Sitting here, just waiting watching check this out little lizard just came up to say what up little dude right here, pretty cool. This video is brought to you by sportlin quality, integrity and tradition, all right! Well, it's about 9 20 at night um, i'm heading out to a walk-in freezer service. Call it's a really frustrating one, because i have been there two times in the last week and a half to defrost this walk-in freezer and there's nothing wrong with it. The customer, their reach and freezer is broken and they're replacing it and they've got a new one coming.

So, in the meantime, the cooks are all using the walk-in freezer as a reach and cooler so they're in and out of it, every five minutes and they're propping the door open and they're constantly making it freeze up. It's frustrating you know i i i kind of feel bad, because i had a conversation with the manager on the phone like dude. This is getting ridiculous. I can't keep coming out to do this.

You know, and i feel bad because you know i was kind of making him. You know know my frustration, but it is what it is. So let's go see what we can get into all right, so it's partially iced up and it sounds like one of the motors is going bad or something that's weird all right! Well, we're gon na get it shut off and defrosted all right. So you can see ice build up like crazy on this guy.

So first thing we do is turn off power outside uh that way it's safe and then we're gon na try to defrost it. Now the fan brackets and everything i like to take fan motors out usually but they're frozen in there, so we got to carefully defrost around them without getting the motors wet and then we'll pull them out and make sure we get all the way through the coil. These coils, these coils, are really jacked up too they're, like all bent fins down in here all back here, and then the back sides messed up too from them smashing the heck out of it. I really you know this equipment needs to be replaced because it's just in horrible shape, but i just don't have the time like or the patience right now.

I'm just so swamped, i'm like a week or two no joke behind on service calls like, because we keep getting walk-in, freezers and air conditioners and ice machines. I keep pushing off like reaching coolers and i have just a backlog of them. I guess it's a good problem to have, but all right. Well, this guy's just about defrosted.

I need to do an inspection to make sure it's completely all gone, but i think it is all back in there. I just recently had redone the drain. It used to run down over to that corner right there, but homeless people live on the other side, because this is an exterior walk-in and they keep jacking the drain lines and messing it up. So i re-ran it just outside the back here, where it's behind a gate that they can't get to it's funny like this is behind a gate that is not, but that's just how it is so we put a new drain line heater on it too.

So that's working good coil is just all smashed up. I mean it's not the worst shape, but it's not in good shape by any means. So, okay, we're defrosted a little bit on here, i'd like to get it off this suction line too, but i don't want to break anything. I don't have any insulation on me right now, yeah this is jacked all jacked up, damn it these guys keep icing.

This thing up, pissing me off all right, we're just about done and we'll get up top and just gon na still double check everything all right. It's all back together. Um leave the side panels off right. There we're gon na turn on power and then test everything out, make sure everything's good nothing wrong with the fan motors, so it was just hitting ice or something something funky like that.

So we're gon na go put our gauges up on the roof, make sure everything's good up there. All right we're gon na open up the high side, we're running a clear sight glass! So that's good all looks well there all right. So this one right here, a lot of people get confused by these. This guy works backwards from a normal valve.

So this is the the process port. This is our port that we put a pressure control on so you're actually going to back it out to let pressure into this - and i know that's a little confusing for most guys but got ta. Remember that i i can't tell you how many times i found these things backed all the way out with a cap on the end and people just don't understand it all right, so i've got an air probe in there. It's 29 degrees in the box.

Right now see uh still coming down 80 degrees outside i'm not seeing anything too scary. With these pressures. At the moment, the box is still stabilizing and coming down to 10. um we're going to let it run for a few more minutes.

Then we're going to throw it into a defrost at the defrost clock right here and uh come to think of it. We might add some more defrost to this guy, because four defrosts right now probably isn't enough for what they're doing here. Because again, one of their freezers is not working like the region, freezer so they're, using the walk-in freezer like in and out in and out constantly causing it to freeze up. So we might have to add some more defrost to kind of compensate for that.

I went ahead and initiated a defrost, so it's pumping down that condenser fan motor is off of a pressure control, so it's still going to run until the pressure gets low enough uh. So we need to go downstairs and make sure that all the heaters are working on the evaporators. When it comes to these guys, you got a couple heaters in here. Okay, that's one heater! It has two sides to it right.

So that's one heater, there's another heater down below and then there's a drain pan heater, so we got a test on those guys, so one of them is at two amps that one's at 2.15 that one and that's it. So all the heaters are working. This thing is doing everything it can, so i'm not seeing any reason for it to ice up. The defrost clock had the right time on it.

When i got here so it's moving, i mean other than this thing, just being a jalopy, it's doing everything you can all right. Everything is looking good. I'm not gon na do it tonight, but i think i might come back and put in a grassland defrost clock that way. We could be more aggressive with the defrost strategy.

Um yeah, i'm thinking about it, but tonight is not the night it's uh 1104. So i don't want to spend another two hours here, trying to wire in a defrost clock. I just want to go home and go to bed. I got to change a compressor in the morning on a set of cooks, drawers so yeah we're going to wrap this one up.

