This video is brought to you by Sporland quality, integrity and tradition. Well, we're called on a walking cooler not working and it's 45 degrees in here. But listen to that sound. That's the sound of a low refrigerant charge.

That's what it sounds like to me. so let's hop up top. The customer said the box was at 50 degrees, but they actually propped open the freezer door to help cool it off a little bit in here. This is going to be a sad day for them, but it is what it is.

So this guy is definitely low on refrigerant. The sight glass is empty. You can see something moving in there, but it's not a clear, solid column of liquid. And from that green sticker right there, this is an R22 Legacy walk-in cooler.

So we're gonna have to dump a ton of R22 in this system to get it operational. but we have to get them going now. The other thing is that you know Southern California is so bipolar with its weather. Yesterday it was 80 degrees today.

Right now it's 55 and dropping and it's uh, raining. Now it's not raining hard where I'm at right now, but it's heading this way and it's pretty heavy rain. so I'm not going to spend a bunch of time on the roof right now. We're going to gas it up, search for some giant leaks.

We'll open up the evaporators real quick, but we're just going to make sure that it's not pissing the gas out and we're gonna, oh, you know, get them going up and running. They actually just informed me that the Health Inspectors here at the moment too. Their luck is just great, right? So doing what? I Can you know? But we'll get it going and operational. I Don't see any obvious signs of leaks up here, but this is definitely an old system so let's get some gauges applied.

The other thing I Want to say is uh, when you're dealing with systems like this, Um, well before I get into that. always watch out on the roof. Roofers like to goober fresh mastic everywhere. that's uh yeah, that's still soft so you don't want to step in that stuff.

They like goobered it everywhere all over the place and on top of the ductwork like whatever. These guys are silly. Um, when you're coming up to this service valves, this is a suction service valve right here. Okay, the king valve is coming off of the receiver.

That's the king valve right there. So the suction service valve. This is a nice valve and that it has two ports. But the question is which Port do we open one of these ports is always going to have refrigerant flow at it? No matter what position this valves in, you're always going to have refrigerant flow.

Uh, and that's going to be the port farthest away from the stem. So this one right here is the one that we want to apply our service gauges. If I try to open this up, it's going to leak out the refrigerant charge even if this valve is backseated or front seated. So we want to put our gauges on the port closest to the stem right and let's see.

I Don't have any other places I Can show you an example, but that's just how it works. Okay, so I'm going to do that real quick. Once You pull the cap off. You always want to make sure that the packing gland is loose.

Okay, the packing nut right there I loosened it. Sometimes when you loosen it, it can leak refrigerant so you may need to actuate the valve, then tighten the packing back up, but always loosen it. It extends the life of the seals inside of the suction service valve or any service valve that has a packing on it that you can loosen. All right.

here's the deal. We're looking at the system with the thermal imaging camera. Okay, and if we come over here, you can see the discharge line which is white coming out of the compressor and that discharge line is going up into the condenser. But look, look at how the temperature is turning kind of purple as it's going into the condenser on the top right there.

and then look how it's hot going where it's white going through the valve all the way down and how the liquid drain coming out of the bottom of the condenser is cold. Okay, that is a head pressure control valve. and that pressure control valve is trying to bypass because the system pressure is below the bypass pressure of 180 PSI My current system pressure is about 82 PSI so we do not have enough refrigerant in the system to properly flood the head or the condenser to elevate the head pressure. So we're going to go ahead and turn the thermal imaging camera off and go ahead and charge this guy up.

All right. So that's the head pressure control valve that I was just talking about and it's clearly cold coming out of the condenser, warm going down into the receiver. So it's bypassing because it says 180 PSI on there and my system pressure is 83 PSI So it's chewing everything it can to try to raise that head pressure and it can't So we need to put more refrigerant in it. We need to clear this sight glass and then we'll have to add a little extra refrigerant for when the ambient temperature drops even lower.

This is an older compressor, so I need to be careful not to put too much liquid refrigerant in it. It doesn't have as good of uh, protection internally. Some of the newer compressors have some protections that help it from flood back to an extent, right? so you just need to be careful when charging it. We're just adding refrigerant.

