This video is brought to you by Sporland quality, integrity and tradition. Well, every Saturday it's Saturday September 16th and uh, we have a service call on the walk-in cooler not working 46 degrees and uh, there's ice in there. It's hard for you to see, but it's all ice stuff on the back of the coil and I have them clear out their food and while they were clearing out the food. I turned around and the store wasn't open.

but I saw that their walking cooler was at 30 plus degrees and there's ice all on this coil too. Inside, it's kind of hard to see because I just threw it into a defrost. but they're clearly the defrost taking care of it. but they're clearly leaving a door open so something's going on here.

We're gonna get them both defrosted when I Defrost evaporators I'm a firm believer of just taking all the fan motors, fan blades, fan guards off using hot water and just melting it and I try to control the hot water so it doesn't overflow the drain pan. go slow. the least amount of mess possible, but I still had them remove all the food just to be safe. Um, and I find it to be more efficient if you don't do it that way.

That's fine. To each their own, it's just to me, it's less destructive, it's faster, and just knocks it out of the park. so I'm still working at it. The drain's draining very well, so that's good, but there's It's solid all the way through.

but I Want to point something out? Let's this. Kind of got a little wet from my hose. Okay, so let's look over here. So what we have here is a little bit of frost, but then underneath it is solid ice and it seems to be thinner at the top, thicker at the bottom.

To me, what that means is that they have a temperature controller right here that has self defrost. Okay, it goes into defrost every six hours or something like that. Four hours for 20 minutes, 30 minutes somewhere along those lines. But it's not enough.

Defrost. This hard ice, to me means that it's been trying to defrost. Okay, and it slowly drips off the coil, but then it re-freezes and it gets thicker at the bottom. If it was just Frost all the way through.

Uh, that would be something that was new, but this is hard ice. This has been going on for a week, two, maybe three, and it's been slowly building until there's enough ice that it just completely, you know, eliminates the amount of cooling that this system, it can effectively do so. Hard ice that's glossy shiny again, right here is kind of because it's melting, but once you get past this little bit of frost right here, it's just a hard, solid, thinner at the top, thicker at the bottom. That's a sign of not enough Defrost.

Now, it doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with that controller. It to me means that they're leaving the door open. it's frosting up, and it's trying to defrost itself. But we'll find out more once we turn it on.

This is the walk-in cooler. Condenser just came up here. Don't see anything crazy. I'm waiting for that evaporator to drain.

Came over to the walk-in freezer condenser and it had just come out of defrost, but there's still a little bit of ice on the coil. So I pulled the X terminal off. Um, put it back into a long defrost and I'm going to let it sit in the defrost while I'm working on the walk-in cooler. So it's just going to get really, really warm in that walk-in freezer.

Try to melt that ice also I melt all the ice from this side. I'm not getting on the other side at all. I'm not trying to make a mess. Okay, steam makes it all fall off, the ice thawed, and what didn't thaw just fell off as big chunks.

So I'll put it in the drain pan, let it melt, and then just move on to this side. So I'm not even getting to the back at all. The only thing I'm going to go to the back to do is to make sure the coil is not plugged up with dirt and lint. The back of this coil is a little bit dirty.

not too bad. So I'm currently spraying some of the Viper aerosol foam cleaner. I'm being careful that there's nothing over there. No food or anything like that I Had to move it all.

but it does a really good job of spraying a pretty long distance too. And it does a good job of getting in the coil and actually pulling stuff out. So I'm going to spray from the other side too because I can. but if you couldn't it does a really good job of getting in there.

How does it pull dirt out? That trips me out? I'm sure. John I should probably ask you. John John Passarella, the inventor I should probably asked him, but it's a trip. Like you would think that it's counterproductive to hold her out.

Usually it pushes dirt out. you know, spray from the inside out. but this stuff does a great job. It's a trip all right.

It is back and running. The evaporator says 47 degrees. My thermometer says about 46. I'm not too worried about that.

That's pretty good. Got to get up here and see what the temperature set point is. Temp set point is 36. That's a hair on the cold side because these things go to the bottom of 36.

So 35.9 that's a differential is three. Yeah, we'll leave that there. Okay, let's see how many defrosts this guy does. Defrost time is 15 minutes.

We're going to change it to 20 minutes. change it to eight because they're clearly icing it up. Compressor starts per hour. that should be at off.

Was wondering if this controller is going bad because I never leave compressor starts on Yeah, that really makes me wonder about that controller. I'm definitely going to be coming back. I'm going to go upstairs and make sure we have a clear sight glass and we're going to make sure we drop significantly in temp. we're at 45 46 somewhere in there now.

come over here. This roof is a mess. This guy's running sight glass is clear, it's got a big spoiling seal. Sight glass is clear.

