I think that is the stupidest stupidest place for a fire sprinkler, even though I knew it was there. I still jammed it with my veto bag coming up so lucky that thing hasn't popped the hole. Yet this video is brought to you by sport'ln quality, integrity and tradition. Today we have a call on a AC, not working or here's the actual call, but I know it's an AC, not working.

The call is that the fire alarm is in a trouble condition and that it keeps going on. They called the fire alarm company, they came out and they said you need to call your HVAC company in hindsight they should have called me. That's the best bet, because I have a pretty good knowledge of how these systems work, but anyways, I'm here now, okay and downstairs at the fire alarm panel, I'm going to pull up a little clip right now and show you what I'm seeing so on the fire Alarm panel, it's showing a supervisory error, okay supervisory trouble condition. Basically, and usually what that means is that the proving circuit has opened okay at the fire alarm panel.

They monitor the duct detectors. The duct detectors usually have a proving circuit. That tells us if something happens with the wiring going to the duct detector to the alarm panel. The reason why they do that is to prove that the circuit is intact in case there's ever a fire.

The alarm company wants to be able to know if a duct detector, cig or you know, senses a fire. If the proving circuit the communication cables to the alarm panel disappear from the circuit, then they know there's something wrong: okay, the things that can make the proving circuit open is a unit being powered down or a duct detector, in a trouble condition, something as simple as A mouse eating through the communication wires. I've talked about that a bunch anyways I just got up on the roof. We have three air conditioners: that's where we're gon na start.

Okay, we're going to check the air conditioners out just do a visual inspection and we're gon na see if any of them might have something obvious that would cause us to trigger something. Okay, this one right off the bat has some alarms in it, but typically that won't trigger a trouble condition. Okay, it looks like we're calling so I'm gon na ignore this one for the moment, we'll look at those alarms in a little while I'm looking for something pretty obvious, usually like a unit being powered down, sometimes when they have filter changers here, they'll leave the unit Off you know and that'll create this trouble condition. So this one right here is running.

I know you guys can't see it, because this stupid prodigy board is hard to see, but it says cooling. The unit is running I should have said. I know you guys can't see when I showed that other unit, but it showed some error codes, but it was running. So this is our last unit.

Right here looks like someone was up here, because every one of these is not closed. All the way. That's one of my pet peeves and this unit is not running. We have a blank display.

We're gon na have to start here. So this one right here, let's go over here power switch see if it's off doesn't look to be off oftentimes the filter. Changing company will leave these units off, but those don't look like new filters. Okay, oh, but look at that.

That's all wrapped up, there's a bunch of balloons stuck in there. So that's good we'll have to dig into that, but we need to figure out why this units not running so we're gon na get a meter out and check voltage and see. What's going on, yeah we've got a bank right here. We can check voltage on something.

Look at this VFD. This thing is blown apart, and I noticed that when I put this bar right here, there's pieces of the VFD right here. It's interesting, though, because there's two of those almost like it's been changed before, but yeah we definitely are gon na. Have a bad VFD: I can pretty much guarantee we're not gon na.

Have any voltage here so I'll check it real, quick, okay, and so we can simply just check power right here. Nothing, nothing, nothing all legs and we'll check them to ground three volts. Three volts. Three volts nothing, so the unit is powered down.

The breaker was not tripped right here, so we need to go downstairs to the main and check there, but before I do that, I'm going to go ahead and power down this unit here. So it's off now and then we'll turn on we'll go downstairs and see if we have a trip. Breaker we'll turn it on and then come up here in troubleshoot, further all right after spending a while on the phone with hold and tech support and national accounts, and not it out at all that stuff. Nobody has this drive in stock.

It's going to take a day or so to get it. So what I'm going to do is we are going to probably temporarily install a contactor see if we can't get this unit up and running, but so we're gon na start by unhooking drive and checking the ground making sure we don't have blower motors and stuff I'll. Put in a contactor wire it in temporarily and we'll remove this and then order the part, so I marked all the wires pulled them off. May not don't really need a mark, they can figure it out, but we still have no power to this unit.

