It's gon na be another hot day out here in the valley. The mornings are always so like misleading. It looks beautiful out there and it's the temperature's, not bad either. It's like probably 80 85 degrees right now, but i think it's supposed to get about 115 today, but then on the roof.

You can usually add 5 to 10 degrees depending on the particular roof. So let's get it! This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition. All right. This is our problem child right here, it's a kitchen ac.

I was here working on another ac recently and this guy was not running. I did not spend any time troubleshooting. All that i did was the manager said it was warm. I walked over to it.

I didn't feel anything running indoor, blower, motor or anything. I did not open control panels or anything. I simply switched the on and off to potentially try to reset any safeties and then made sure that a breaker wasn't tripped. That is the only troubleshooting i did now.

Normally i wouldn't do that, but it was a really hot day and i had no patience. It was that 120 degree day video that i made so i had no patience wasn't going to spend any time on it, so we had them issue an actual service request and we came out today and we're going to go through this guy and see if we Can figure out potentially what is going wrong? So we open it up and we have no power. Um doesn't look like the transformers tripped. I haven't gotten my meter out yet uh yeah.

This is a three-phase unit. We opened up the indoor blower assembly just to see what that looked like this thing is greasy as all get up right now. That's gon na need to be degreased at some point. That's not good, but um.

Okay, we're gon na get the meter out and start checking voltages. All right. Let's go ahead and check. Voltage looks like nothing, something something so we're probably gon na have a blown fuse.

Let's go and open up this disconnect switch. Let's see what we got going on in here, so this is incoming power boy. This is a 208 volt system, three phase so 99, one to two 211, two to three and one to three 106.: what the heck all right, let's check to ground 19 volts to ground. That is a trip.

Let's keep going over 120 120. there's something funky going on here. All right. We need to go downstairs to the breaker panel and see what's going on down there all right, this labeling could be all messed up, but i believe that this is our breaker right here.

So we're going to go ahead and test it. It's not tripped! There's nothing tripped in the panel, certainly messy, but i've seen worse, so we're going to test voltage out the breaker and see if that's where the issue's at all right, here's what we got going on! Um, it is this breaker, so 211 phase, b to c phase a to b, we've got 99 volts in phase a to c. We have 106 and then, if you go to the bus bar right here, you got proper voltage, proper voltage, proper voltage. So the problem is the breaker we're going to go and put the panel back together and then we'll reset it.

I don't want to reset it with it off just in case it blows up or something so we're gon na put that on reset it see if we can get it to reset real, quick and then uh we'll have to get him to get an electrician to Change this, i also would like to see that breaker go up in size if there's room, although that wire is only 10 gauge, because there's 45 amp fuses in the unit, it's only a 30 amp breaker, but it's minimum 30 maximum 45. So all right, i turned it on and off a bunch of times, and i actually got it to give us the right voltage now more than likely. In my experience they get full of sand here because we are in the desert. 200.

211. 213. Still, though, look at that voltage drop 202 to 11 213, but um we're going to try to fire this guy up and see if we can at least just test the unit out to make sure there's nothing else going on. So we're gon na close this and i did check the fuses already too close this flip it on see what happens see if we can at least get something going on here.

No because we're not even lighting up on this yeah something's funky here yeah, i don't think this thing's gon na reset yeah. That's weird: it's got like zero volts. What the heck yeah! I don't! I don't think you can handle a load. Let's test this again, 98 yeah see it can't handle a load going back to its normal goofy self, so that breaker is definitely toasted.

Yeah yep yep all right. Well, i have the manager trying to get the electrician out here right now. I told him i'll be i'll stay for an hour if they can get the electrician out without an out within an hour. We've got a couple other things to do so, while we were up here the other day, we noticed that um one of these drains was overflowing right here.

It was just overflowing out the trap and we had the hose. So we tried to blow it out and when we blew this out, it blew over into this drain. So i had someone cover up that drain and then i blew it out again and it felt like it broke free and then all of a sudden it was blowing out over in that drain, so they're all interconnected underneath so we've got a plugged up main. So we're going to go ahead and clear that right now and then hopefully the electrician will be here by then this is one of their drains and it's it's full.