Um i mean i don't know what else to tell them, except for to keep the damn door shut. You know all right. We are back um got it defrosted, the last clip you saw that night. We came back out today to try to dig into it and it's actually frozen up again.

So we got to dig a little bit further now that it's not the middle of the night and figure out what the heck is going on here, it's solid top to bottom. So why is it doing that? This thing is frustrating is all get up. Thermostat doesn't look to be set too cold, but we also got to make sure that's shutting off. Let's figure this out.

First thing i did was come up to the roof and uh. This clock did not have the right time on it. Every time i've been here, i've been here, i think two times and uh the clock had the right time, but today it didn't so i just turned it into a defrost, but it said 3 p.m, and it's only 10 20 am so. It looks like maybe the clock might be our problem.

When i was coming back out here, i decided i was going to change this clock anyways, even if i didn't see the incorrect time on it, just because this is like the second time we've had to defrost it, and i can't find anything wrong. So the clock has been keeping time every single time, but i think that every once in a while, it's getting stuck at a defrost or something it's hard to say. So i went ahead and went in with the grassland. Now i interchanged between both of those.

This time i use the grassland because i want to be able to put more defrost in the middle of the night and i want to do 45 minute, defrost in the middle of the night and then half hours throughout the day. So we're going to put the cover back on and then i have another tech downstairs defrosting it once we get it defrosted we're going to do a full analysis on this system check the txv make sure it's working right check everything we can so we're gon na Get down and dirty here in a few minutes all right, we're getting the probe set up. Um got a giant rat dead rat back there down in the bottom, big old furry thing: it's nice! We got the defrost clock installed. I'm just waiting for my tech to give me the go ahead, so we can turn it on he's just assembling the evaporator right now.

So all right, so my system is running, but the evaporator fan motors are not on yet you've got to give it time to get the coil cold enough for the evaporative fan motors to come on. My sight, glass is even flashing, so you can't just assume. That's! That's normal when the fans aren't running, see we're running a really low evaporator temperature, but in a few minutes you'll see that that suction pressure, evaporator temperature rise once the fan start running and there we go so evaporator pressure is rising, suction line temperatures rising. So now we got to wait for the box to get cold and stabilize out.

Let's see what our box temperature is box, temperature is about 30 degrees, so it's gon na take some time, bring the temp down and then uh we'll test this, the evaporator superheat to see what it's at and just monitor the system so we're gon na. Let it run for a bit. I went ahead uh we had a water hose nearby and this thing was kind of dirty, so i went ahead and cleaned the condenser, so that kind of put a wrench and everything because it dropped. My you know: uh condensing tim dropped, my suction pressure, we'll give it a few minutes to warm up.

It'll evaporate that water and then my system pressures will start to stabilize out one of the fan motors cycled because you know it's off a fan, cycling control, so um all right, we're gon na. Let this keep running sitting here. Just waiting watching check this out. Little lizard just came up to say what up little dude right here, pretty cool little guy random that he's up on top of this walk-in freezer, but he's just chilling so yeah we're just waiting watching um.

It's looking good, i mean superheat's still high, but the box temp is still high, so you don't want to adjust on the expansion valve until you're getting closer to temperature. It's about 16 degrees in the box, where our set point is negative 10.. So i personally wouldn't adjust on the expansion valve until you got to about zero degrees, ish and then maybe start adjusting, but just be cautious. Um i'll go check the frost pattern in a few minutes so far we're looking pretty good all right um.

We had our uh return air probe in the wrong place earlier, but i moved it to the return air. It's about 20 degrees in the box right now, and we've got about 14 degrees. Super heat. The valve looks fine, the coil's not frosting up in any weird ways or anything.

So i'm pretty happy with that. The performance of the expansion valve um, the pressures. Don't scare me everything looks okay, sorry about that weird line right there, the sun's acting weird um yeah. Looking pretty good, i wanted to watch this thing come down to temp, but i'm getting so many service calls.

I can't all right at this point uh in speaking with the customer. We looked at the shape of the equipment, the age of it, and we decided it would be in their best interest to go ahead and replace the equipment. Now, with this particular customer they're, very proactive about replacing older equipment because they really don't like the downtime. This equipment was certainly eligible for that criteria that they have as far as why they want to replace and when they want to replace.

So we went ahead and we're going to do a load calculation on the equipment right now, i'm going to walk you guys through the process and the steps of doing the load calculation and how i determine what equipment is going to be right for their particular situation. Okay, but with that in mind, some really important things we need to understand is: there's a new federal mandate by the department of energy, all new walk-in installations, whether it be coolers or freezers. If they have a square footage of 3000 square feet or less, they have to comply with new energy requirements for the walk-in, coolers and freezers. Think of it as like you know, the seer ratings that we have for air conditioning systems.

The air conditioning system has to be so efficient right that kind of stuff it's. This isn't i, in my opinion, this is going to get a lot more stringent, but right now we're in its infancy and it's just being introduced. Okay, so uh the the things that they want to see with the new equipment. Is they want to see energy efficiency? They want to see um less electrical consumption, more bang for your buck.