We're paying attention to the sight glass so it's going to take quite a bit of refrigerant to get this head pressure up. Okay, we're really starting to see some movement here and I've added refrigerant and we're slightly coming above the bypass pressure. So what you're going to notice is in the sight glass. you're going to see a lot of fluid movement now because that valve that head pressure control valve is starting to shut down, it's starting to throttle and you're actually getting more liquid refrigerant coming off the bottom of the condenser.

So we're just going to keep adding it. We'll clear up the sight glass and then we'll check the winter charge uh, in the receiver. When we're done, some may ask why don't I use a fan cycle switch number one I Don't like fan cycle switches very much because if you have a fan cycle switch and you watch a sight glass it's very violent. The way that it turns on it had pressure control valve will slowly open and close where a fan Cycles on off, on off.

The next thing is I Don't really recommend using fan cycle switches on single condenser systems. now. sometimes you have to, it is what it is. But if I am going to use a fan cycle switch I Prefer it to be on a system that has two condenser fan motors where you can stage them.

You know you can turn one off then turn the other off slowly. Well preferably leave one on and just turn one off. But yeah, I'm not a huge fan of fan cycle switches I Realize that they work for some people I'm not going to say that they don't. they do.

I just am not a huge fan of them. So we're just slowly adding gas. The pressure's dropped a little bit as I started slowing down, but all that's happening is the refrigerant system or the system is kind of stabilizing out and it's actually starting to move some refrigerant. The expansion valves.

Even though we don't have a solid column of liquid yet, they're still starting to feed better. Now you can see we have suction pressure coming back. We're not down in the middle digit numbers anymore, so the expansion knobs are actually trying to do the best they can, but we're going to keep adding it until we get a solid column of liquid. A Clear Sight glass.

All right. it is starting to rain. Uh, it's still just heavy sprinkles at the moment. But like I'm telling you it's coming down because I came through it getting here.

Um, so I'm trying to hurry as fast as I can, but we have a clear sight glass now and we're actually below the bypass pressure. So what that means is that if that had pressure control valve wasn't bypassing at all. If it wasn't even in the picture, we would have enough gas in the system now. but it is only 68 degrees outside and it's gonna drop even more.

so we need to go ahead and put the maximum amount of refrigerant in this system. Now a couple different ways we can do this: I Can go get a calculator and a measuring tape and we can measure the condenser and calculate the internal volume using Sporlins 90-30-1 method. Um, that is one way to do it the other way, especially when it's kind of raining on me and I Just want to get out of here is we're just going to put the maximum amount of refrigerant in it. So we're going to pump down the receiver, check the liquid level, and we're going to fill it up to the three-quarter Mark which is the maximum amount of refrigerant that you can have in this system when it is pumped down.

Uh, once we do that, then we know that we'll be good to go. So I'm using up the whole cylinder refrigerant I think there was about 10 pounds in it I'll check the liquid level here in a minute. but what I did was it was struggling to uh to um, it's a pump I mean to get all the refrigerant out of this. So what I actually did was put it in front of the condenser so that way it could warm up a little bit and that helped to drive a lot more of the refrigerant into the system.

Notice that it pulled all the way down to three. Now there's still a little bit of vapor left in there. Um, when I open it, you can see there's still about 24 PSI of pressure in there, but it's really not that much. It's just ounces of vapor.

So we're going to check the liquid level again. I'm pretty confident that's going to be enough refrigerant to get us through the night trying to get out of here before this rain gets any worse. It's not bad yet. It's still just a heavy drizzle.

but I just don't want to get stuck here. Um, and then, uh, it looks like the rain is going to clear for tomorrow. So I'll go down and make sure there's no mass monster leaks. and if there isn't then we'll uh, we'll just come back tomorrow and fix it.

all right. It came back the next morning. Uh, box is down to temperature, but what we're going to do is we're actually gonna shut off the condensed unit, leave the thermostat on and calling. so that way the system pressures can equalize out and then we're going to leak check each evaporator coil, trying to see if we can find where these refrigerant leaks are.

I have not started leak checking the evaporator yet, but what I actually did was went to the breaker and shut off the condenser unit with the evaporator still calling and I'm going to do a quick leak check of the condensing unit before I take the Caps off and put service ports on it. It's a very important thing that you can very easily eliminate a potential leak. Source by putting service gauges on the system. Let's say that this fitting right here is leaking.

