This video is brought to you by Sportlin. Quality Integrity and tradition. Today we were called on a kitchen AC Not working at this restaurant now I Just talked to the manager and he said he was confused because he didn't think the kitchen AC wasn't working. but he said he had a fire inspection and they said that there was no air blown out of the vents which is kind of strange.

But regardless, we've got to figure out what's going on within this unit. So when we walk up to the unit it's not running at the moment. Let's go ahead and open up the electrical section in here and we have a number four on the circuit board now. I Happen to know that is a smoke detector indicates smoke alarm for smoke detector.

So let's go over here and here's the smoke alarm and it is triggered. We hit the reset. What happens? Just reset. See if it starts up, this thing's vibrating all over the place.

Looks like there's something wrong with the belt. The whole blower is simply shaking the whole unit. That's not good. That's not good at all.

Yeah, this thing's got messed up. Let's go ahead and power this guy down. and uh, we'll dig into it a little bit more. All right.

So I Shut down the unit. We have no power. We've got a very loose belt. The pulleys are worn out.

They're not in good condition. Okay, both of them have interesting grooves on them. Um, but something is vibrating in the unit I Think that there's damage in the blower? Wheels Based off of the vibration that was happening there and the unit was shaking really bad. But we still don't know why the smoke detector tripped.

That is a very old smoke detector. Very very old. Um, air filters are dirty, but they're not completely plugged up, but that shouldn't affect that. But why did we trip a smoke detector? That's interesting? Okay, let's have a look in here.

I Don't think this is aligned properly I Know it probably doesn't come across to you guys very well. Yeah, it doesn't look to be aligned properly, but I'm telling you there's there's something going on in the blower. Wheels Like this: this thing's out of vibration. the way that it was vibrating.

and um, there's no way to get that blower assembly out because if you look I've got about five feet at the most four feet and that blower assembly comes out as one giant assembly. so that's interesting. They're not getting that out. Hmm.

Okay, well what I'm gonna do right now is we are going to get a laser alignment tool. We're going to check the alignment on those pulleys, we're gonna get the belt tightened up and we're going to see if the vibration intensifies or get work gets worse. I Have a feeling it's going to intensify while we're doing that too. I'll climb into the back and look at the blower assembly, but still, the vibration may have nothing to do with why the smoke detector trips.

So before I go any further I'm going to open up that smoke detector and have a look inside there. All right. This is an older smoke detector and so what happens is they used to have these filters for the sampling tubes and the filters. That's the sediment from the filters.

They they disintegrate and they get stuck in the detector. and they cause nuisance trips. but that's not the only thing that can cause it to trip. It could have been actual smoke too.

But yeah, these things are trashed. Um, this detector is so old that it's not even anything I really want to mess with if we're having nuisance trips on this, but we still don't know if it's a nuisance. But if we have a nuisance trip, this detector needs to be replaced and it looks like there's actually two of them. Uh, and they're both could tied together probably.

But what I'm interested in is I'm surprised it didn't trip every unit on this roof because usually they're Daisy chained together and uh, I mean it could be water leaking out. I mean there's so many things that could be causing this problem. So again, we're not seeing a problem right now. but let me show you some vitals that I am seeing.

Okay, first off, you see the wiring and stuff down in here. Now you know what? No, it doesn't look like actually that's going to be the problem I Was thinking that this was a smoke detector wire and it's not. and I was saying that the drain can overflow and cause issues because the drain is actually plugged up. It's not overflowing, but there's a bunch of slime and sediment so if this unit really gets running, it could overflow.

Let's go down here. Are this: Yeah. See, none of this is in the duct detector wiring either. Like this, getting wet isn't going to do anything, but that's a economizer.

Anyway, so all the duct detector stuff's up high. so I don't think it's a problem with condensation shorting things out. We're just going to have a problem within the duct detectors. It could just be a nuisance trip though, too, you know, So it's kind of hard to say.