I'm gonna give it a few minutes. Nice cold suction line. Coming back I'm definitely going to be coming back to go through the system, but I can't really check any system vitals like superheat and stuff until we see the Box satisfy. And it's been a while since it's been warm judging by the ice, so it's going to take a long time to come down to temp.

I've also got an exhaust fan down at another restaurant, so we're going to be coming back as long as the temp's doing okay. I'll call them a little bit later, we'll uh, we'll come back when we're not on overtime because it's Saturday right now. This guy right here. I'm gonna go ahead and uh, hook the defrost termination back up and then turn it back on.

Let's go. Let's hit this right here. turned off power defrost termination. this is the X terminal right there.

If I plug that back in and turn it on, clicks right out of defrost because it's really warm in the coil. and I'll go ahead and eliminate that really long defrost and we'll leave it at four defrosts a day and we'll follow up on this guy too. As far as the time, it's 207. I had adjusted it, but it wasn't It was kind of off there you go somewhere in there, so we'll definitely be following up on this one too out of curiosity.

What's the condenser coil? Looks clean. No problems there. Okay, we're gonna watch that one come down to Temp significantly and this one come down to Temp and then I'll be getting out of here. All right.

We are back today. Uh, it's been about a week since I was last here. It doesn't look like there's any ice on the coil. We're going to verify that the temp control still has the right settings in it.

and we actually got some new hinges because they've got these walk-in doors. They've got multiple doors and uh, the hinges are all jacked up. See that door's staying open because it won't shut by itself. They don't use them as like walk through doors, they just use them to grab crap from the shelf.

So we're gonna get those done too. Up at the condensing unit. I've got uh, probes down at the evaporator. We're running a little bit high on the superheat about 16 degrees evaporator superheat so we may make an adjustment and get that to drop down.

We'd like to see eight to ten, but you know what? it's pumping down. No. I think it was pumping down so I'm going to give it another cycle, let it come on and then see if it starts to uh to do that same thing again because when it first turned on, it was right at about 10 degrees so we'll see. but I'll watch it again.

Came back into the box, it just has been running for a minute and we're running just a hair on the high side. so I might make one quarter turn and kind of see what that does. I'm watching this thing and I come up here and this. TXV it's pumping down right now, but it's making a loud hissing sound.

So before I try to adjust superheat, we're going to do a quick pump down and we're going to pop that strainer out and make sure that that strainer is clear because something's clearly going on. a TXV shouldn't be that loud. It got me thinking normally I'm not concerned about contaminations in my systems, but we did just have a compressor failure on this a couple months back, so it's possible that something is floating through the system. We do have a liquid line filter dryer obviously, but you know there could be some sort of contamination in there.

So what we're going to do is we're going to pump it down. I Got the king valve right here. We're going to make sure that this is on tight. Okay, and then I already loosened the packing this top piece right here.

Okay, now that I loosened that we're gonna front seat, this loosening the packing helps to save the life. When you loosen it though, it does leak so be cautious about that. So close this down. Now it's not calling at the moment, but it will be soon.

Now when you loosen the packing, it does leak. so we're gonna close that right there so it doesn't leak on us. and then what we will do is we're going to wait for it to call. Once it calls, suction pressure will come up, actuate the low pressure control, and then I'll just hold the contactor and it does have a time delay, but I'll just hold it in until I get to the pump down level that I want and then we'll go downstairs.

We're just going to do a hot swap. We're not going to pump it down and open that system to Atmosphere So I'm just going to pump it down to a low enough level that I can just change out that uh strainer real quick, verify that it's clean before I try adjusting on the valve. All right. It turned on on its own.

So now I'm just watching the low pressure and it should start pumping down really quick because the king valve is closed on the receiver. so as the refrigerant passes through the liquid line solenoid valve, there we go. We're running low I'm going to run it a little bit lower. We got to be careful because the compressor will bypass if we get too low because to about 10 psi.

see if it'll let me pump it down to there. These pressure reliefs in the compressor will jump it back up. so we're about. oh yeah, see, we went up to 27.

so I'm gonna go just a little bit lower and see if I can get it to stay lower and then we'll go downstairs. I Just shut off the fans because they were bugging me. but it's very possible the hissing sound I was hearing was that booster fan that they're using for their kegs. but I'm still going to pop this strainer out.

Got an extra one right here. It's always good to check these when you can before you try to adjust on the valve. anyways. Okay, so there's about 12 PSI in here so it's a little tricky.

You just do it, put your finger over it, and then swap it out. Actually, the strainer is not even dirty so there's no point. I'll just put it back on and we'll make the adjustments we need to make. So it's always good to check those strainers again because they can be so plugged up.