So a couple of them have been ran to the roof drains, not very well, but see this right here. If you look at this good gosh, what the heck this one's ran over here, like a tweaker, got up here. Look at that tweaker got up here and broke the drain line all right. Well, we might as well fix this today too.

That's silly, okay! Well, the first thing we do is we disconnect these guys and we're gon na blow out this main? What we do is we go to all the drains that are connected and you tape them off, so they can't go anywhere okay, and we did that for multiple acs and then you come over here and tape, this guy to it and then we're gon na go Downstairs and try to find the outlet and we're just gon na let this run and we should get a drain snake. If i can find the outlet there, we go all that's filling that drain out. It's all! Coming from that, so we went ahead and cleared this too, because i didn't want to wait for a plumber to come. What was happening was it had this primary and then it had that secondary screen and it just kept getting plugged up with gunk.

So we got the shop back cleared it out uh. I don't got all the fancy tools, so i just hooked a towel to this and blew that drain really good for a while with that drain, we're blowing out another ac right now. So once we got the main cleared, it's not bad! You can see just the chunks coming out we're just moving from ac to ac, to make sure that our lines are 100 clear, i'm trying to stall because we're waiting for the electrician to get here. I don't know if he's gon na show or not um, i mean i'll turn the unit back on.

I just don't know if there's any other problems, so what we're gon na do we're gon na give it another hour, so we're gon na go ahead and pull the top. We got two people here: anyways we're gon na pull the top clean the condenser and give the evaporator a rinse tighten up the belt because we can do that while we're waiting for power - and if he's not here by the time we get done with that, then We'll just bounce got the whole top off. The condenser is really not that bad, but we went ahead and split it anyways. It's only dirty where it was not getting air flow, but like down in here.

It's not bad down there, but we're still gon na go through and give it a good rinse try to get it as good as possible, and then i'm gon na get some cleaner on this evaporator, because it's got some grease on. It got to be really careful. Okay, the condenser coil did not need any cleaner, it was just sand, we rinsed it all out. That's cool, there's no need to put cleaner on it, but the evaporator's got grease okay, but i had to use the blue cleaner, but the blue cleaner has some fumes to it.

So you got to be very careful. You don't want to do it on a dining room, ac with customers in building. Luckily, this is a kitchen ac they've got exhaust fans running we're not going to have a problem, but i'm just spraying it on letting it sit for the minute. It is this one.

The blue, viper brightener uh, so we're using that and then, when we're done, we're gon na do the evap cleaner and then we'll sanitize it with the strike back cleaner, so um we're just letting it sit. We'll have to do a couple. Rinses get some of that grease off uh started on the c setting as in charlie, so at that yummy, greasy goodness all coming out of there yum for the big nasty grease. I take this wire brush once the cleaner's been sitting on there and just kind of brush it off and we'll clean it up.

But it helps to get this big stuff off, because it's going to take forever for the cleaner to get all that so just break it down with the brush get all these spots where the filter creases are, and everything just try not to destroy the condenser. If you can or evaporator, i should say just waiting for it to drain, do another rinse but check this out. I was looking at this. I thought this was a piston, but it's not.

It still has the fixed orifice metering devices in here like the little accurators. So they went mechanical connection coming out the dryer into that. That is weird huh. Why would they do that? That seems like a mechanical fitting would cost them more.

When it comes to production, it doesn't make changing the fixed orifice metering device any easier. I don't understand that, because yeah, you can clearly still see that there's little pistons in here, where they usually are. So what the heck is that about. That is weird.

If uh, that isn't a fire hazard, i don't know what is that's insane, how much this heat exchange this heating's gon na get disconnected permanently because they don't ever use it here. Anyways, but still that's that's bad. They need to do something about this grease, so we're gon na degrease that guy real, quick um, i'm on my last rinse, letting this sit one more time on this guy. It is gon na be a miracle if this thing's not out of balance man.

This thing is so nasty i'm having to like fill it up and soak the wheel, it's just so caked with it's about as good as that evaporator's gon na get. This thing is kind of a piece of junk um. I'm gon na grab some sanitizer, which i don't know where i'll put it. Oh, it's right here grab some sanitizer real, quick and we'll give this guy a couple sprays down and then we'll start assembling it we're still cleaning the indoor blower assembly so should be good.

Get some on the other side, let's brace them from over. Here too. It's amazing that is such a fire hazard. They know they have a hood problem here.