We're going to get this drive out in a perfect world, I'd like to be able to hook this guy up to the actual circuit board and running into our blower motor off of that. But I don't know if I'm gon na be able to figure that out or not worst case scenario, I'll hook up the contactor to the our I'm sorry to the G and the C pond thermostat, where yeah. The only problem with that is is that the unit won't have test function. Is I don't think that the test function says powered it up? I think it completely ignores that understand.

So if you were to put it into test code, I don't think that turn the contactor on, but you know who knows we'll see. I know there's 24 volts going to this relay right here, but I just don't know if this is a call yeah. I don't know how they do it, we'll figure it out that should I'll put all the screws back in here. So that way, you're not lost and we come back to do the work, whether I could theoretically true just wire the just jump these guys together, but I'd rather not do that.

I'd rather put a contact here, because who knows how long it's going to take? I would for them to a part of it and stuff so 24/7. That's that I disconnected this, but we're gon na have to figure this out. This is the relay that I'm assuming puts it in the second stage, see because this thing it's a the second, the the VFD only speeds up when it goes in the second stage. Basically, so I'm assuming that's in here somewhere, but okay I'll, have to figure this out all right.

I got the contact our installed. You know me, I'm still gon na have to flip that around because that's driving me nuts. Now I've got to try to see. If I can wire this into this unit or not, but before we do that, we're gon na test everything to ground okay to see if we have any direct shorts, I'm trying to find a reason for this VFD to blow up so I'll test that to ground And then what I'm going to do is come over here and according to this guy right here this legend, the blower contactor, is k3 right here and I already found it the k3 relay.

That's the symbol for a relay right. There is right there and it looks like the wires coming in to that is J, 265 b j 265, a kay 65. What is that? That's an exhaust fan, so I got to try to find those wires because I don't I don't know if I can make this work, I don't think I can, but this is my VFD I'll have to look into it. This is labeled differently because the units actually programmed for a VFD.

So we have these extra things up here, because the contactor would have been installed right here, but k 65 bj2 65 II - I don't know I'm gon na - have to go through this K. 65. Isn't it that's for an something else? I don't know if I can make this work or not, but I'm gon na keep looking into it and, like I said, I'm gon na test ground to make sure nothing's grounded we're just gon na test home. We've got a good tone and we have a good tone.

I know people freak out cuz I test on the unit ground, but the unit is grounded. We've got a good tone, we're just looking for a direct short to ground, nothing, nothing, nothing! I'm looking at my meter, nothing, nothing, nothing so there's no visible direct shorts to ground at this point. What I'm gon na do is power the unit on test three-phase power coming in. It's not going to pull the contact ring because there's Noth nothing hooked up to the coil and then I'm going to try to see if I can test the blower function and see if this gets energized and de-energized.

I don't know how they were doing this so we'll have to see. Do the 1 2. 3. Please don't blow up right here.

We go we're getting a call for cooling, but I don't want it to do that, so I'm actually going to disconnect this. So that way we don't get a call for cooling, so I disconnected that it's like we're getting alarms. You guys can't see this but we're getting alarm 46, and it says that that is what who won't tell me and let's see what the next one is alarm. 1:29 VFD shut down, so it senses that we've got the VFD, unhooked, okay and then alarm 46.

I don't know what 46 is alarm. 46. It's not giving me the whatever it is, but anyways I'm gon na see if I can't get it running okay. So what I'm gon na do is put the unit into test mode, and then you guys can see this okay.

I silenced the alarms it's off on alarm. That's fine! Let's go to the these things, not letting me get past that alarm, so I might have to hook that little relay back up. So I don't know: what's going on in this little inverter board down here, it's all burnt up, so I don't want to talk about power to that. So what I might do is just go ahead and clip all these guys wire.

Not him then hook up the relay and I think it'll work after that, all right. What I did was, I went ahead and took all the wires off the bottom of the V V PFD wire, netted them and it looks like we're still getting the same alarm and then plugged everything back in it looks like maybe one of these completes a circuit. So that it's since it's broken right now, it probably tells it that the bfg is not working yeah. I know you guys can't see it right now, but it's not letting me silence these going through and see if it'll.