Um, okay. Well, we're going to go ahead and go with the alignment. We're going to get this cleaned up really quick uh, and then we'll let it run longer. We'll get that belt tightened up and see how it does.

We've got a laser alignment tool and the alignment really isn't bad. I mean uh, it basically puts it at the zero. Mark It's a like a hair off, but I'm not even gonna call that bad. All we're going to do is tighten this up.

This guy needs new pulleys for sure, but we're going to tighten it up and see what that happens with the vibration. Because yeah, the alignment isn't as bad as I thought it was I Thought that the pulleys being worn out. Maybe it's just because they were constantly running with loose belts that wore the pulleys though? Who knows. All right.

So on these guys, you loosen these guys up. There's two on the other side too. Uh, and then you basically actuate these guys right here evenly. Okay, you got to make sure because this motor can come up at a weird angle so you got to make sure they're even.

Did you do that a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time, make sure it's leveled out. Now that's going the wrong way because it's getting looser so we need to go the opposite way. But you get the idea. you basically lower those down or raise them up depending on how you need to adjust it.

All right. We got this guy snugged up. Um, I Actually, the belt itself I mean it's really not in that bad of shape, but the pulleys are worn out for sure. so we're gonna have to talk to them about that.

um, belt snugged up. everything's tightened back on. I Definitely am going to grease these bearings. but I have someone going to get some grease right now.

So at this point, we're gonna go and turn this guy on and see how the vibration you know, progresses or regresses. I Don't know if that's the right way to say that. So this guy's running now. Yeah, I mean I Don't know if it's coming across on camera.

It hasn't gotten worse, but it's vibrating pretty bad now. Pulleys can cause vibrations too. If they're really rutted and the belt's getting stuck in them, they are worn out. but I don't think that's our problem.

I think our problem is in the indoor blower assemblies. Something's out of balance, something's dirty, and unfortunately we can't pull it out to clean it. We can pull the top off the unit, but I don't have enough guys to lift this thing out of the unit straight up and over. and we're not going to do a crane for that.

This unit's a piece of junk from 2003. It's not worth that much headache, but the vibration is there, but it's like not the end of the world. It's just something to let them know, like add to the list of problems that's wrong with this. AC So at this point we need to finish diagnosing on this.

We don't know what would have caused a smoke detector to trip. it. Could have been nuisance. It could be that it's old.

We're going to go through the rest of the unit. Yeah, the vibration right here too is just I can feel it in my hands. It's pretty bad. Um, we're gonna go through the rest of the unit and see if it works.

Okay, all right, we are fully probed up. The unit's been running for about four minutes I'm not seeing anything too scary with the first stage. let's jump over to the second stage. I Don't know why we get these glitchy things happening, but it's still reading the numbers.

Um, I mean Super is a little bit low Sub: Queen's a little bit low, but also I don't think the the condenser fan motor is running because it stages off of pressure. guys. I'm not seeing anything too scary here. I'll get the other condenser fan motors running really quick.

I'll jump them out and then we'll confirm. But I mean the unit itself looks like it's doing pretty good. Let's uh, temp, split's still a little low, but we'll let it run a little bit longer. Actually, let's see what the target is.

The target's 17 based off of the ambient and indoor conditions. So honestly, this isn't bad for a 15 ton unit. But I'm gonna get those other condenser fan motors running all right. We got all the condenser fan motors running now.

so Supreme and subcoin are lining up when I say superheat and subcoin. That's just a measurement of the refrigerant charge and the efficiency of the expansion valve. And that's an overall we're looking at everything though. Okay, um, yeah, we're looking good on airflow delivered.

capacity looks decent. Let's go to the first stage now that all the condenser fan motors are running again, it's upcoins a hair on the low side, but I'm not going to go too crazy on this one. It's a R22 system. I Really don't see anything wrong with this other than the pulley issues.

the vibration issue. Okay, we've got some worn out contactors. you can see they're definitely worn out inside. You've got some overheating on the bottom and stuff.

