This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition, so the customer's complaining that the walk-in freezer's not working properly and it was like packed full of food. I had to have him move all this crap out here, because it was stacked all the way up, but it's got a giant block of ice back behind the fan motors and if you come over here you can see there is just a crap ton of ice. So we're going to disassemble it. I turned off the condensing unit, we're going to get this all thawed out and then the condenser needs to be cleaned too.

So we'll get the hose up there. This kind of ice is typical of a door being left open consistently because the defrost is taking care of the ice down below, but the defrost heaters have a hard time getting the ice all on the top. But i mean we're not going to rule out refrigeration related, but to me this looks like a door being left open and they actually were having problems with their door closure. So i had to make a repair to it.

So so this is a slow process, because i'm in a walk-in freezer and the water wants to run off the back of the coil. When i'm trying to melt it see i'm trying to do all the work from the front of the coil, but it just keeps running down, so i have to stop because in a walk-in freezer you want the minimal amount of water on the floor. If any at all now this is a tile floor, so we have a little bit more leeway, but if it was a raised floor, an aluminum clad floor, the water gets underneath that the floor is ruined. It freezes and lifts up so be very careful.

But the point i'm trying to make that's where this wand really comes into play, because you have this mist feature and you can just very carefully get in there and break down stuff in situations where it's running down the back. My favorite feature on this guy is the shower feature, and that's that i love that but see it's already starting to drip down the back. So it's just a slow process. Even on the tile floor, once the water gets down there, it freezes it's like an ice skating rink and it's almost impossible.

It's a nightmare, so you want the you know: aim for no water on the floor at all. Like i said i like to do it all from the front: okay, so just using steam just very carefully and what happens is all the stuff will fall off the back in giant chunks, just whoosh just falls and releases right off so probably still got a little Bit more to clear: let's go back here and see now actually looks pretty darn good, so the coil's pretty damaged but we'll just uh clear. The side panels make sure there's no ice over there and then we'll put this guy back together. So the condensers aren't horrible.

But they're dirty, so i don't think we're going to need cleaner, though i'm just giving them a quick rinse, get the mud out of them and then we'll put that we still got to put the coil back together. I just wanted to do it before i put the hose away, come up here and rinse everything off so got to be careful, though, because um this water will go right through and soak the motors, so you want to be cautious. I mean look at the stuff coming out of it. It's nasty all right, my condensing units running now on startup, the sight glass was flashing and it flashed for a good three four minutes, and then it cleared up that's normal on a walk-in freezer.

If everything is working correctly, because the evaporator fan motors do not turn on right away until the evaporator gets to a certain temperature, so you want to give it time to stabilize out before you start checking things now. I have service gauges on this guy and uh. It's about, let's see i'll, get a thermometer out here. Let's see how hot it is outside.

I guess it's about 98 degrees, maybe more yeah, 98 and climbing slowly. So it might hit 100. we're running a significantly low head pressure, but my coil is still wet. It's still drying off, so that's to be, you know, expected um.

Everything else is looking pretty good. We're running a clear sight. Glass evaporator fan motors are running now. Um last thing: i'm going to do i'm going to let it run for about 10 minutes, get the coil, nice and cold, and then we're going to throw it into a defrost and make sure all the heaters are working just for giggles and uh yeah.

It looks like we're pushing right at 100, so it's actually kind of a cool day. Um yeah, that's looking pretty good so far. You know i get a lot of questions from people about this valve on the side of this compressor. There's two different styles.

This is more of a fixed, orifice metering device style, but it is a uh. It's a valve that helps to cool the compressor off. Okay, we can call it a uh discharge, temperature, uh dtc valve that one's not technically a dtc valve, but it's liquid injection, essentially so you have liquid coming off the liquid line after it comes out of the condenser, goes through a solenoid. That only opens when the compressor is running and it meters refrigerant into the compressor to try to cool it off.

When you get high compression ratio situations, a really high discharge temperature, they want to try to cool the head of that compressor off. So they're going to inject some refrigerant into there, so it's not pure liquid refrigerant, they're metering, it just like an expansion valve. So this one's not a dtc valve but two different styles, this one's just a fixed orifice device and then there's a a dtc valve which essentially is a temperature responsive expansion valve it's an expansion valve non-adjustable that has a head going into the top of the compressor That you know basically opens and closes um, but yeah, so this one just runs all the time whenever the compressor's running it feeds refrigerant on this one and it just cools. The compressor is all it's doing so at about 103 is where it's kind of topping out at we've, got about 113 degrees, saturation temperature uh, it's still a little low um.

I like to see typically on these micro channel condensers you'll, see about 15 to 18 degrees. Uh condensing temp over ambient, so we're getting there. But again it's going to dry out and it'll start building the head pressure more and more as it comes up, so we're going to go ahead and put this guy into defrost. I'm happy with the refrigerant pressures and the clear side, glass and everything.

So this is our current sensing relay and it just runs one leg of the compressor through it and whenever it senses power through that leg, it opens that solenoid valve that feeds refrigerant into the compressor. So uh went ahead and uh pushed this guy into defrost. So we're gon na go downstairs and check all the heaters now all right, so one heater is at six amps. One heater is at five amps, i'm happy with that.