Okay, a lot of the manufacturers um have different methods of achieving this energy efficiency, but one of the more common methods is to bring the condensing temperature the operating condensing temperatures of the equipment down. Okay. So how do we do that? Well, in the winter time, we will artificially increase our condensing temperature by flooding the condenser, with liquid refrigerant, reducing the condensing surface space. So that way it drives the head pressure up.

Okay, we call it a flooded system head pressure, control valve. You can also do that with fan cycling um in the summertime, all right. What we're going to do is they actually are going to oversize the condensing units. The condenser surface area is going to be bigger.

Therefore, it's going to drop the head pressure now. These are just some of the ways there's other methods that they do it too, in the evaporator they're, going to put ecm motors on everything now and they're, also going to go one step past, an ecm motor and they're going to do two speed, evaporator fan motors. So when the system is calling for cooling, the fan motors will ramp up to 100 when the system is not calling for cooling and it's just circulating air, sometimes they'll either turn off the fans or they'll slow. The fans down, that's the most common way they slow.

The fans down to low speed, okay, now, there's good and bad things about all these uh things that they do on walking. Coolers slowing the fans down on low speed is actually problematic, especially with restaurants that are in and out of their equipment. A lot because when the system goes into defrost, technically, it's not calling anymore, so the fans slow down to low speed and it's not moving the air across the evaporator fast enough and you can run into freeze-up problems, but that's a whole nother issue. Okay, this is a walk-in freezer, so i'm gon na go through the process of showing you guys the load calculation and then we'll talk a little bit more about it, as the video goes on.

Okay, all right now, this is the rapid spec program. This is russell refrigeration's load calculation program. You don't have to use this one. You can use any load calculation program as long as you get the criteria put in there.

You can also do a hand load calculation. If you want, you can download the heat craft engineering manual, you can look it up. That way, there's a couple different methods, but i like electronic, it's easy just as long as you input the right information, but understand something. A load calculation program is only as good as the information you're feeding into it.

I can easily manipulate this program to do all kinds of stuff okay, so you want to be straightforward and answer the questions honestly, and it's going to walk you through this okay. Now this is my total information. I like this information because, because i like russell equipment, this gives you an equipment match up and make sure that everything's good to go. But you could use this program and then just see what the evaporator and condensing unit btu requirements are and match up any other equipment.

If you'd like to too and understand these prices are not accurate. This is uh, you know: net price before discounts and all that stuff, okay um. So what we're going to do is we're going to click on this guy right here and you're, going to see the criteria that i put into the system uh. We take an indoor measurement of the indoor space of the walk-in freezer, so it's 10 feet deep.

Eight feet wide eight feet tall, okay, um, then what you're gon na do is you're gon na go in here. You're gon na set your room temperature. I wan na maintain negative 10 degrees fahrenheit inside the box. You can configure your wall temperatures, okay, looking at the different walls.

So if you look at this, i have one wall, which is where the door is at. I have the surface temperature of that wall at 75 degrees because that's inside the building, every other wall is on the exterior of the building, i'm being a little conservative with my surface temperature - and i just did a 100 degree surface temperature on that one. Okay, then, what we do is we can configure the ceilings. My floor is concrete, so i went ahead and used the normal information they have in there and then also my ceiling is polyurethane and i went ahead and did 110 degrees because that's my max ambient temperature for about four months out of the year at this location.

Okay, so once we've done that you're going to put your air change load information, you can configure your door, you do have some. I have one man door on this, so you can do some automatic calculations. You know for the door usage. You can change it to heavy duty, above average, all that stuff uh.

Once we do that, you can change the amount of people in the box. This is a small box, so we're pretty good on that. You can change your estimate for the equipment. I just have it set to average duty.

You can change that to heavy duty. If you need to and here's what we get, we get the capacity required at eleven thousand thirteen btus per hour. That's what's required to maintain negative 10 degrees at 110 degree ambient based off of 18 hours of run time per day; okay. So when you hit save and close, it's going to take you to your breakdown sheet, and you can see that it's gon na give you equipment information now, um, here's the equipment that i'm gon na use, i'm gon na use a four horsepower condensing unit.

I'm gon na use a ten thousand. What is that ten thousand btu evaporator 10 and a half something like that, and it's going to give you based off of the equipment? It's actually going to give you a better run time because of the uh the balance capacity on it. Okay, so your evaporator td is going to be calculated at 9.8 degrees, so there's lots of really good information inside this okay. Now, if you want to do custom equipment, you can also select the options.

Do all that good stuff? We can go to our actual sheet right here. This is your printout that i get to save, and i love these because they have all kinds of information in here and you save these things so that way, if you ever have a problem with the box, you know how someone sized it too. Another thing to understand is the refrigerant makes a huge difference on the equipment. We are using r448a refrigerant, and i will mention it later in the video, but with r448a because of the glide in the refrigerant.

We actually will compared to 404, we're actually going to have to upsize the condensed unit right because we're going to get a little bit less capacity out of the condensing unit. But we're going to get more capacity out of the evaporator during more. During certain times of the year, so with that being said, the equipment is actually going to be a little bit bigger than normal. The original condensing unit on this system was a three horse.