Uh, let's you know I mean there's so many different variables that you can eliminate by putting service gauges on. So if you suspect any system leaks, it's always best to do a preliminary Leak search before you disturb the system and take the Caps off. All right. I Did not find anything on the Caps or anything but what I suspected was that we potentially have a refrigerant leak in the low pressure control.

see the light is lighting up Now it's the small leak because it comes and goes and you can come over here to the digital readout and every once in a while there you go, you'll see a refrigerant leak. So this particular leak I didn't have to do before I put service gauges on it, but these are very common places for refrigerant leaks to happen. The pressure control Bellows will start to leak over time, so don't ever discount your pressure controls even if you don't see oil like I Don't see oil, but we clearly have something going on in there, right? It's a small leak, but it's there. It comes and goes.

In all fairness, I have my leak detector on turbo mode all right now. We're not just going to stop there, we're going to keep leak checking the entire system and uh, we're gonna make sure that, um, you know we've We identify as many leaks as possible. So I'm going to go and do a leak search on the condenser. but we know that the low pressure portion of this dual pressure control is definitely leaking all right Now that I went ahead and put the service gauges on I went ahead and truly equalized them out.

Now it will equalize through the liquid line solenoid valve, but sometimes it can take a while. but by taking the gauges and opening the high and the low side with the system off now, it truly equalizes out and we have 116 PSI on the low side of the system. So now I'm going to go down to the evaporators and do a leak search down there now. I Know this equipment's in really bad shape and ideally it needs to be replaced, but we got to get them operational I Genuinely don't have the time to replace this equipment right now I've got way too much construction work to do I.E Walk-in retrofits and different things like that that I need to catch up on so we got to get them going in the meantime.

So if we can eliminate a lead Source by changing a dual pressure control today, then that can save me from having to change this walk-in within the next few weeks and potentially move it down a month or two to where I can catch up on my crazy workload. Um I I Don't want to make it sound like I'm slammed with work I'm not super busy like with server. Calls are really low right now, but we just have an abundance of equipment from all the lockdowns and all that stuff and the equipment shortages. Like all the sudden, we got all this equipment all at once and it's like there's no way we can get to it all.

so if we can do anything to get them operational, that's what we're going to try to do just running the leak detector through here. It's kind of hard because they got a lot of music going. Yeah, we're not seeing anything. Not here.

Coil Not seeing anything in the coil. So this is one of the two coils. There's looks like maybe a little bit of oil, but that could just be condensation. Go to this cap that looks a little shiny right here.

I'm not seeing anything in here, so we'll do the other side and then the other coil. Okay, this is the other side of that guy just looking for signs of oil. I'm really not seeing anything I Mean this equipment's really old. We've got a solenoid valve with a bunch of mechanical fittings right here those can leak.

Not seeing anything, not necessarily going to leak. Check the entire line set. It's really, really bad shape. Everything needs to be replaced on this.

I Think that that pressure control is going to be our main source? Let's hit the other coil now. Ooh, this one's suspect. Look at it looks all oily back there. that looks oily I wonder if that Cap's leaking? Yep, we got a leaking Schrader on that guy, so that's definitely part of the problem.

I'm gonna finish leak checking so we'll change that Schrader verify that's the only thing I'm not really seeing anything else in here. Definitely on that. Schrader Though that lighted tip is really nice, we'll hit the other side of the coil not really picking anything up under the coil. You have to have trust in your Leak Detectors I Trust this leak detector.

This is the Dr-82 It does a really good job for me and I'm constantly comparing it to another leak detector that I have. This is also very, very good, which is the Amphicon Stratus I have that too. Both of them are great Leak Detectors Just there's a huge price difference. Um, okay, so we're gonna change that Schrader and then change the Dual pressure control on the roof because I'm not seeing anything else as of yet.

Um, if you loosen the drain pan, you can actually Bend this out of the way. Uh, and what I found? Is that more than likely the shredder has completely failed inside there because there's a pretty substantial leak when I loosen the cap. So um, what I'm going to do is go turn The condensed new back on, pump the system down to a low enough pressure that I can just pop that Schrader Port out real quick now earlier I said that I shut it off down at the breaker. so I can't just turn the breaker on because I have my gauges opened up and equalized out.