I've been telling them forever. They need to get their hoods replaced because they're just really old and they're not made for all the equipment that they have so the kitchen's really greasy - and this is what happens - just destroys everything uh, i'm pretty confident. This blower wheel is going to vibrate, but we're probably going to have to have them change it, because this thing is just i mean it came pretty clean, but still it's there's so much grease in there. It's insane they got to fix these kitchen problems but drains clear, coils, clean those filters too.

When we pulled them out, they look like they were wet and we couldn't figure it out. No, that's grease, that's so dangerous. This is nuts and all their exhaust fans are working, but they just recently remodeled their kitchen and moved equipment around and stuff and they're probably got stuff. That's just coming right out of the hood.

It's insane that end. Oh, this is running, but i don't think the water pump's working - i don't know, but um yeah, it's a mess. So all right we got the electrician, replace the breaker too. So we got proper power now, so we're gon na put this unit back together.

I already checked power, it's good now, so here we go. Actually it's not vibrating. It's got a little vibration, but it's not bad. I thought it would be a lot worse.

Oh there it goes yeah it's it's going. I can hear things shaking uh we're running at four amps right now. Let's wait till this bad boy, fires up um yeah. There goes the compressor, 16 amps, 17 amps they're.

Looking good. So far, inch fan motor is running everything's good. Now we're going to let it run for a little while all right, so we're using measure quick here and according to measure quick, let's go through this um superheat's just a little bit high. It's not horrendous sub coin's doing pretty good.

Our pressure targets are somewhat good. Suction line temperature is a little bit high. Let's move on over outdoor air temps about 108, looking good, we have a high temperature split, it's really hot in that kitchen, and also, i imagine we're probably pulling a little bit of outside air through the economizer damper too um airflow looks to be low and i Think we have high return static because that panel is like sucking on, so i wouldn't be surprised if the uh return - air grills are really dirty too, but look at that temp split too, that temp splits really high, so duct torque issues are pretty common. Also on this unit, i noticed when i was pulling everything apart, that the supply and returns aren't 100 open, meaning that it should have had a curb adapter.

Basically, but these restaurants, half the time, don't want that stuff. They don't want to spend a bunch of money on all this. They just want cold and they usually don't want to fix duct work and things like that. Um everything's, i'm not scared about anything.

Now um everything's kind of doing about as good as it can on this unit. Uh tested current draw on everything. After it's been running for a while, the unit's only running 18, almost 18 and a half amps, that's not a problem at all. Um.

We got a 30 amp breaker current draw on the condenser fan motor we're allowed to run 1.7, so that's good indoor, blower motor, i believe, is allowed to run like five or no it's allowed to run. Eight. I think 5.5 is what it's running right. Now indoor motor is allowed to run four or eight point four, so we're doing fine compressor, yeah, that's combustion.

Motor indoor compressor is allowed to run 15.9 15.9. We could get that guy right here. Let's see what this guy's doing, yeah we're not even running anywhere near full load on the compressor, i'm not seeing anything with this. I have no voltage drop across the contactors um everything's.

Looking good, i don't see a reason for the breaker to trip um. I think it was just a faulty breaker. It wasn't tripped when i arrived, but the fact that we lost phases makes me think that it tripped and then it didn't reset everything's good. We cleaned it up as best as possible.

This is one of those situations where you're never gon na win i'd like them to replace that blower wheel, but i don't know if they will. It's not vibrating that bad. It's got a little bit of a vibration, but that's it. We're gon na wrap this one up.

It's the return, they're gon na clean these. I pulled them down for them. They're gon na put them back up themselves, so this is the other one. It's like pluggo.

I mentioned that this call started a previous visit and it was a really hot day. The customer actually gave me warning when i was coming out to fix the previous ac. Okay. That was the one that i had to change.

The uh add the liquid line dryers to the heat pump and then repair leak. So while i was there actually before, i came to do that when i scheduled that job with the customer they said hey, you know we have a kitchen ac, that's down and i told them right then and they're like i don't think i'm going to get to The kitchen ac, because i knew i was going to be on that particular ac all day long and i knew i was going to be exhausted because it was going to be a hot day. So that was the case when i finished fixing that heat pump unit um the customer said hey. So can you look at my other ac and i said no, it's not gon na happen.