I'm going with the four horse now and you'll see as we go through the equipment installation, but i love all this information in here gives you even a breakdown, because i'm using their components, it gives you a breakdown of the equipment, tells you the dimensions, the standard Stuff, that's going to come on it. The evaporator information gives you an awef number. Uh tells you what the line sizes are now we're going to go through the line sizing right now too. Okay.

So the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to go to sporland's virtual engineer. Okay, sporland.com go on there find the virtual engineer open it up, input your information and you're going to come to this sheet right here and based off of so we do our load calculation. First, once we've done our load calculation, then we select our condensing unit. We select our evaporator, we find out what our balance system capacity is and then we're going to start sizing our components for the equipment.

Okay, we're going to size the expansion valve the liquid line, filter dryer, the liquid line, solenoid valve the suction line and the liquid line itself. Okay, all of that is going to be sized in spoilan's virtual engineer. I've already done all the work you guys can walk through the tutorials and everything, but we're going to use an e3s 130 liquid line solenoid valve and if you click on this it'll give you information on what we went through to size. It we're going to use a 16 4s.

That's a sweat liquid catch-all filter dryer we're going to use a 3 8 inch liquid line, we're going to use a 7 8 inch suction line, okay, and that's pretty much all that we need now, once we've done that we also need to select our expansion valve. Okay, now to select our expansion valve, we have to look into something else with the new awef compliant refrigeration equipment. You have to understand that there is new factors that we need to consider when we are sizing our expansion valve for the system, because we are floating our head pressure down during the winter and during the summer we have to make sure that our expansion valves are Sized accordingly, so sporeland has a tech document bulletin 500-10-awef that they have done the footwork okay. They have called majority of the refrigeration manufacturers.

Out there figured out the typical pressure drop across the distributors figured out the standard. You know um uh, liquid temperatures that they're designing the equipment with and everything and they've made it pretty easy for us. Okay, so you actually don't even have to go through the virtual engineer and answer all the questions to size. The expansion valve you can actually just use this really cool chart.

Okay, so we're going to scroll on down here into the chart, we're going to find the refrigerant that we're using, which is 448a okay. Here we are at 448 a, and what we're going to do is we're going to see at our condense or our evaporator temperature of negative 20 right, because my evaporator is going to maintain negative 10 degree box temperature. We have a 10 degree, approximately a 10 degree. Evaporator td, which means that the actual evaporator temperature is going to be about 10 degrees below that, so that would be a negative, 20 degree evaporator at negative 20.

You look and you find the right expansion valve based off of the minimum and maximum capacity of said valve. So if we take a bq valve right, that's the balance port um buildable valve and we take a b cartridge. It says that we can deliver 9000 as low as 9000 btus and as high as 16.8 000 btus um of capacity. So that's the the one that we're going to use all right r.

If we go back to. Let me go ahead and pull this up. If we go back to our rapid spec equipment right here, it says that my evaporator is going to uh, we'll go right here to our balance system performance and, let's see balanced system performance balance capacity is 11 940 btus. Okay with that being said, that is under the 16 000, but that is over the 9 000, so this valve, with this cartridge, a b cartridge is going to work perfect for us, okay, so that is what we're going to use inside of our valve now, with That being said, we need to understand if we're buying new refrigeration equipment these days, it's more than likely going to be awef compliant with.

That being said, you can't just necessarily swap out a condensing unit like we used to. Let's say you have a bad compressor and it's easier just to change the condensing unit. You need to investigate your expansion valve if you're using existing equipment. Okay, because with the new awef compliant equipment, majority of them are floating the head pressure a lot lower and that head pressure control valve is very rarely ever going to bypass right because the bypass pressures are as low as like 100 psi now granted.

This is a 448a system, so it's going to run very similar to r22 for a lot of us. That's that's an easier way to remember it but um. So it's already going to run. You know lower than normal head pressure as compared to like 404, but that being said, if you just go, get a new awef compliant condensing unit and slap it on an existing system in low ambience, we might be running into some big problems.

Okay with that expansion valve not feeding correctly because the pressure drop is too low or who knows? Okay, so keep that in mind. But with that being said, we know what size equipment we want now we know what components we want to install on our equipment. We know what line sizes we need. Okay, now really important to understand too.

Just because this particular condensing unit that you guys are about to see has an inch and an eighth suction line on it. But that's not what's required for our delivered btus. We only need a seven eighths. Actually, we only need a three quarter inch line set, but i'm going to use a 7 8 because it's readily available - and i don't really have a lot of three quarter - inch components on my truck every single day.

So we're gon na go with seven eighths, but you don't just grab the line size. This goes for residential equipment too. If you have a three quarter, inch line set and a 3 8 inch connection on the out of the outside of the condenser unit. That doesn't necessarily mean that's, what's required for the system to operate properly, depending on the line set length, the rise, the drop, all that different stuff is going to determine what your line sizes need to be.

