This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition. Today, we've got an ice machine, that's given them a high pressure cut out. We got to figure out why and what's going on, this machine's actually been down before the whole virus and it just got put off so we're going to figure out. What's going on, they've got a properly operating machine next to it, they're just low on production.

Basically, the machine has a very um unique smell about it, but it's probably because it's had standing water in it for a very long time, definitely going to need a sanitizing, but look at the evaporator there's a nice layer of scale on it too. You can see this is a somewhat new machine and you can see that white tone to the evap color, that's all scale, so we definitely need to do a clinging on this guy um. This guy has a uv bulb. Those need to be changed.

People leave every six months and there's two of them on this so and this was installed in 2014, so this customer doesn't have a cleaning company that changes them. Some customers do so we need to talk to them about some new uv bulbs. For this guy, too. All right well we're going to try to diagnose this before we do a cleaning, because it doesn't look like the cleaning issue is the problem water filters.

Look like. Let's see, i don't know which one's which, because there's three filters there. Some of these are for soda. Some of these are for ice machines.

I think, but this one is bypassed. You see that one shut off that one shut off and it has a bypass valve. I would think just by guessing that this is the ice machine just based on the scale build up there. That's another thing: they need to get this filter situation figured out.

Okay - let's look at this, so when you have the air, do the right air left arrow high pressure, control fault - it's happened. 999 times gives you a couple issues that it could possibly be, and you go right here to clear alert exit. Okay, so we're in a high pressure cut out delay. What that means is that the high pressure control theoretically is open, so we need to start on the roof, because that's where the high pressure control is not really looking forward to this one.

This i've shown some stuff, but this is a greasy roof. Now recently, i went through and kind of cleaned myself with coil cleaner, but you know it's still nasty up here. All this is grease. I don't want to step in any of that, but this is my ice machine condenser what's interesting.

I know this machine's been down for a long time, but it's still got refrigerant in the accumulator. That's interesting! That's the left machine. I can tell just because the right machine has a communication wire. The left machine is the new indigo next and they don't have the calm wires.

All right, we're gon na get this guy opened up, get the top pulled off right with the top pulled off um. Now remember we're looking for a reason that the high pressure control would not or would would open, basically um, but preliminary just opening up this accumulator looks very oily and manitowoc are prone to rusted out accumulators causing refrigerant leaks and man. That sure feels like oil. So we're not going to ignore that we'll dig into that.

But again the issue at hand is a high pressure switch, so we're going to go ahead and gauge up now. This is a manitowoc machine. Normally putting gauges on an ice machine is an absolute last resort, but i don't see the condenser being plugged. It might be dirty, but it doesn't look plugged from the outside um and we're trying to figure it out.

So we got to get high pressure on the flip side. This unit takes like 12 pounds, if not more 15 pounds of gas, so putting gauges on here isn't going to hurt anything. I applied some service gauges uh, it's a 404, a ice machine. We clearly should not have a high pressure situation right now, so we need to get into the control section and verify if the high pressure switch is actually engaged.

So that's just low pressure and it's pumping down because this is a pump down system. So it will do that when the low pressure slowly bleeds up, it'll pump down consistently, but we need to figure out why we have a high pressure lockout in the controls section. You can also follow their schematic, it'll kind of tell you a few things, but we have a high pressure control and a fan cycle control. Now i do need to be careful because this does have high voltage in it and by me moving wires out of the way.

I don't want to short anything out. Um. Let's see, that's, let's just check three phase, so we've got 204.7. 205.

204 point okay. So we have three-phase power now we need to figure out which one of these is fan cycle uh looks like this has been changed before because there's a pinch off uh, very common failure as the fan cycle switches on these guys. So we need to look into that, but the high pressure's in the back this unit has a 24 volt control system. There's a 24 volt transformer down here.

It's really important that you make sure that that transformer is tapped correctly. I'm pretty sure this one is but we're gon na test voltage. If it's not tapped correctly, you can have some voltage and consistencies when it gets uh hot outside, but um. We have 27 volts coming out of the transformer.

