This video is brought to you by Sportland Quality, integrity and tradition. All right. we got a call on an AC not working. Now here's the deal.

When I got here, the manager on duty doesn't know much about it. He says I think it might be this AC that doesn't help me much now. What I'm going to do in a few minutes I'm going to have him call the manager that actually placed the service call but first just to kind of do a little walk through real quick. What I did was I went down to all their thermostats and I turned on every AC Okay, got every AC running and I'm just kind of doing a quick little rundown before.

I get other people involved this AC is running I have hot discharge. Doesn't mean it's working right? This AC is not running at all this AC right here and these are the dining room ones right? This and that are the kitchen I'm going to check those but those aren't what I'm really concerned cuz they said it was in the dining room. This is a bar AC um this one right here. Just knowing this location does have a problem because you're not going to be able to see this, but it's saying compressor number one low pressure.

Okay, so it's off on low pressure for compressor one. that's for their bar. this one right here is their other dining room and it's cooling and it has a good TD I mean relatively good, right? That's just a the The temperature differential across the evaporator is just a ballpark figure. Just kind of a rule of thumb thing.

but that doesn't mean the unit's working properly. So I'm just looking for Vital Signs So this one has a low pressure code. This one's not running at all. This would be their front entry and this controls a good portion of the restaurant.

So I'm actually going to start on this one. figure out why it's not running because the thermostat should be calling it's funny. like as I'm in the trade longer and longer I can see equipment being phased out I Can remember when these Lenux Epic units were like new right? late 80s, early to mid90s and then they went to the L Series units which more or less that unit right There is the L Series unit. and then you have the newer energence units and you know the new Prodigy controllers and stuff.

But this guy's a dinosaur and I mean judging by the age of the equipment and just how beat down it is, the whole base is Rusted Look at this condenser. It's just completely disintegrated and when you touch it, it just flakes away like yeah. I Wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this unit's not off on high head pressure on a high pressure safety just because you can't even clean, that condenser just disintegrates. Um, but yeah on these older units.

Uh, the control sections down here in the blower assembly and then the labelings on the back of that panel. So don't lose that panel. But I'll open that up and we'll see if we got control voltage coming in if I'm doing this correctly. Uh, it's hard to find the common in this guy.

but I believe it's this brown wire right here. Um, but if I'm doing this correctly, let's see. Uh, see, Y1 has voltage 24 volts. Let's see where Y2 is Y 2.

See, they don't tell you on here. Uh, Y 2 should be 12. So 12 should be this black one. And let's go ahead and test that.

Y 2 has voltage too. So we're calling for first and second stage Cooling and we're not cooling. Um I bet you anything. let me get this cover on and we'll push these high pressure switches.

I Bet you the unit turns on all right. Coming down here, that indoor blower needs a rebuild. It's got bad bearings. so coming down here we have two high pressure controls.

one right here. There's one compressor and then the other one right there. So both the high pressure switches were tripped and the condenser fan motor is not running. What's going on with that? Let's get something to.

Oh there there it goes. It just turned on. So let's put this panel on. We'll get some gauges and we'll gauge up all right.

I Pulled off the hail guards cuz it's just silly being able to have those on there in general cuz we don't get hail here, but they're just in my way. Um, condenser fan motor is running at 2.96 amps. It's allowed to run 3.4 so it's not over amping. Condenser certainly doesn't look good.

Let's have a look and see what measure Qui has to say here. Um, just a software that I'm using with my field piece jobling probe so the first stage compressor does not look too bad. Super heat doesn't look bad. Sub coolings a hair on the high side.

not bad though. 81 ambient for something this old. I'm not too worried about it. Okay, let's go to: Circuit Two circuit two superheats on the low side.

Um. sub coolings a hair on the low side. but it doesn't show me anything. That's saying it was going off on high head pressure.

approach. temperature is way out of whack there. um temperature split across the unit is about 19. It's is a 7 and 1/2 ton unit.

I Mean we're putting out the delivered capacity I'm not seeing a reason for this thing to go off on high pressure, but I'm going to go ahead and bring some hoses up here and we're going to go Ahad and rinse this condenser just cuz I know it probably needs to be rinsed and we'll have to do it from the inside out. but I don't know why this thing was off on high pressure for both circuits too. That to me indicates maybe a condenser fan motor problem. Um, you know what? we could do I Got to shut it down Anyways, let's go ahead and shut it down.