Let me alright last thing we need to do. I think I figured out the wiring we're gon na check phase rotation, so the field piece sd480 does a good job of that line, one to line two and then you leave line one on and you put the one on line two on to line three and It should say line one two three, and it does so. That means we've got the correct phasing sequence for the contactor right here, so theoretically, our blower should be running in the right direction. Next thing I got to do I have the cooling disconnected.

I want to see if the fan turns on put that in we'll listen up, see the contact or pull in contactor pulled in we'll go check, rotation, real, quick, so to check rotation. What I'll do is just pull this and when it powers down I'll. Take you guys over here and we can watch it it just shut down, so we can make sure that it's actually going in the right direction and it is alright, it's running counterclockwise, which is what it says belt. There's a little loose need some p.m.

work for sure. Okay. So with that being said, we're gon na power this guy up into stage one cooling so we'll put this back on real quick indoor blowers. Should fire up okay and then we'll fire up stage.

One cooling make sure the blowers running fire up stage, cuckooing make sure the blower stays running and then we'll have to make sure that we let it run for a while and it doesn't error out on some sort of an error. So let's go ahead and put this guy in here: yeah I'll have to tighten that in so we got a call for y1 and we are running. I want to make sure see, because this is a multi-stage air volume unit. Okay, the reason why there's a VFD on it, basically it's a two-speed blower motor whenever second stage calls the blower motor goes to 100 %.

Whenever first stage calls by itself, the blower motor runs out, like whatever a slower speed than full speed. Ok, whatever they have a program down, and I want to make sure that we're not going to air out. So it's a good thing that with just a call for y1, the blowers running, that's a plus, but we need to make sure it continues to run. When we get a second stage.

And we also need to make sure that we don't air out on some sort of an issue. Now again, this is just temporary because we have to order the drive. So it's been running for about 20 minutes on first stage I went ahead and energized the second stage. I know you can't see it right now, but we're energized down here on the light.

So this camera doesn't pick up the LE. So we got a call for fan y1 y2 and an occupied signal, so this will get them going temporarily. We have a blower, that'll disengage and then we have this we'll just have to sit in here temporarily, that's just low voltage and I'm gon na order. The drive the last thing that I'm gon na do just because I want to try to simulate any errors.

Is we're gon na disconnect y1 and y2, make sure that the blower continues to run and that we don't get an error message. Let's go a disconnect. Y2. Let's wait for it to staged down.

It'll, take a second, ok, we staged down on y2 and then I want to stage down on y1 and then make sure that there's absolutely no error messages popping up. Let's give it a second, and the fan should continue to run okay and then what I want to do is go ahead and disconnect the G make sure that it stages down. Contactors should pull out here in a minute. Let's give it a second.

It says fan only at the time right now. I just want to make sure that this thing is going to not error out on me. You know all right, so we are call 4G went away. It now says Idol on the prodigy board, so I'm going to go ahead and push this back in see if we get a call for fan again trying to do this one hand, it's probably not the smartest thing yep we got a call for a fan.

So that's good and then we're gon na stage everything up again but yeah. It looks like we're gon na be good temporarily. One thing I didn't say is that I one thing I didn't do, I should say, is test the fans current draw to make sure we're not over amping or anything we're running a right at nine amps and let's go over here and see what the fan is Allowed to run evaporators are rather than ten point six amps, so we're safe, so we're within spec we're going to talk to the customer about some p.m. service cleaning.

These units up, there's water running everywhere too. So I think that is the stupidest stupidest place for a fire sprinkler, even though I knew it was there. I still jammed it with my veto bag coming up so lucky that thing hasn't popped, a hole. Yet I'm gon na take some pictures and contact their facilities department and let them know they need to be ready for that, because that thing goes off.

It's not really our fault. It's kind of stupid all right, we're back today we're going to get this guy finished up. So it's been running fine since last. I was here running with the fan.

The way that I have it bypassed so we're gon na put the new drive in and hopefully then I'm gon na blow some drains out too, because I think last time I was here, the drains were plugged up or something doesn't look like they're overflowing. This time, though, so the first step is we're going to power down the unit. We need to verify that everything is correct. It looks like it's correct.