So that's a good sign. Then what we're going to do is we're going to check to see if the high pressure control we've got a little terminal block right here see if the high pressure control is open now manitowoc does some funky stuff with their control voltage, doesn't look like the high Pressure control is open. Let's check from hpc2 yeah, it doesn't look like high pressure. Control is open at this point.

What we need to do is reset the machine and just give it a watch and see what happens connected via bluetooth up to the roof on measure. Quick, so we're watching high side and the low side. I just came down here and turned it on and off which kind of doesn't make sense because it still said high pressure cut out very interesting, but we're driving up our head pressure awfully high right now. Condenser fan motor should be turning on here.

Any second and it's not, which makes me wonder if we got a fan cycle issue, condenser fan motor is not running. Fan cycle switch should be turning it on. That's this guy right here interesting. So it's about to go off on high head pressure, probably right now, 397 399 - i'm not gon na - have enough time to jump it out.

So what we need to do is figure out which side - okay, i think i can figure it out - we'll probably have to get it for the next round. I'm gon na try to do this real quick. This is a mess and i'm surprised the high pressure control hasn't kicked out yet 440 psi i'd. Imagine it would have kicked out by now.

Um, oh it's 450, so it should be kicking out here. Any second there's: 454. 460. yeah! That's a problem that high pressure control should have kicked out by now.

What is going on here there we go: okay, wow, 463 um. I got to turn the power off to this and redo this. This this wiring is such a mess. I was going to pull it off real, quick and connect it to the contactor, but i know my limits and like this is tied in knots down here and it's just a cluster f.

So i'm going to turn off power clean this up. So i can safely move around in here. We're going to bypass the fan cycle, switch, make sure the condenser fan motor works and if that's the case, then we'll go further, that's certainly a little bit easier to troubleshoot. Now i went ahead and eliminated a lot of the excess wiring in there just kind of zip tied it up, fan cycle switches.

You know you can access it now, it's much easier. This way i'm going to go ahead and reset the unit turn power back on and we'll finish our diagnosis. Oh also, it was easier to just replace the contactor, because i didn't have the lugs for this eight gauge wire, so this one had screws. I didn't have the little fittings for it, so i just grabbed a 24 volt contactor that had lugs.

It was much easier rather than going to the hardware store to get the little ends, and it's not just the standard yellow ends, because this is eight gauge wire. So it would have been much bigger, so it's easier just to throw on a new contactor, the contactor for sure wasn't the problem but 280. So we should be closed on our fan cycle switch and our fan cycle switch is open. So the fan cycle is the problem.

I'm gon na, swap it out real quick. So what i did was, i just took the wire off of the fan cycle, switch put it onto the contact to reset the machine downstairs and now our condenser fan motor is running. So we know that we have a bad fan cycle switch because that fan cycle switch should be 200. I just read it on there.

It says cut out at 200, so whenever the head pressure gets to uh 200, the fan cycle switch is going to open and stop the condenser fan motor and then, whenever the head pressure gets to 250, it's going to close and turn on the condenser fan motor. But why did the fan cycle switch fail more than likely because it's a factory fan cycle switch and they have a lot of problems with these guys. This guy's allowed to run 1.2 amps we're right at 1.2 amps. We are 1.28, but i'll give them that much.

We're going to go ahead and replace that fan cycle switch okay and uh we're going to do them a a service here, because that is a factory fan cycle switch. I can clearly see that it's been pinched off and replaced. That means it was a warranty repair. Those things fail like no tomorrow, i always advocate to use oem parts whenever possible, but there is certain instances that i know i'm going to save the customer money by not putting in an oem part because uh that thing is just going to continue to fail.

We're going to put an aftermarket fan cycle switch on this guy. It's gon na be a bolt-on. It's just gon na you'll see when i get it all done, and it's gon na solve that problem. But we don't know if that's the only problem, but we know we need to solve that before.

We can go any further. Make sure that when you're doing the threads on these, you take a drop of nylog and you're gon na put it right here: okay, just the tiniest bit, pull the flare nut out the tiniest bit of nylon right there. Okay, then you're just gon na spin, the flare nut and all you're doing is lubricating the mating surface. Because if you don't know when you tighten a flare, you'll see that little piece in between twist when it gets super tight and the nylog allows you to spin the flare nut tight without twisting that top piece.