So you don't just necessarily match up. What's on the equipment, you're installing and assume that's what your line set needs to be all right. You have to do the research look at the total equivalent length find out what size lines you need. What's your uh, what's your pressure drop going to be and all that good stuff? Okay? So let's go ahead and get on to the installation and we'll talk a little bit more in the closing words all right.

We are prepping this evaporator right now for replacement, we're gon na go ahead and get i like to prep them myself, because i make sure the right nozzle gets put in there we're gon na get it set up for 448a uh expansion valve all that good stuff. We're also prepping our condensed unit. That's monstrous. I can't believe how big it is.

Um, it's just a four horsepower unit blows my mind how tall this thing is, but what it is is they're only using a single pass. Condenser they're, not doubling it up like they. Normally do so that makes it have to be a lot taller anyways, so uh we're just getting this going. All right got the bq kit.

Of course i love using this. It gives you the ability to build these expansion valves on the fly and, yes, you don't have to necessarily have the kit, but it's nice to have everything all consolidated in one place. So um we've got the valve the cartridge and the power head uh, and you got to make sure you use the valve tag right there that indicate that lets the next guy know what cartridge you have installed that guy in that guy, and i also put the Uh nozzle, are they already up in here? This unit came with two nozzles. I always save the extra one.

If you look down into here, i actually carry extra nozzles, so this was the extra one that came with this kit and then i have other ones down in here, so i always save them. So that way, if you ever need them in the future and then i also have plenty of these uh strainers too in case, you ever need to clean a valve strainer on the fly all right, um we're gon na go ahead and sweat in this expansion valve. We're gon na i just realized. I use that as a prop, but we need to go ahead and put some of that on this valve right here, um.

We already got this portion down here done outside so now we're gon na. Do this part up here. We've already got the nozzle inside this is bent. We have room for our solenoid coil and we've got the nitrogen moving through the system right now.

So, okay, so we're using a rather small tip we're using a zero tip. You don't need a lot of heat. Okay, so i always like to try to pre-bend this guy make it a little bit easier. I get a lot of questions about this rod.

This is uh solder, welds 15 round rod. I got no affiliation with them, but i really do like the round rod because you can spin it around in your fingers. It's just it works the same. I mean it's no different than any other solder, but, okay, i know a lot of people say i use too much solder, but i just like to be sure with my company.

I don't care if i use and i don't care if my employees use a little too much solder, it's better than not using enough so okay, so our next goal is to get this stuff off as fast as possible. We're going to do an initial cool, real, quick and i know they say you're not supposed to cool down a braze joint. But when you have sensitive components like an expansion valve you kind of have to and then once we get it somewhat cool we're going to pull the heat blocking compound off. Alright, you can turn it off.

You can very clearly see where the heat stops. You notice how this brass right here doesn't get overheated doesn't get overheated. The heat stops right here. Heat stops here now.

If you come up here, i probably should have put some heat blocking compound up here too, but it's okay, but you got to be careful because a lot of times this is a russell equipment. They use soft solder up here like the low temperature solders and it will become a problem and then trying to mix uh. If you don't have the exact solder that they use trying to mix like 56 with it is just a nightmare. So just be very careful, but that heat blocking compound really does work.

Well, now we're going to leave this uncapped we'll put a cap on it, we're going to leave this loose, leave this loose and we'll go ahead and pressurize the system with nitrogen it'll. Just be the solenoid holding it back and then we got to get into wiring the temp control and everything all right. We are prepped as much as we can for today, we're going to use an etc ronco uh nema, 4x stat. So it's the 140 1000 208 volt does not have built-in defrost or anything like that.

It's a solid controller just being used for temperature. But if you want defrost, then you want to go to like a ke2 therm one. We have a mechanical defrost clock on the roof. That'll handle all that, so we just have it sitting here just for shipping purposes, because we're gon na take this to the job.

We have it all wired in into here. Hopefully i did it right because i did have to change some stuff up to wire in the two speed fan relay, so we're set up there, just the land. All we got to do is land in three x, four and ground. We land those wires coming from the condensing unit.

Then everything else should be hunky dory. So then you come over here. We've got the txv mounted solenoid valve mounted. We have room to move it around if need be.

Sensing bulb will terminate that once we get it piped in we're going to leave this cap on until we're ready to do the install put a cap on this guy, and that's it we're wired in we're just going to put this together um this guy right here. We got the disconnect switch mounted. We need to get some 40 amp fuses for this guy we're going to go with a standard, electro electromechanical, defrost clock, that's what came factory installed, which will make it easy and everything else is good. So we just need to land three-phase power here in the disconnect switch on the top and then run our uh com, or i mean our interconnecting wires down to the condenser unit.

I mean down to the evaporator, so we're gon na start putting this guy back together and uh, we'll be back on install day. Okay, we're demoing the old equipment, we've already got. Power turned off, so we're just disconnecting everything we're going to make new bolt penetrations on the top of the walk-in and line set penetration. So the only thing that's going to be reused is the drain line, so we're just disconnecting everything right now.