I got the new one. I need to undo what I did and then redo what they did, and hopefully everything lines up looks like I'm gon na need some connectors, this restaurant, the AC unit. You know what, before I go any further, I'm wearing a face shield, I'm not afraid of kovat. On the roof, this thing I wear this thing this Gator around my neck all day when I'm working and I'll usually just pull it up over my face and it's actually pretty convenient, because I don't like the Sun on my skin, although in hindsight my ears are Unprotected which I got to put sunscreen on I've almost forget to put sunscreen on my ears, but I just got this Gator from like Instagram.

I don't even know who makes it I'll have to look and see, but it's alright. It's not the greatest thing in the world, but it does the job but anyways. So that's why I may sound a little bit muffled, so we're gon na power down, replace that line for line when you're doing these VFDs you've got to be ubirr, careful that you do not mix up incoming and outgoing voltage, because the drive will instantly blow up This units fire alarm is tied into this AC, so I had to let the manager know to call the fire alarm company before I powered it down, because when you power it down, there's a little resistor right in here and it's jumping between the alarm contacts. And it's approving the circuit and if that resistor gets interrupted in which it does, when you power down the unit, it sends a trouble signal to the alarm company.

So you got to make sure you know how your systems operate, even though my bag is heavy. I do appreciate it has everything that I need in it. I try not to keep too much. This is just my wrench bag.

It has my electrical screwdrivers, some screwdrivers. I can bash on their impact rated, you know, so you can beat the crap out of them and then all my other stuff, so I try not to you know, carry too much, but it has everything I need for the most part. All right now is the scary part. I always my butt clinches when I do this, because I don't know what caused this to blow up in the first place, we know there's nothing wrong with the motor, because the motors been running for a couple weeks by itself with just a contactor.

The odds are, there's nothing wrong and they just had a bad Drive. You can also tell that it's been getting very dirty, because this is the air coming out of the fan and it's I probably should have brushed that off first, but it's pretty dusty right there. So that means that it's been sucking in a lot of dirt. I really don't like these drives installed in the packaged units, but you know the customer would have to.

In my opinion they shouldn't come in packaged units. They should be installed in an electrical room downstairs. That's conditioned, I would think they would last a lot longer. That way.

Everything looks good, don't see anything scary, so we're gon na power. This guy up stand back. We always get to the side and watch your ears cuz when they blow they're loud see what happens. Knock on wood, nothing blew up yet stand back.

Man drive is speeding up now interesting, it's only running at 30 Hertz, it's probably hard to see that's the frame rate of the camera doing that, but all stages are running. That drive should be speeding up. It's a full speed, so I am gon na have to call Linux technical support and see what the deal is with that all right. So that's frustrating! After going through some stuff with tech support, we diagnosed that this board right here has got a problem.

So you know tech support people give me crap, sometimes about calling tech support, but when you're working on om, weird stuff like this, this is proprietary controller. You got to talk to tech support so anyways I told them what happened? We changed a drive. The problem is, is that the drive isn't speeding up? Okay right now, it's at 30 Hertz and the interesting thing is: if you disconnect your call for cooling, the drive will speed up to full speed. I know that's bouncing around but 58 Hertz.

So the problem I'm told, is that this board right here is jacked up and it could have been something when the drive blew up. Who knows, we also might have a bad main board, so we got to kind of take a gamble here. Do we want to just order this board, or do we want to order the main board? That's gon na be the interesting one. So I tried to call this is National Accounts, so they have a different phone number that we have to talk to.

So I tried to call national accounts parts and of course they're not there, so I'll have to deal with them tomorrow. So this one is not finished and also another thing, so you guys see that I stripped the wires right here. I actually hate it when people do that, but sometimes you've got to. I was on the phone with tech support and we satisfied on cooling.

I needed this thing jumped out quick, so I just stripped them back up. I put some tape on those because there's nothing worse than those things short now, so this sucks, I'm gon na, have to put that contactor back in all right. Well, it's wired it's running in the right direction. It looks wrong, but it's correct and we're back over here.