Um, and check the capacitor. We'll check the run capacitor for the condenser fan mot to see if something funky is going on in there. I Had to do a double take because this is a 20 microfarad capacitor plus or minus 6% 1976 is what we're measuring using the battery and the meter. That doesn't seem too bad.

Um, but what's tripping me out is for something to trip. The head pressure controls on both compressors indicates that maybe the condenser fan motor was not working. So what's causing the condenser fan motors not to turn on? Now one thing I will say now this is a really old unit. Okay, but this unit does have fan cycling now.

Is it just temperature or is it pressure? I Think it's pressure? um and I think it's this guy right here. Oh, both fan Cycles are going together I Think these are the fan. Cycles So it's possible that maybe a fan cycle switch isn't working and um, condens fan motor is not turning on and it's causing it to trip High Head pressure. The refrigerant pressures don't seem that bad like the condenser.

It's dirty, but it doesn't look like oh my gosh, this is the cause. So I'm going to go and clean that and we're going to consider getting rid of the fan cycle switches on this unit temporarily just because we don't know what's causing this issue. Um, this customer is going to have to replace this unit. This unit is just dead pretty much, but we got to get them up and running.

So I'm going to go get my coil cleaning stuff. We're going to give this guy a cleaning and then we'll look into those fan cycle switches. Now this is a double Road condenser really should split it, but with the shape I'm kind of afraid to pull this thing apart because it still has refrigerant in it. So I'm just going to do my best to wash it, rinse it.

I'm going to rinse it from the inside out, try to get a lot of this Gunk and goo. and then I've got some uh of the yellow Viper Venom pack right there and we'll get in there and get it in the middle. but yeah, in order to split it, you got to pull the top off the unit, separate the condenser over here, stretch it out so you can get in between it which I'm sure it's dirty, but I mean look at at just how bad that is. I'm just afraid we're just going to cause a leak if we do that.

So I wet down the entire condenser and then now I've got some of the yellow Venom pack and we're just applying it and we're just going to let it sit on there I'll apply it from the inside out also I already got it on this side just getting it all up into here. and the cool stuff about this is it's not going to really damage the condenser anymore cuz it's just soap and water so we just got to be careful. and I got to get inside with the coil gun and I'll spray the inside of that guy too if possible. It's not always possible, but if possible, washing from the inside is the best way, especially on these ones that are all damaged.

So I've got my big wand and we're just rinsing out the coil a little bit out of time. Just work your way up and you can see you can get right into here where it's all damaged and you would otherwise just destroyed the coil further. You can actually wash it and still allow air to flow through it. So one of these wands is instrumental for that.

and I just picked it up at like the hardware store they have them just in the garden section. All right this AC see the longer I let it run, it's all cleaned up. It's drying out right now and we're back in running. but the longer that I let it run the more.

I I Hear like a metallic sound coming from this condenser fan motor. It's running, but I can just hear this bearing sound coming out of it. We are definitely rejecting some good heat right now. Um I'm starting to question whether or not the bearings are going out in this motor and the long that it runs, the tighter they're going to get and be problematic.

So we're probably going to recommend a condenser fan motor for this guy. Um, we did our best to clean it I'm going to leave the hail guards off cuz there's no point they need to replace this unit. This unit's just beat down. It's going to suck though cuz it's not going to be like a super quick change out because it's a side shot and the new unit will sit on a curb adapter.

I Mean it's not going to be the end of the world, but it's not going to be a quick you know, slam dunk. Um, sub cools a hair high now the older Linux they wanted you to use um the the liquid Wells and they wanted you to check basically um, uh, approach temperature but this one. The approach on the first stage seems a little bit on the low side to me just a little bit. But the interesting thing is my sub cooling's high and that's true liquid pressure.

Uh, if we go to the second stage, sub cooling's really low 2.8 de almost like it's slightly undercharged and approach temperatures high. but I don't know if I'm really going to be adjusting the charge on this guy. it's I think doing the best that it can. Uh, this is R22 um I'm going to talk to the customer and see what they want to do.