We don't want the compressor running like that. So I came back here, closed up the gauges I already actuated the packing gland or packing that. So we're gonna go ahead and set this guy up for pump down. and then what we're going to do is, uh, run downstairs, turn the breaker on, let the system pump down, shut off on low pressure, and then we'll work on seeing if we can get the dual pressure control change now.

I don't know if I'm gonna have to recover the gas or not because I started thinking about something to make sure that this valve actually shuts down the flow to this port. Sometimes they don't, sometimes they do. So what I'll do is I'll back the port out slowly, crack it, and see if the the leakage dissipates, and if so, then I can change it without having to completely recover the gas. But we'll have to see.

all right. Pumped it down so the low side pressure is about 12. PSI I can work with that. We're going to go ahead and backseat.

so this was just kind of like cracked which gives me hope that this is going to have the pressure shut off and then what we're going to do is just crack it. It's going to have an initial little Purge and it shut off. Perfect. Yes! So it's very rare that you can actually change a high pressure control like that.

That's sweet. Okay, I'm gonna get the control changed out and then we'll uh, we'll go from there. Foreign, Foreign. Okay, got the pressure control changed.

Now there's always going to be a little bit of air in this line. There's not really much we can do about it. it's just going to be. It is what it is.

So go ahead and crack that we now have pressure. We have pressure in here. We never let it completely out of low pressure. Um, to stock at 18 PSI in it.

So it is what it is. Um, now I'm going to set the pressure control for the right settings and then, uh, paying attention to the outdoor ambient temperatures. So if you take the outdoor ambient temperature and you take that into effect, how? what's the coldest outside air temperature you're going to get? You need to make sure that the cut in pressure, the saturation temperature of the cutting pressure is never higher than the coldest ambient temperature. Because when it gets super super cold outside, the refrigerant is going to react to temperature and it's not going to climb up like if it was.

you know, 100 degrees outside. so you need to make sure you take that into account. When you're setting, the pressure control settings are all set up. I Made sure I separated the capillary tube.

Really important thing too is to make sure that you lubricate your flare. The most important place to lubricate the flare is the mating surface where the nut touches the copper. right in here. So I took some Nylog right when I was putting it on and I put it right there and then I spun the nut on it.

Now me personally, this is a preference. if you're using a torque wrench. you don't really want to use Nylog now. I didn't use a torque wrench so I put a little bit of Nylog on the threads.

I Personally like using Nylug on the threads, but that's a preference thing. Okay, but understand, if you do use Nylog on the threads and you use a torque wrench, then it's going to mess with the torque specs and things are going to be kind of tweaked. You can tend it or technically over tighten it, so be cautious about that. But remember, the only thing you really want to put on a flare is oil.

and that's what Nylog is. Nylog is oil with just a different viscosity. Okay, but it's Polyoester oil. This one right here the Nylock blue so be cautious about that now.

I'm not going to go out on a limb or stand on a high horse and say I've never used other substances. um, that you know Harden I Used that stuff for the first part of my career on flare nuts and if used correctly, you know you can get away with it. But the problem with some of the other uh, thread sealers and different things like that is that they can get in the system. Heaven forbid that this get in the system.

It's just Polyoester oil. It's not a big deal, but if you use thread sealants and different things that Harden those get in the system. they're a contaminant, so just be cautious. if you are going to use that stuff, be very, very careful.

But again, I Use that stuff for the first part of my career. Never really had any problems, but I'm also not a sloppy person that just goobers it on and gets it all in the valve and you know, craziness. But we're good to go. Always make sure.

Now this is a cracked valve, right? So if we backseated that all the way, then the high pressure control would not sense the high pressure. I Also routed the capillary tubes so they're not touching anything. they're not rubbing out. they're not touching the electrical conduit.

They're not touching itself right here. so you always want to be careful about that. The last thing I want to say is when you're setting pressure controls, you always want to look at the manufacturer's information. Copeland Does a really good job.

Now this is a really, really old compressor. This is a piston driven, hermetically sealed compressor reciprocating. I Guess you can call it scroll compressors. It's very critical how you set pressure controls because scroll compressors because of the floating ceiling stuff.

They don't like to pump down into a vacuum or anywhere close to a vacuum and they'll actually the floating seal will lift up as it's pumping down and it'll just turn the system back on and you'll just get it on off, on off on off majority of the time. You can solve that by properly setting the pressure control. so always read the manufacturer's information. Like I said.