I'm gon na fix that contactor cover, but I left this installed for now because you got to leave the control wires installed for it to still work right and we are back again for the third time. I've got a new m2 and then whatever 133 board, or something like that for the VFD underneath there. So when I talked to tech support, we basically went through a couple diagnostic steps, and then we pulled off this cover and there's this board right here and the board did not have the proper voltage coming out. That was telling the VFD to speed up and slow down, so we were just running on low speed, the entire time he did give us the option.

He said you know it's a possibility. It's just this little add-on board, or it could be the main m2 also, and I brought it up to the customer and the customer just wanted to do them both. So hopefully we can get this done and be done with it permanently and again, like I've said before this actually flashes a display for me, but not for you guys, you can kind of see it as as fan only but powered the unit down. You got to use a flathead screwdriver and you just kind of pry on these guys.

This board cover will come off, we're not changing the display, so we just unplug it and then we're gon na unplug the wires going into the board one by one and then we'll just change the entire board, making sure that we connect everything back. This is the add-on board that was problematic and it is a 133 a 133, but we're changing this and the m2. And then, after that, we have to go through the new m2 installation where we program a model and serial number of the unit make sure everything's configured and then we'll start it up. And hopefully everything will be good.

It's a little overwhelming to see all the connectors everywhere now for the most part, I mean worst case scenario: you can trace back via the wire code to figure out what goes where, but for the most part they all linux has done a pretty good job of Making sure that they're set up with these little clips to make sure you can't put them in the wrong spot, but it is still possible. There's a couple like individual ones like this, which you can put in the wrong spot, so just got to go through carefully. Alright again I just first off I took a picture too. That's another thing you can do just to see you don't have to guess as much, but every wire is numbered.

You just have to figure out the combinations of how it plugs and there is empty spaces too, because we don't have reheat. We don't have a reverse involved, but I got everything plugged back in I'm going to plug in all the sensors. We're not going to put the thermostat input in, but we are going to put RNC well. Actually, I don't even to be honest with you, because that's just going downstairs and then we'll put the display on turn it on program it and then we'll give it a call for cooling and all that stuff.

I got a wire in the BFD. Also all right. I'm all back together, PFDs hooked in ground wire hooked up made sure I hooked up the line voltage to the line side of the load to the load because boom. If you do the opposite, everything's good, I did not hook up our and/or the thermostat, because I don't want it to call right now.

I want to handle everything. I want to program the board first, so we're gon na power this guy up now all right, we're gon na power. It up, of course, we're gon na stand out of the way, hopefully BFD says zero. Okay, it's looking good.

The unit just says restart mode right now, I'm gon na give it a second showing the software version on the board and it's showing an alarm: okay, showing an alarm air volume control setup area. So we got to go through and program it now. Man I was having some problems because I turned it on and it still wouldn't speed up to the right speed and I called tech support and the tech support. Guy said: oh yeah, you should have changed this too, and it's like dude come on.

I just got off the phone with them. They told me to change the m2 in the a-133. Didn't tell me to change this too silly, but anyways that wasn't the problem. I'm hoping I can get away without changing that, because that seems kind of silly.

But I don't know I ended up having to reap go into here. I had inputted the model in serial number, but I didn't fully input all the configurations so stupid me. I went and set the time set, the program, the fan speeds, the outdoor air, sensors and all that stuff, because essentially I installed a new air conditioner according to the circuit board, because the circuit board is the brain, so I had to reprogram the whole thing now: We've got first stage, cooling, just one LED light and we're about 42 Hertz. I know that's hard to see and then, when second stage kicks on it'll speed up to 59 Hertz.

I've already seen it so before we weren't getting that speed up and that's why. After talking to tech support, they had me changed those two boards, so we're just waiting for that to happen. I have someone downstairs flipping the thermostat on. I actually still I'm having tech support.

Call me back, but we'll see if they call me before I leave. I was kind of irritated when he told me I should have changed the display, I'm like dude, I it's not the guy's fault on the phone, but the previous guy. You know if they wanted me to change the display to this. Show that told me all right.

Girls, my second stage second stage and it just sped up to 59 Hertz, so we're good. Now, I'm gon na watch this operate for a few minutes. We're finally done with this thing and I pulled out all the old contactor and everything so we're gon na call. This one done finally, okay, they can't always be perfect right.