Okay and then i'm going to take a drop of nylog and put it right here, which is where the pressure controls, um flare nut, is going to go, see this flare that capillary right there and then i'm going to put a drop on this thread right here Too, so that way we get a nice tight flare on this guy. Okay, right here same thing: this one's easy because you can pull the whole flare nut back and what you really want to lubricate is right in here about a quarter inch above the nut right. There so that way, this part of the nut that gets down there spins on the nylog and it doesn't bind up on the metal, nice and good. What we're going to do is we're going to twist this on and it is going to pre.

Uh refrigerant is going to escape just the tiniest bit because we're doing a hot connection here. This schrader depressor is going to go on there and then there's going to be a schrader here for accessing the system. But i got to put the flare nut from that. Guy on this guy first, our system is back on.

It should be pumping down right now. I'll have to have someone reset. It downstairs, let's see if the which one shuts off first, the system or the fan cycle fan cycle turned on about 260. and yeah.

It looks like a pump down, so i'm gon na have someone reset it downstairs and then we'll watch it turn on and off there. It goes and let's see where it turns off at we go. We shut off around 200 and we should be turning on coming in here. There we go 270., so i'm good with that.

I'm not too worried about it. We're going to let the system go and operate for a little while and i'm going to finish, diagnosing everything. But now we have a properly operating fan cycle, switch, capillary, safe electrical, safe cleaned up easier to troubleshoot and we're going to look into that possible refrigerant leak. The machine is in a harvest right now, and i wanted to talk about something operating pressures when it's in a freeze cycle is between 200 250 and higher suction pressure is usually around 40 30 somewhere in there right now, it's in a harvest and it uses cool Vapor off the top of the receiver, so you see the high suction pressure and the hot.

You know low discharge pressure. Now the fan has to shut off the head pressure control valve, which is tucked back over there or headmaster whatever you want to call it. That's an oroa valve is very important right now to maintain that higher than normal uh pressure on the high side, because we're using cool vapor out of the top of the receiver. At the same time, the fan cycle switch has to be operating too.

So you don't ever want to bypass the fan cycle switch. The machine will not operate properly, especially when the outdoor air temperatures get low. Okay, because it has to shut off that condenser to drive up the head pressure and also flood the condenser with the head pressure control valve for it to work properly. So this machine looks like one side of the evaporator has dropped ice, and now it looks like it's knowing the operation.

It's it's coming back into. Freeze mode right now, condenser fan motor should turn back on in a minute. Suction pressure is going to drop, um 140 uh discharge pressure, and it's actually i'm trying to think where i'm at yeah that's discharge pressure, 140, psi discharge pressure is a hair on the low side for these manitowoc machines. It could mean two things.

I typically see that, especially on older machines, because the compressors are somewhat inefficient. In my opinion, um, but also the manitowoc tech specs book tells you to maintain, like i believe it's like 160 head pressure or something like that in a harvest, but i hardly ever see 160. I always usually see around 140 ish, sometimes a little bit lower. We could have a refrigerant leak or it could just be normal operation.

We're gon na watch this machine cycle a few more times and then before i leave, i'm gon na do a leak check on that accumulator. I went ahead and took my wire brush and scrubbed. The heck out of that, because if there was like even the closest potential leak source, i wanted to make it and exploit it and make it bigger. So i scrubbed it real good with the metal brush pulled all the excess paint off that was already peeling off, and it actually doesn't look that bad once i've done that, let's just hit this guy.

With this i mean the pressures weren't horrendous. Surprisingly, it could have just been uh dirt on top of that moisture that potentially was causing the leak let's hit underneath it's another common place is on the underside, i'm not picking up any leaks, so, let's hit the suction filter too. This is not a dryer by the way, and you guys don't want to go and get aftermarket components for these always want to get the factory suction filter. If you can, it's not made for the pressure drop that a dryer can create, i'm not picking anything up.

So we're going to go ahead and tell them to keep an eye on it. Watch the machine make ice. A couple more batches, probably call this one done. One last thing i wanted to point out: this is a pump down system.