At a minimum, we need to put a condenser fan motor on it um and then go from there I Went ahead and took the condenser fan motor out of the fan cycling low ambient kit because I just didn't know if there was a problem within that relay. This unit's just really, really, really old. so um, yeah, that's pretty much it. Condensers are cleaned.

They want me to look at their bar Ac2 which is this one right here. The one that had a low circuit or low refrigerant charge I may or may not get to that I need to take a lunch and see what my calls are looking like right now because I've been here for quite a while so that's it on this one. Um, tripped high pressure controls. Not 100% sure I'm confident in what caused it.

Condenser was a little bit dirty. You can see that it's deteriorated though to where it's not allowing a lot of air flow through. I'm suspect of the fan cycling switches, so I took those out. it's the middle of summer, we don't need those right now and altogether this unit is just beat down and in dire need of replacement.

Second stage might be slightly low on refrigerant um, but I'm not really going to do a whole lot on this one right now, so that's it for this one. It has been about a week since I was last here on this unit and it's still running. It hasn't tripped the high pressure control again. Um, so maybe it looks like the problem might have been in those fan Cycles switches which I kind of took a educated guess on and took them out of the picture.

so that should get us some time for now. I Really want them to replace this unit and that buys us a little more time to get a unit ordered and work on getting that replaced. So you know? Uh, I've got a lot of equipment that's about this age in this area. That particular part of Southern California has a lot of beat down equipment from the I think this was from like '94 I think or something like that.

Um, I'd have to look at the serial number, but I'm pretty sure it's like the 94 is era. Uh, but it's just time to replace that. You know? we've changed a few of the units at this restaurant, but there's still two of them that are original and uh, they really need to replace them both now. I'm talking to the customer.

Uh, this one. We actually never changed the condenser fan motor I just pulled those fan cycle switches out and this made it through the rest of the summer. This was filmed in August No yeah, this was filmed in August we're now into October They have really haven't had any other problems with it. Um, but uh, we're gonna I'm talking them into putting in humiditrol units from Linux because we had a lot of humidity problems this summer which we have them every summer but this year we had more humidity than we've had in the past.

We had a uh Tropical Storm come through and then we just had just more humidity than normal. And what we're finding is these restaurants aren't as busy as they used to be. Okay because a lot of the has been oversaturated with restaurants so they don't get the customer base that they used to get where they would fill up the restaurants every single night. Their equipment is massively oversized for that building.

Okay, it is just the equipment on the commercial side. They tend to oversize everything and we can't control the humidity in the building. A good majority of the time we will have 60% relative humidity inside the building when we've only got 40% outside. Um, so what I want to do is I want to talk them into putting humiditrol units for uh, the two that I want to replace right now I want to do two of these units and uh, that'll help a little bit.

but then we also want to work on our staging. Uh, set up the thermostat so that way we have longer times between first and second stage. Maybe we can get majority of the building to run on first stage. for most of the time so we can actually have longer run times.

Dehumidify more? Uh, they also have some air balance issues here. I've got some other footage where I was like finding all these problems but I don't know how well I can turn it into an actual video because it's a lot of just like walking around playing with things. But in a nutshell, they had a makeup air unit that wasn't working made the building really negative. so they were pulling in outside air every time they opened a door.

Then on top of that, they have massively oversized equipment. A lot of the equipment first and second stages jump together, so first and second stage compressors come on at the same time. Typically we see that in restaurants a lot of times because they have bad thermostat wires, you know, you know, or whatever. But anyways, there's a lot of work to be done.

I'm again in the process of talking them into putting two at least two humiditrol units in. there. humiditrol is just a Linux unit that has uh, reheat in it basically, so it just helps a little bit to control the humidity. Longer run times, more dehumidification so we'll see, we'll see where it goes.

but you know, sometimes we we go in here and we just have to use uh, our knowledge and make educated guesses. So this equipment's trashed right? But it has to be operating as best as possible. Cleaned it went through I'm like, you know I don't know what the problem was, but then you know I kind of had a hunch and I was like man. I'm going to take those fan cycle switches out of the picture and when I did that, we didn't have any more problems.

And we had ridiculously hot days after that, right? So we never had any more nuisance trips or anything. so pretty confident it was the fan cycle switches. but obviously they need to change the unit too. So I really appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video listening to my rambling.

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