I Will bring all this up to the customer's attention. All the condenser fan motors are working running like they should be. Um, they may look slow to the camera, but they're not. They're running full speed.

Everything's looking good, so we need to get the drain blown out. We need to talk to the customer about the vibration. I I Really don't want to change the blowers in this thing, but if the customer wants me to I Guess we can. We can change the entire indoor blower assembly.

that'll chill out the vibration, put new pulleys on it and you know they'll probably get a little more life out of it. I Wouldn't be surprised I Went ahead and wrote down all the information for the police. so that way I Have it and you know we can talk to the customer see what they want to do. but really, it's in their court now.

At the same time, when we were trying to find this issue, once we got here we noticed that this AC over here the belts were slapping really bad and so um something's going on here. They were like and they're tight but they were slapping bad but the pulleys are worn out bad and I think what's happening is the belts are getting stuck in the pulleys. This one's not as bad really. This one doesn't have very much of a Groove but this one pretty bad and it was like like you could hear it when you open the blower assembly.

So it was bad. So we're gonna have to get new pulleys on this one and then we'll evaluate this AC too. Now this is their other AC I Went ahead and measured the pulleys because I already know that we're going to need to replace the pulleys and we got that information. Let's see this thing turn on.

It sounds like it has a broken Bell But what's actually happening is it's getting stuck in the pulley and then it's like releasing So eventually. That'll cause problems. So we're going to get new pulleys for this guy today too. All right.

So this is the first unit I started working on that was vibrating I Talked to the customer. They want to go ahead and try to replace the pulleys first see if that helps with the vibration. I Told him it's probably not, but the pulleys are still going to need to be replaced because even if they have to change the unit, you can't get these units very fast anymore. So it's going to be a while.

We're just going to burn through belts so we got to change the pulleys, but I said they're still going to have to consider replacing the blower assembly or changing the unit, whatever they want to do, but we're going to get these swapped out. So what I did was I took some penetrating oil, got some penetrating oil right here, sprayed it in here. We're going to sand it up, We'll get these pulleys off, get them put on a line, started back up, and then we'll jump onto the other unit. All right.

So what I'm doing is We started by kinda eyeballing the pulleys, getting them somewhat lined up, and I'm tightening this one down. This one uses a taper bushing, so taper bushings have two sets of holes, one that's threaded, one that's not. Then the pulley has threaded connections, so the hole that doesn't have threads you put the bolt through, you put it into the threaded section of the pulley to tighten it, make sure your key is in there, make sure it's where you want it, and you evenly tighten it a little bit here, a little bit there that way it doesn't like tighten, crooked or anything. If you wanted to separate them, then you would take this bolt out and put it into the threaded hole, and then it pushes against the pulley and separates it from the taper bushing.

So now that we have that, I'm going to go ahead and put my laser alignment tool on here, and then we're going to set the depth of this pulley all right. So we're gonna put these guys right here. Okay, that way we can set the laser alignment tool up and get a general idea of how far we are off from this guy. Okay, so right now we are hitting way out of whack and we need to push it in significantly.

So now my laser is hitting the zero line on all three of these magnets, so that's about where it needs to be. I'm going to go ahead and tighten it on and then we'll adjust the belt tension and get that all nice and neat too. All right, we are installed, lined up, tensioned. Everything's good.

We're going to I need to tighten those half inch bolts to lock the motor in and then we're going to turn it on and move on to the next one. Um, we're allowed to run 13.9 amps. We're running like nine. It's still vibrating, but not as bad.

But I mean everything's good right there. Running nice and good. right direction, all right. but you can see I mean I Don't know if it's coming across the camera, but it's the whole unit's still shaking.

Certainly not as bad as it was, so we're good on that. Now it's time to move on to the next. All right now just for ballpark. We're going to take a tachometer and measure the speed so we can make sure we get relatively close.