The new condensing unit is going to be relocated a little bit. We turned it around some four by supports across to spread the load. These units are so big now and the load calculation called for a four horse. The old unit was a three horse, but when you go to 448a, you lose a little efficiency in the condensing unit, but you gain it in the evaporator.

So the evaporator is rated as a 10 900 btu evap, but with 448a you get closer to like 12 000 or something so anyways um. All's good. So we're just checking everything out kind of getting everything prepped. We got the the whole drill for our new line set.

They're gon na have to get roofers out to seal this up. We need new coil bolts. The coil's hung we'll abandon all this old stuff a little bit out of time. So all right, it has been a heck of a day, but we've got this.

Guy ran electricals hooked up to it, um we're still kind of working we're going to get a cover made for this line set right here to keep the tweakers. You know a little bit at bay, everything's wired in here, so yeah we're just about pulling the vacuum right. Now, it's looking really good. So so we've got a uh, spore lens suction line filter and then a spoiling catch-all dryer down there.

I like the way that they secure them and support everything. It's really nice on these uh russell condensing units. They did a good job with the head pressure control valve installing that it's everything on these things looks nice, and i love the spoiling love on these things. These guys uh, it's really nice, so all right we're getting ready to charge this guy we're still in decay.

546. It's i've been moving this around, so it's kind of moving, but we're good. It pulled down to about 200 microns um. Before i uh open up the system i vacuumed down my gauges.

I took off my big hoses just vacuumed down the gauges, then we'll open them to the system. Uh we're gon na front seat. This valve put as much get much gas into the receiver as we can and then start from there all right, we're going to uh flip the cylinder over we're using honeywell's 448a. I've been using this for a long time, walk-in, coolers and freezers at least a year and a half.

Now i mean it's really just another flavor refrigerant guys. It's not that big of a deal just make sure your valves are sized right. Your orifices or your nozzles, for the expansion valves are sized right, condensed unit. You typically gain.

I already said it earlier gain capacity in the evaporator. You lose a little capacity in the condenser, so you typically have to oversize a little bit and if it's low, temp, even medium temp but low temp for sure you need to have compressor cooling. The dtc valve cools off the compressor, because um you'll have some overheat issues with these blends. So you got to be careful about that.

All right. My system is running. I'm currently charging it with refrigerant. We've still got a clear flashing sight glass.

So all we're going to do is clear, the sight, glass and then we'll worry about our winter charge after that um. But i'm waiting for my evaporator fan motors to turn on because they're not even on yet so all right. We are back to do the official startup on this guy today, um it's cold. As you know.

What, in here it's about zero degrees at the moment, looks like it just turned on everything's working, i will say just preliminary inspection that frost right. There means that we didn't seal that penetration enough and uh, we'll have to double up on that get some foam on that and then uh, but we're gon na check the evaporator superheat just go through all operations. Uh make sure defrost is working and everything all right. We're all probed up superheat's a little bit higher than i want it to be, but it's also kind of weird, because our sight glass is flashing right now.

So we're going to add a little more refrigerant. Get that taken care of check the liquid level again. Make sure we're not low, it's probably just needed a little more gas. Now i mentioned that we had frost coming down.

I didn't seal this because i kind of wanted a roofer to come up here, because since we had to penetrate the rubber roof membrane, i really wanted the roofer to deal with this. But we're going to have to do something because the condensation was really close to going down this penetration. So i got to go ahead and seal it with silicone or something i'm not going to mastic it because i'll. Let him make that, but we're also going to put some more spray foam down there.

But before we start adjusting txvs or anything, we're going to add a little refrigerant, get that sight, glass cleared up check the liquid level again and then go from. There got my suction probe down at the evaporator. So i'm able to monitor the pressures there and then right here i just hooked up and i'm just pushing it into the suction side, a little bit at a time watching that sight glass, it's just about to clear up. I it literally took a couple ounces.

So we're gon na double check the liquid level. Again too, i have to also look in to see when that head pressure valve the head pressure control knob, actually what bypass pressure? Usually they float it way down on these things, but i want to double check all right, so superheat's still a little bit high, i'm in the box right now we're going to go ahead and adjust this valve to bring so we're going to bring the stem down To drop the superheat okay, i made uh eight quarter turns which should equate to about two full turns, so we're going to give it some time. Let it drop down we're ideally looking for about six to eight degrees, evaporator superheat, when it's down to temperature, when we make superheat adjustments, we really need to give the system time to stabilize so immediately. It dropped down to zero degrees superheat and it's gon na kind of find its happy medium.

That's why you know. Obviously, we want to get the superheat as low as possible to get the most efficiency out of the coil, but at the same time you tend to especially on these mechanical valves. They go about six to eight degrees because they don't want to flood back to the compressor, see there's potential that when the valve opens it's going to flood, you know and go back and forth, so we run a higher conservative number of six to eight degrees. That's also why it's pretty important to have suction line accumulators to help protect the compressor, but those are a whole other story.

You know the screens if people aren't improp or properly installing the system brazing with nitrogen, that kind of stuff the screens can get plugged up and then the accumulators fill up with oil. So that's a whole nother issue, but point i'm trying to make. Is you make an adjustment, and you give it time? Okay, we're gon na watch, it kinda throttle see how it reacts and just kind of go from there all right. That seems to be where it's going to leave right about 8.2 degrees.