This has a low pressure, a high pressure, a contactor, but it doesn't work like a conventional pump down system that low pressure control does not turn on the contactor that low pressure control goes to the circuit board. The circuit board controls everything to prove it. We're at 134 psi and my system is not turned on yet because the board is not telling us to turn on all right. This one was shot back, i wan na, say in june june or july um.

It was right after we were starting to come out of the first lockdown and the customer called, and they you know it had been down for that month and a half or whatever that we were locked down. So you know they. They never approved us to clean. It that visit, but we ended up, doing a pm like a couple weeks later and then we went ahead and cleaned the ice machine and got it.

You know back to where it didn't smell, so funky anymore gross. Those things can do that when they have that standing water in it. So i'm a big advocate for using oem components, especially when it comes to you know, reaching coolers and ice machines and stuff. But this is one of those things where, if you guys work on the manitowoc ice machines, you totally know what i'm talking about with these fan cycle switches.

It is so stupid ridiculous. How many fan cycle switches you go through when these machines are under warranty? I mean i'm not joking with you, you can have a machine, most most ice machines have a three year parts and labor warranty, and you might change three fan cycle switches within those three years, if not more, it's ridiculous, so you're doing the customer service. If you sell them in after market control, like i did um realistically, that control will exceed the life of that ice machine, i mean as long as no crazy stuff happens. You know so um understanding the sequence of operation is very important on these ice machines, too.

Uh, you know i'm very familiar with manatox. If you throw a scotsman or an isomatic in front of me, you know i'm probably not as familiar and i'm probably going to stumble a little bit more, but the manitowoc. You know i'm really keen to what their quarks are and knowing you know, what's going to happen here and how the sequence of operation works. So you know understanding that stuff really helps you to be able to diagnose.

Now, to be honest with you, i knew what was wrong with it. I kind of had an idea that we already had a fan cycle switch right when i walked up, but for the sake of going through the troubleshooting steps and and making you know, helping other people. Basically, i went through the steps to kind of show. Okay.

This is the process. This is what happens. This is why this happens. Um understand that these videos, while i know that um you guys watch these and you enjoy them, but really they're for my employees, that's the whole reason why i started these videos in the first place is they're for my employees.

So that way they can see. Like look, this is the troubleshooting steps that we go through. These are the things that we see. You know the whole birth of this youtube channel started with before i started making these videos.

I we meet in our shop every morning and you know mondays. Usually, everybody would come in and i'd talk to them about the previous week and like hey, i went on this really difficult service call and i used to you know: try to explain them to them, and i decided one day like hey, you know, it'd be so Much easier, if i just filmed this and then showed it to the guys - and that was the birth of the youtube channel in general. So you know, when you see me going through things like, i already know how they work, but i'm doing this for the sake of being able to show a video to train another person, essentially to say hey. This is the little quirks of this ice machine or something okay, so um, but i'm not trying to say like i know everything i mean i get stumped all the time on this stuff, so i get my ass handed to me more times than not so you Know i'm i'm definitely not perfect um.

I really really appreciate you guys taking the time, especially those you that make it to the end um. You know uh, there's a couple different ways that you guys can support the channel um. One of the easiest ways is, if you guys are considering purchasing any tools go to truetechtools.com. I have enough an offer code.

Basically, if you use the word big picture, one word put it in at the end where the discount code is you'll, save eight percent. On your order, i get a small commission from that. Another way. Excuse me.

I just got like a frog in my throat uh. If you guys have tools that you know you know, you're gon na purchase this or whatever shoot me an email, and i can generate an affiliate link for that tool. Okay, that'll actually benefit me a little bit more you'll still save your eight percent, but i get a little bit more of a commission by you guys using my affiliate link on top of the offer code. So please, if you guys, are considering that do so um.

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I really really appreciate it. Remember i do live streams monday evening, 5 p.m, pacific work permitting and then also i go live on the hvac overtime channel with my buddies friday evenings 605 ish pm, pacific time, um or west coast time. We go live on youtube on friday nights just to kind of bs and talk about different things, so definitely go over to the hvac overtime youtube channel subscribe to it. That way, you guys get the notifications and all that stuff.

Okay, uh again. Thank you. So very much and we will catch you guys on the next one: okay.