You know, I mean it's in the real world. Stuff happens, you don't necessarily get everything fixed on the first call. It's not always you know cookie cutter boom boom boom on this one. We ran into some problems.

Okay from the beginning, though, I did what I had to do to try to get the customer operational, because I wanted their air conditioner to work. In the meantime, I knew that this was going to take a while to get all these parts, even when it was just the VFD in the beginning. I knew I was gon na run into some issues. Okay, to clarify I kind of covered it a little bit in the beginning of the video the whole point of having a VFD in this unit.

It literally just makes the indoor blower two speeds: that's all it does okay and then it provides overload protection for the motor in California. We have an energy code called Title 24 now I know you guys are adopting this in some other parts of the country. Now too, but in essence, if this thing is running with full speed, okay in theory, that has to be enough air volume for the unit to operate with two stages. If you take the the most common, you know, rule of thumb, 400 CFM s per ton; okay! Well, if you take that calculation right and you do 15 tons, what is that 4,000 CFM's 400 times? 15 6,000 CFM's? Okay! So that's with all stages running! So if we're doing 15 tons of cooling and we have 6,000 CFM's of air moving across the evaporator coil great theoretically, we have the right amount of airflow right.

But what happens if we turn off two or three of the compressors and there's just one or two left, depending on how many stages the unit has right? Well, when you stage down to just first stage it's just one compressor running: we don't necessarily need that much air anymore and theoretically, we are pulling too much air right. You understand why we have to have that two-stage. It's like an energy thing right, because you're saving energy in essence, you're running that blower and you're moving too much air across the evaporator coal. We don't need that much air right, we're not cooling the air down properly, but you're just wasting energy.

So that's the whole theory as to why they do multistage air volume. M sev, M SAV is what Lennox calls this unit? Okay, so first stage it runs with a lower air volume. Second stage it speeds up right and on these Linux units, even though it has three or four compressors. They only operate typically as two stages, so, depending on how many it has so, this one has three compressors, so it does one compressor for first stage.

The next two compressors for second stage and then sometimes if they have like 18 ton units that have four compressors, they might do one. You know in different things. Now that's not saying that everyone's like that. Sometimes you have multistage thermostats that can do more than two stages.

Okay, so that's the whole point of having the VFD now on this one. Obviously the VF t didn't solve the problem. Now there's another thing that I didn't tell you the first time that I called technical support, and this probably makes everything make more sense. The first time I call technical support.

He had me go through some parameters before we diagnosed the faulty a-133 board and when we were doing that, we noticed that the unit no longer had a model and serial numbers stored inside of it and a lot of the other parameters that belong in the circuit Board were missing, okay, so something happened within the board that caused it to lose its memory and also blew up the drive so something funky was going on. They probably had some sort of a power issue, but on the flip side, if they had a power issue, why didn't they have the same problem with the other units too? It's hard to say: okay, regardless by the time the third time came around I put in the new board, I reprogrammed everything, a hundred percent. The unit has now been working for about a week and a half two weeks, so all is well. The customer is happy.

I did the best that I could. Okay, I'm not perfect, I don't always get it on the first call. You know it is what it is. I really really appreciate you guys taking the time to watch these videos.

You guys notice that that behind me that merge pile is getting lower right guys. I release the merch. I thank you guys so very much. I think, within a week I've put in 90 something orders, I'm so humbled by that guys.

I never even I thought it was the silliest thing with me ordering these shirts. It just seemed odd to me when someone originally asked me here: you're gon na do merch. I was like no I'm not interested in that. It just seems silly to me, but I decided to do it and you guys are awesome.

So thank you guys so very much if any of you are interested just go to my website, HVAC our videos comm all the informations on there. Okay, do me a favor if you haven't already please consider subscribing to the channel, it really really does help me out. You can support the channel via my website buying some merch. You can also support the channel by going to true tech tools.

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So long as I can get off work in time. I'll go, live on YouTube and we'll talk about all these videos and talk about the merch and whatever else you guys want to talk about. Ok, we'll catch you guys next time.