It only has two heaters. This is one end. This is one end, and this is the drain. Pan heater, so we're gon na put this guy together, always want to inspect your limit switches too.

I don't see any damage, they look. Fine, so put it together and uh tell the customer to keep an eye on it. You know taking the time to do things right to do the best in your abilities to make sure that you fix the problem and or make the customer aware of the problem right in this situation. It's just a walk-in freezer, that's iced! Up now i say it's just a walk-in freezer, because i deal with these all the time and we run into iced up walk-in freezers.

All the time now i have a methodical way of defrosting these troubleshooting them and working through the steps everybody doesn't have to do it the same as long as you get to the same end result: okay, and it also depends on your your customers habits. My customers have bad habits of leaving the doors open because they're high volume, restaurants and it's hard for them to keep the doors shut. Okay, um there's a lot of reasons behind that. But that's that's a whole bunch of psychological stuff too, but you know we.

We have to make sure that you know we go through the process and try not to skip steps that might not get us to the end result that we want okay, defrosting, the evaporator coil i personally like using hot water or cold water. Before i try to use a torch or a heat gun and in fact i don't ever use torches, because you run the risk of damaging the evaporative oil by heating, the aluminum up too high, and then also you have a carbon monoxide risk and an enclosed space. Running a torch for a very long time, you can cause some issues and have some breathing stuff maybe pass out. So you want to be very cautious about that heat guns, really don't care to use a heat gun.

I find hot water to be the most efficient tool in even cold water to be more efficient than a heat gun personally, but you have to take some steps to make sure that that water doesn't get onto the floor. Like i said, once you get water onto a floor in a freezer, it's one of the worst things to try to get up. Okay, especially if it's a big freezer and the box temperature is really low, see you could be working in big industrial type, freezers where you're in a parka beanie, all the the cold weather gear and you're, still freezing your butt off and you're defrosting an evaporator. And if any water drips onto the floor, it's still negative 10 in the rest of that box, because you might have multiple evaporators in my situation, it's a smaller box.

So, yes, i could prop the door open, but i don't want to unnecessarily bring the box temperature any higher than it needs to be so it's kind of a game, so i prefer to use water just take my time as the drain pan starts to fill up Or as the water starts to drip off the back of the coil slow down and just keep proceeding, i still find it to be much faster myself than using a heat gun. Even with the heat gun, you can damage the coil because you can get wires, melted and different things like that. Okay, i also personally take out the evaporator fan motors as much as possible, there's times that you can't get them out because of the ice and you kind of got to do what you got to do, but i prefer to take them out. Then i go through my process of defrosting it again because i work on these things a lot.

I start to notice patterns and trends. The type of ice formation that i saw was indicative of a door being left open. In my opinion, and the defrost heater is just not running long enough to properly defrost everything, okay, so yeah, we could add more defrost into the system and sometimes i'll do that or we could just tell the customer hey keep the door shut. You know also.

I didn't explain it in the video, but i'm also inspecting the closing hardware on the doors the doors need to be self-closing if doors are not self-closing on walk-in, coolers and walk-in freezers, trust me they will not get shut. So try to talk your customers into self-closing hardware, making sure that the gaskets are sealing properly and something that gets forgotten about a lot of the times is vacuum breakers. Make sure that the vacuum breakers are working a vacuum. Breaker is something to relieve the pressure inside the box that way the door doesn't get stuck shut.

If you think about it at your home domestic home, refrigerator oftentimes, if you open your refrigerator side, then you shut it. Then you open your freezer side and then you go to try to open your refrigerator side. You'll notice. Oh, you can't get the door open.

You know it's because a vacuum has been created inside that box and it's really difficult to get the doors open. It just takes time on commercial and industrial walk-ins. We have vacuum breakers, which are little uh pressure relief devices that typically have a heating element inside of them that help to break the vacuum. You want to make sure that those vacuum breakers are working properly.

Okay, so i went through the process i checked or i defrosted the coil i inspected the condensing unit. I did take my hoses onto the roof because it was dirty again. You don't want to do that in the middle of the summer, and you know i probably should address this too. This video was from like last year by the way last summer, we're currently february 13th of 2022, so it's not 100 degrees outside yet we're about 80 degrees.

But we will get back to that 100 degree weather here in the next couple months, but um deep. You know i mean i cleaned the condenser coil up on the roof. I didn't see the need to go, you know heavy cleaners or anything just water worked and i still inspected everything put my service gauges on it. Watched the system pull down made sure the pressures looked good sight.

Glass was clear, then went and tested the defrost heaters. Defrost heaters have to be working properly, defrost time clock needs to be keeping time went through all that couldn't find anything else wrong. So we chalked this one off as a potential that the customer was leaving the door open now mind you like. I said this was from sometime last year.

We really haven't had any other problems. I don't think on this box that i can remember so yeah, just a basic iced up walk-in freezer. So i really appreciate you guys making it to the end. If you haven't already check out my website hvacrvideos.com, it's just a great way to help support the channel guys.

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