeze cycle on a Hoshizaki machine. The pressures that are listed in the book is what they should be. Approximately okay, so you got to read these things. They have schematics, they have troubleshooting information, and also they have more information available on their website.

This Company Manitowoc actually has uh, um, troubleshooting charts that you can use and basically you answer questions and you check off boxes and it leads you to a diagnosis. Okay, so just reach out to the manufacturers if you want to know how to work on their equipment. They usually have lots of great information that's available. For the most part most of the manufacturers do right.

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