Usually on my systems though, they're not in bad shape. Okay, so I'm going to torque that guy back on and then we'll finish with our super heat adjustments torqued back on. All good. Didn't have to use this one.

Always keep these in your truck because sometimes it's just easier to swap them real quick. Um, three quarter and a 5 8, 3 4 goes on the body. 5 8 goes on that and you're able to do it real quick. So I'm gonna put this guy together and then we'll make some mild adjustments to the superheat and watch it operate in.

Hope to get it around 10 ish degrees. All right. Now what we're gonna do. We know that we need to decrease the superheat.

So the easiest way to remember this is if you want to increase the superheat, the stem goes into the valve. If you want to decrease it, the stem comes out of the valve okay, righty, tighty, lefty. Loosey So I'm gonna do just maybe quarter turn right. so there you go out of the valve, decrease the superheat.

We'll see what that does for us. So when you make super heat adjustments, you got to give it time. You got to make sure that it has time to stabilize. This one is sitting right around 10 or 11 or 12 or 11.

and uh, I'm just gonna let it sit and go through a couple Cycles just to make sure before I make any more adjustments, we're just going to let it run all right. It just turned on again. It's cold freezing my butt off in here, but it just turned on. We're going to give it a second to stabilize out I'm hoping it stabilizes right around 10 degrees.

Evaporator superheat currently at 14. Let's give it a second as the valves kind of finding its happy place. We're just about done changing the hinges. There's a couple that the screws are stripped out.

so I've got another tech with me and he's going to run bolts through the doors. The doors are eventually gonna have to be changed, but these hinges will get them going and there we go. It's coming down right now. We'll let it come back up.

but I think we're gonna be good so far. I did basically three quarters of a turn out and uh, we're still kind of stabilizing out, but I'm pretty confident that that's going to be good with this guy. so let's give it another second and we're stabilizing out right around nine ten-ish degrees. I'm happy with that.

So Evaporator Super Heat's good. We're not icing up anymore. We're just about done with the door hinges. I Think we're gonna be good to go.

That's going to be it on this one. We're gonna tell the customer to keep an eye on it I'm watching that temp control I I Don't know if there's anything wrong with it or if someone just got in it and played with it because it did have a weird setting where it did. The compressor starts per hour and I usually shut that off, but we'll keep an eye on that. but other than that I think that's it I did increase the defrost on that I think to eight defrosts a day so I'm happy with that.

We're still running. It's right at about 10 degrees evaporator superheat so again, we're good to go. That's going to be it. you know when I get these calls on the weekends I typically just get them operational as long as it's not like a diary emergency if it's something easy, I'll finish it.

but in this situation I defrosted the coil I Was a little concerned about the temperature controller because of that that weird setting in there, but I went ahead and came back out. I had ordered new hinges for the other two little doors. They actually have three doors for their walk-in cooler, but two of them are blocked by a shelf and they literally just use them to grab food. kind of like a reaching cooler.

So I went ahead and ordered new hinges and closures for those two doors and because they were sticking open and then we came back in, went through the box. I Did make some super heat adjustments but I want to stress. You know you always want to make sure that you're checking if those strainers are plugged up. but I mentioned something in the video I'm not really too concerned about most of my service calls having um, debris because we do a really good job.

or at least we try to do a really good job of keeping contamination out of our systems. We try to pull proper evacuations, making sure that you know we're purging our lines and all that good stuff. So we typically don't have plugged up strainers on our equipment unless it's something we recently took over. or if we had you know, some sort of a weird contamination issue like I mentioned.

we had a failed compressor recently, but the failed compressor was actually just I think it was like an internal bypass thing or something if I remember it I can't remember exactly what happened I didn't change it but I went ahead and pumped the system down to slightly positive pressure. What it was like 10 15 psi pop the strainer out. It wasn't dirty so put it back in and then I went ahead and made the super heat adjustments on the valve. Now another thing to think about too.

it's a good possibility that the power head is starting to fail. Okay, and the reason why I say that is this system has been installed for four years. Okay, and I know that when we installed it, we checked superheat right and then now all of a sudden the super Heat's kind of going out of range so we will definitely monitor the system. It's possible we have a power head that's starting to fail because there's no other real reason why we should have to adjust superheat, the spring, the seat, all that stuff in that valve.

They don't really go bad, especially on one that's only like four or five years old. Okay, so that is something to think about, but went ahead and adjusted it, got it where it should be, went through the operations, didn't see anything else wrong and all was well. okay. Also, I had someone come out and uh, while I was there I defrosted the walk-in freezer the first night, but then or first day, but then I had someone come out the next week and they went through the Box made sure there was nothing going on with that freezer too, so all was well on that.

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