We were exhausted, we'd been on the roof for eight hours or seven hours. I think it was 115 that day i was like it's absolutely not happening and the customer was like. Oh you can't just look at it. I was like no like.

No, it's not gon na happen. You know we're taking our tools off the roof. You guys can wait we'll schedule another day and they understood, but you know they just wanted to get their stuff fixed, but i was just like it's just not going to go down. You know we were exhausted and we have to know our limits when when we're on a roof that long, yes, you know, of course you know you want to do them a favor and you want to try to help them out, but i knew i was.

I was spent that day. I could not do anything else, so we rescheduled, we had them put in a proper service request and i went back out super early again. Had the customer come in early in the morning. That's why you see when i'm driving out there in the dark uh had the customer get there once we got there, we went through everything i for safety reasons.

I don't normally bring two service techs, but again in those extreme heat situations, i'll usually bring another service. Tech with me, so we did the customer understands it. I get these questions all the time. People saying you know: how do you build a customer for all this time? The customer is free to call someone else anytime that they want to.

I try not to gouge customers, i try not to you know, take advantage of them or anything like that, but myself and my employees come first before the customers. So in a situation where there's a potential, we could be on the roof all day and it's it's dangerous heat outside. Of course, i'm gon na try to schedule another service, tech, okay. So, in this situation it worked out.

I brought another service tech with me and it actually ended up not needing the other service tech, okay, but it was still kind of cool to have them because it just made the day go by that much faster okay. This particular call, i want to say we were probably there anywhere between four to six hours. Okay, so yeah that would have been a much longer day. I probably would have saved you know two three hours having that other guy with me, um or i would have used up an extra two to three hours, getting all the tools and stuff off the roof.

Okay, so we got there and we found that it was actually a power issue. Okay, we had a bad circuit breaker now i certainly could have went and found an electrical wholesale house and picked up a breaker and replaced it myself. I get these questions all the time too. There's a lot of factors that go into me doing that kind of stuff.

First off, i'm technically not really supposed to change a breaker okay, even though you know it's it's a gray area. One could argue that it's you know i could probably get away with it, but still you have to factor in a lot of different things. There, okay number one um. I definitely wouldn't ask any of my employees to do that.

Okay, but i know i can do it, but it's just yeah um, but i'm an hour and a half away from my shop. Okay, so dare i go try to find uh search for a supply house which i'm you know i could find one on the internet, but still search for a supply house try to find a breaker. I'm not super familiar with that breaker. I'm not super familiar with that area.

Okay. This is all the stuff going through my head. So first off i'm going to spend a bunch of time trying to find a supply house. I don't know which supply house carries that breaker.

So i might visit a few different electrical wholesale houses until you know i find the right one, then i replace the breaker and say that doesn't fix it or there's something else, wrong say that when i pull the breaker off the bus bar is burnt. At that point, they're going to have to call an electrician anyways right, so i usually will step back and let the electrician handle their job. I will handle my job to a certain extent. I might do a little bit because, hey you know, i could swap out a break or something like that or hey.

I can blow out a drain line without calling a plumber, okay, but i have to know when to step back and say: no, i'm not going to do that part. You need to get an electrician out in this situation. I went ahead and had them call an electrician. Luckily there was other things i could do so i knew i had to blow out that other drain or the main for the building, and then i also knew that this ac was really greasy.

So i figured you know what the customer's paying me anyways, while i'm waiting for the electrician we're gon na go ahead and disassemble this ac and it actually worked out almost perfect by the time the electrician got there found out what he needed went and got the Part and got back and had it installed. We were done cleaning the air conditioning unit, degreasing it and blowing out the building's main for the plumbing for the air conditioning drains okay. So i was able to utilize the time that we had in waiting for the electrician to finish that and keep ourselves busy. So that way the customer got the best bang for their buck.

Okay. Now the next question is: why did i stay? Why not just tell the electrician to change the breaker and turn it on again. My time is really valuable and in my head, i'm thinking all this stuff through. I don't want to have to come back here.

If i don't have to there's nothing worse than telling the electrician to change the breaker and then just turn it on, and let me know if you have any more problems and then they call me again a couple days later, it's like why not! I had a little bit more time. Basically, i had to wait about two hours for the electrician, which is a great response time. If you think about it, they called the electrician local guy. He was able to get out there get the breaker get it replaced within about.