It's kind of still modulating we're going to close up the evaporator coil or at least the expansion valve side and then throw the unit into a defrost check the liquid level in the receiver market. All that good stuff. Now all right, so we're looking good um. I wanted to point out something we were just talking about this right now, these newer units they're trying to get as much energy efficiency out of them as possible.

So if you notice discharge gas comes out of the compressor right, there runs in right here on this guy. Okay goes into the condenser comes out of the condenser right here. Okay goes through the head pressure. Control valve to the receiver then comes out of the receiver right right here comes out of the receiver goes back into the condenser again then comes out of the condenser goes through the side, glass and the liquid line, filter, dryer they're, doing that for efficiency, they're verifying That we have a hundred percent proper sub cooling on these newer units.

You actually have measurable sub cooling looks like my valve is throttling again, but uh look at. We have measurable sub point of about six degrees, so that's normal, but you have to understand these new systems because they're doing that for energy efficiency. Now, all right at this point we're gon na go ahead and pump the system down and check the liquid level in the receiver and mark it for the next guy all right. So we have our receiver right here and we heated it up when it was pumped down and you can clearly see the liquid level right here.

That's where it starts so we're gon na go ahead and mark that guy and then that way we know from this point forward. That is the full amount of refrigerant we can put in this system all right systems back up and running. We came over here and we marked the liquid level 31 pounds of 448a. I also wrote that in the name plate right here we're putting all of our notes in here i put system startup right there, three quarter, receiver level um.

The next thing we're going to do is just go double check. All the electrical connections make sure they're tight make sure the crankcase heater is working just doing a full start up on this guy, then we'll put it into defrost make sure all the defrost heaters are working all right. So we've got a tech downstairs uh and i verified everything we wrote it down. So i wrote down the current of the crankcase heater, but remember that current is going to change depending on the voltage so 204 volts, 0.25 amps evap heaters, there's three of them.

Total current at 204 volts 8.5 amps individual heaters are 2.9 amps each, so we're good there everything's looking really good up here, we're going to go ahead and start taking all of our stuff off, and i did make a pressure control adjustment because the compressor was short Cycling a little bit, but it's doing good now, so we're just about done here all right. We are back today to cover up this line set. So that way we can be done with this now we're gon na cover it up with this really thin galvanized and we're gon na paint it brown all right. We didn't do anything crazy.

We just notched the metal, it's not sealed whatsoever. We even left gaps underneath so that way water can flow. This is just to kind of make it look prettier, so you know public and stuff like over. There doesn't have to look at it.

You got all those cars and whatever then we're gon na paint. It brown we are gon na cut this back about two inches and they're still gon na have a roofer. Now i put that roof jack right there. The roofer may put something different, who knows um, but at least there's something he can choose to use it or not.

He'll probably need to replace that flashing too, but that's not my thing, so we're going to take it off, i'm going to do one more cut right here and then we're going to paint it brown and put it back on and be done with this thing and Again, it doesn't need to be sealed or anything it's just a beauty cover. Just in case you wanted to know. We offer professional paint services too over here and we paint match. We guarantee our paint match.

If it doesn't match, you can call someone else all right. It's not perfect, somewhat matches the paint color. This is actually not the paint color. The paint color is on the side of the building right there, so somewhat matches that good enough again, this is just to keep the attention away from the shiny.

Copper is really all that this is for um the next time i come back, i'm not going to do it now, because the paint's all tacky, we'll write on it with a big fat sharpie do not step or something you know. I don't want someone to walk on it and then the roofer still has the stuff and then, as far i can't remember if i already said it in the video or not, but i sealed it underneath with spray foam and stuff and then just silicone. But that way the roofer can be the one to make the permanent seal. You know he'll do what he wants to do there and you know he'll realize that this is loose.

He can move that if he needs to so all right. That's it customer's been happy. Walking's been working great for a while now so uh yeah we're gon na wrap this one up. When we do these installs, it's really about what the customer can afford and what they expect, what they want to spend right.

I would love to take all this equipment and put it on their main roof um, but it's already on top of the walk-in cooler in order to get it on top of the main roof. We'd have to go through some pretty complex stuff. If you guys paid attention, the brick on the outside of the building would have to be penetrated. You know, we'd have to do.

Beauty covers and different stuff like that, so the customer just wanted it put back on top of the freezer. Okay, it's not ideal. It's not the perfect situation. We tried to take those four by fours and lay them across to evenly spread the load.

So that way, it wasn't just leaning on the panels of the walk-in. These newer, condensed units they're huge they are giant. You know that's something we have to remember and i can't stress enough like when i was talking about doing the load calculation. You guys need to understand what this awef compliant equipment is doing and how low they're floating the head pressure.