Cope one does a great job. Download the Copeland mobile app, you can find all kinds of great information. All right, we're about ready. I'm going to pump this down to a little bit of a lower pressure and then I'm going to head downstairs and swap out that bad Shader and then hopefully we should be good to go.

All right with the system in such a low pressure. I Was able to just do a hot swap on the Schrader swap it out this particular Shredder right here if I get it to focus is just bad. The spring has just pushed out the bottom so we got it swapped out. Got a new cap put on there and we're good to go.

League Solved! Uh, we're gonna put the coil back together and then turn the system back on. I did bring the box temp up just a little bit. It's about 43 degrees. That's just from me having to shut off for the half hour 45 minutes while I was changing that pressure control.

The other thing is they need to clean these coils. The coils are pretty dirty. Um, I'll talk to them. Maybe I'll get someone out here to do that I don't have time to do that today.

So since the Schrader on the second coil failed, I just went ahead and swapped out the first coil too. It wasn't bad, but the fact that it's you know the other one was as bad as it was. Figured, why not just I'm in here, put a new cap on it too, make sure we eliminate that and then we're just about done. All right.

You always want to make sure that after you do that that you did not lose your positive pressure status so we still have two. PSI Um, that's a good sign we have not opened the system to Atmosphere At this point we can go ahead and open up this guy and the system should turn on here in just a second. It would not have leaked out enough refrigerant overnight to change the amount of refrigerant that I put in it yesterday. So we're good to go on that and we are operating.

Everything's good. We're gonna let it run for a little bit and bring the box down to Temp and I'm going to start cleaning up my messes. You know this was an overtime service called the start and it was raining so it was a weekend if I remember right and I did what I had to do to get the customer operational back in action and then at their request I returned when we weren't on overtime when it wasn't raining, when I could spend a little more time on the roof and properly find the refrigerant leaks. Now I Don't think that these are the only refrigerant leaks I think these were the biggest refrigerant leaks.

That entire system is in dire need of replacement, including the line set, so that will come in the future. In fact, we've already made the recommendations to the customer and if I remember right I think they've already ordered the equipment so that will potentially come in the future. But going through this, you know it's so important when you're doing leak searches that you don't stop at the first leak. You always keep checking.

The odds that there's only one leak is pretty slim. There's usually multiple leaks. Okay, now in this situation: I fixed the two main leaks and then I left it at that Again, because of my discussions with the customer and the fact that you know they're considering replacing this equipment, we didn't want to go too much further, especially with this being a legacy system that had R22 in it. It was a lot of money in refrigerants, so you know we did what we had to do to fix the major leaks.

We got the equipment running, but I can't stress enough. don't stop at the first leak. That seems to be something that a lot of people that I have come across that have worked with me in the past have done. They think, oh, we found a leak, We're good.

It's like no, you big picture stuff here right? you know I don't think I've said that lately I think that might hold the whole big picture diagnoses Mantra kind of has been going on without me even talking about it I probably haven't talked about it in a very long time in my videos, but it's still the way that I I go at my service calls, always looking at the big picture. Okay, so we found multiple leaks. We brought all the information to the customer's attention, We gave them all the facts and we let them make the decisions. Okay, so I ended up changing the Dual pressure control I replaced the two Schraders, the one that was leaking and everything else seemed to be fine.

We have since been back out there working on other things. We followed up on the equipment. it's been doing good so that's it. I Really, really appreciate you all taking the time to watch this video and all my videos.

Please if you haven't already leave me some feedback down in the comments, consider subscribing to the channel. And if I can ask a big favor I Usually don't ask anything of my viewers, please turn your uh your notifications on and make sure that you're subscribed to the channel. I'm really having a hard time with the views and the different stuff right now with YouTube and it's just getting kind of frustrating and I it's I've even gone to the point of communicating with YouTube and all that they can say as is, you know your subscribers don't have notifications on. it's like okay, all right, so please I know you guys watch these videos and I know that there's a lot of you that aren't subscribed so please consider subscribing.

It really does help out the channel. Okay, so thank you so very much I Really appreciate y'all Remember, be kind to one another and we will catch you on the next. Okay.