I think it might have been two and a half, maybe three hours, but still he had it done quick and i was able to still properly troubleshoot the unit to make sure there was nothing else going wrong with it and we cleaned up the unit. Okay. As far as the drain goes um, you know that particular situation. I've shown that in videos before the drain uses a common drain.

So all the air conditioning units have a 7 8 inch drain line or a 3 4 inch plumbing pipe, hitting the roof deck and then underneath the roof deck they go to a common drain line in this situation. It's very common for restaurants that were built in the the late 80s to early 90s to do this kind of a setup where they ran a common drain and um. Typically, they, if you guys, are ever looking for them, they usually uh exit or you know, uh terminate into a floor sink somewhere, usually in a mechanical room or in a mop sink or something like that. You can usually find a spot.

It's pretty easy to find, but in this situation what they did was they have uh actually, at one point in time they had like nine acs going into one uh common trunk line, basically or one drain line. That was only a one inch drain line. So three quarter, multiple three quarter inch drain lines ending in a one inch drain line. They really should have gone into like almost a two inch drain line.

They would have prevented this problem. This wouldn't happen. If this was a two inch drain line, you wouldn't have plugged up the main almost guaranteed. You would just have individual restrictions in the three quarter.

Inch drain lines; okay, so in this situation it's another one of those things where yes, theoretically, that is the plumber's job? Okay, i blow out the drain at the ac and if it's plugged up after the air conditioner. Well, it's my you know it's the plumber's problem, but it's one of those things like it's there, i'm there. I know how to blow it out. I mean i'm not using snakes or anything, but i mean just use logic find the ac, that's highest, start there and start blowing out and then work your way down to the lowest drain, and you know just clear them all.

Also, i went from every ac and plugged up when i, when i would blow out 1ac i'd plug up all the other drains and then vice you know, as i moved along, continue plugging them up that way we cleared the entire line, so we probably won't ever Have to do this again, or you know at least a couple years, all right um, it's really important to to try to think logically like. Why did that breaker fail? You know my thought was: maybe it tripped okay, it's a possibility that it was just a bad breaker, but maybe it tripped at some point. Okay and that's why i still stayed back to watch the unit, make sure nothing's shorting out amping everything out. Look at the electrical connections: that's a fairly new unit.

I think it was only a couple years old. You know i didn't see anything else wrong with it at this time, but i still left a decl disclaimer on the invoice. Like hey, don't know what caused the breaker to fail? Don't know what caused the problem in the first place, but i did my due diligence clean the unit checked everything checked all the electrical connections. Torqued them down made sure they were tight, do not see anything else wrong.

You know so that way the customer knows like i did my best, but i never found the real reason that caused the breaker to fail and or trip in the first place, but maybe it was just a fluke. You know you notice that a lot of the breakers have been being changed in that panel. I don't know if you guys go back to the scene right there and you'll start to see. Multiple breakers have been replaced and i'm starting to notice a trend at this restaurant that they're starting to have a lot of failures with their circuit breakers.

I know for a fact that they have an issue with sand here, so sand will gum up. Those breakers makes the contacts not make right, you know, and then they start to have issues so again. Just take a step back and look at the big picture, guys, i'm not perfect. I certainly miss all kinds of things.

Um nobody's gon na be perfect. Just do your best to look at everything. Okay, i really really appreciate you guys taking the time to make it to the end of this video. That is awesome when you guys do that.

Uh keep in mind. Uh merch is still available on the website hvacrvideos.com. We have uh the shirts, the hats and stay tuned, hopefully within the next couple weeks. I'll have samples and then a couple weeks after that we will have beanies for the winter time coming, so those will be coming soon, so stay tuned, that'll, be there hats we're doing good right now, but we're actually out almost out of the large hats.

We only have a few left and then we are completely out of the small medium hats, but i already have an order that i placed a couple weeks ago. They usually take a couple weeks to get them, make them and deliver them. So hopefully, a few more weeks we'll have some more small mediums and we'll have a restock of the large extra large hats they'll be back in, but i think at this moment right now, when i'm filming this, i think i have like 15 large extra large. So, there's still a few, you guys can grab them.

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