Because if you try to throw an existing condensing unit on an existing system, that txv may or may not be the right size right, especially since they're dropping that head pressure so low in the winter time. So keep that in mind all right. As far as the installation goes, of course, there's always stuff i'd love to do better about my installs okay, i am not an instagram tech that does these perfect, pretty perfect installs. I wish i was um, i'm constantly looking at what these other technicians do.

We all feed off of each other and when i see people do these great installs, they give me ideas and tips. You know and different things to do, and i hope that maybe there's like one or two things, maybe that you guys get. You know that maybe you want to improve upon uh, you see something in my video, maybe you duplicate it or you think hey, i don't want to do it the way chris did i want to do it better. You know, and you work off of that and and that's a good thing right, because i am not perfect and i never will be perfect.

Okay. So in this situation we were having a real struggle with the equipment. The customer kept icing up the equipment. Now one thing i will tell you guys: i told you that when i did the load calculation on this equipment that um you know it required a a a four horsepower condensed unit with a what is it like? A 12 000 btu evaporator right to satisfy the load with the ambient conditions in this area.

With that being said, what was existing? There was a 9000 btu evaporator coil, with a three horsepower condensing unit, so the the condensing unit was was oversized for the evaporator, but the evaporator was marginally sized for the load at the ambient that they run that walking at now. It's been like that for since, like 2003, i think or something like that. Okay, it's been that way for a long time, but that does play a role in the equipment icing up as much as it had been now things to understand. You know we went through the operations of the original equipment, we told the customer hey it's working, it's doing everything it can, but you know here's what we're finding it's marginally sized the customers keep opening and closing the doors and with all that being said, you know The customer wanted to go ahead and upgrade the equipment when we did the upgrade we sized it properly right.

So that way it can satisfy the requirements under the ambient conditions and also to be fair, not to get political or weird. In this thing, too, the temperatures outside are rising. Okay, um this equipment. When it was originally installed, the ambient temperature might have only been 95 degrees - okay, um, maybe 100 degrees at the most, but the temperatures are going up.

It's getting hotter outside. We have to size. Our equipment appropriately for those higher than normal ambient conditions. Okay, keep that in mind.

So as far as the install goes, it was pretty straightforward, of course, there's things i could have done to make it better. In hindsight, when i'm editing the video - i didn't think about this in the time, but in hindsight had i just extended that line set over and penetrated further inside the box. I probably wouldn't have to do such an extensive cover on the roof right and we wouldn't have that penetration, because it's it's kind of awkward getting to that, and i did flip the equipment so that the condenser face the wall that way it gave us. You know a little bit more room to work up there, but at the same time it puts the line set right in the area where a technician would be kneeling down, and that's why i went back and ro or wanted to go back and ride on it.

I haven't been back yet, but in rode on that that cover that i made do not stand or whatever right, because i don't want someone to lean on that and it'll just shatter crush, because it's, i think, that's like 20 gauge galvanized or something. So it's not very sturdy, but you know in hindsight i should have extended the line set more inside the box over and then penetrated up, because then there would have been less on top of the roof. You know, but you live and you learn. They also still need to get an electrician out, because i wanted the electrical service upgraded, um, the wire size is marginally sized.

I think they had 12 gauge wire going to that. It's got a 40 amp max circuit ampacity, but the breaker size was too small. So we increased the size of the breaker while we were there, but because of the complexity, we want an electrician to get out and increase the wire size to 10 gauge going from the breaker all the way to it now to be fair, too, they say: 40 Amp breaker is the max size for that system, but it's only running like 21 amps of current okay, so with the 12 gauge wire, it's okay for now, but i still want them to increase the size just for safety reasons, just to be cautious. Okay, um.

You know when it comes to working on this equipment. I do not know everything when it comes to doing load, calculations and different things like that. This is just what works for me. I encourage you guys all to check out and do your reading research load calculations.

Research line sizing, there's so much mis information out there, people giving wrong information or just assuming, because the system has a inch and an 8, because this particular condensed unit had an inch and an eighth suction line coming off of it. But it didn't require that and the evaporator had a 7 8 inch suction line coming off of it because of the capacity it actually only required a three-quarter inch suction line. But, like i said, i went with the 7 8 because it's more readily available and i keep those fittings and everything on my truck. I have very minimal three-quarter inch truck stock for refrigeration line sizing.

Refrigerant lines are sized according to pressure drop oil return and refrigerant. Velocity, keep that in mind going to 448a is a very similar gas to r22 from 404. You are gon na drop in line size. Okay, you can put bigger lines on there, but it's gon na change.

The pressure drop, it's gon na change, the oil return and different stuff like that, so you always wan na. Do your research definitely look into that rapid spec program for doing load calculations? I really do like that, especially when i do the russell equipment. I really like using it but, more importantly, check out the spoiler virtual engineer. It really does help you to understand the things you need to consider when you're sizing expansion valves liquid line, uh solenoid valves liquid line dryers any other spoiling component that they sell.

They have sizing information on that virtual engineer website. Okay, so definitely check that out. I really really do appreciate your guys's uh um feedback. I appreciate your support, so please leave me some comments.

Let me know what you think feel free to send me an email to hvacr videos gmail.com. If you have any questions or things you want to talk about.