922 RPMs Now I Just want to make sure we're not lower than that. We're probably going to be a little bit over because these pulleys are worn out and they're slipping. So 9 22. you don't want to strip it out there.

We go Perfect. Clean. Save the keys that are in there. All right.

This is never going to be absolutely perfect because this is a variable pitch pulley and it's a little bit wider than it is over there. That's pretty natural on that, but the alignment's pretty good. The motor's tension. The belts are tensioned.

We got a match set of belts, both the same brand. Um, you got to be careful when you put them next to each other. It's inevitable that they end up spinning at different rates. Whatever reason, but tensions.

The same adjustments. We're going to double tighten everything that we're going to push this guy in and tighten it up. Should turn on any second it's looking good. Hopefully we didn't just dust out the customers.

No more slapping of the belts. We're going to test the RPMs and then test the current. make sure we're not overloaded. All right, we're running at 933 RPMs we were originally at 9 22 .

I'm pretty happy with that I don't see a problem at all. Now we're going to test current and make sure we're not overloaded and we should be good to go. Sky is allowed to run 10.6 amps for the indoor blower running at 9.3 so that's good. We're going to uh, probe up on it, make sure the rest of the unit's working properly.

All right, this guy is up and running. Uh, everything seems to be good. All the compressors are on I had to jump them out. But let's look at uh, the vitals here.

So this is the first stage. Nothing too crazy about seven degrees super heat 13 degrees sub cooling. That doesn't concern me too much. Second stage: about 10 degrees super heat 11 degrees sub cooling I Mean it's within range I'm not gonna try to reinvent the wheel here.

Eight degrees 13 degrees sub cool I mean looking pretty good. Fourth compressor: about 13 Super 8 10 degrees sub cool. That looks pretty good. Let's go.

Temperature splits a little bit higher 24 degrees. We are calling for 21.6 so that's not too bad. Um, airflow seems to be where it should be delivered Capacity: We're right on the money. Uh, we're looking for 206 000 BTUs We're right at 207 000 BTUs I Do not see any major problems.

Um, saturation temps where we really don't need four stages of cooling at the moment. So I'm freezing that building out. Go back here real quick. 44 degree Saturation Temp 112 Condensing Temp 46 106.

47 108 I Mean they're all within reason. They're not all identical, but I'm not too worried about that. Everything seems to be working fine on this guy now. I'm sure there's a little bit here and there I Could probably tweak the charge a little bit here and there, but this thing's kicking.

but I don't see the need to like go crazy on this unit. All the condenser fan motors are running, so that's a good sign. We changed the pulleys on the indoor blower motor. We are going to be replacing the belts I mean the uh, the filters but not today.

I have a technician start the rooftop maintenance today, but uh, we're not going to finish it today I Had him go take some other people some parts I Just had them blow out drains rinse off condensers. So we originally started on that unit with a trip smoke detector. We're going to give it an opportunity to see if we have any other issues. If we do, we'll change both the smoke detectors on it because there is two.

um, this one right here. We just noticed the belt was slapping around, the pulley was all jacked up. so we changed the pulleys on both of these and everything's good. So I'm gonna go ahead and clean up all my tools.

got my stuff right here and uh, we're gonna give the keys back to the customer. That's it on this one. When it comes to smoke detectors, duct detectors, whatever you want to call them, the you know, uh, dirty sampling tubes and worn out filters can definitely be a cause of concern. Okay, the sampling tube is the part that goes into it they can get Dusty Especially when these customers aren't doing, you know, um, the routine maintenance as periodically as they should.

This customer does them, but they do them quarterly. They really need more and they do quarterly. But like you saw how dirty the unit is, they don't they? They really only want us just rinsing off coils, blowing out drains, changing filters like they don't want us spending a bunch of time doing stuff that we really should be doing. You know, vacuuming the unit out and stuff like that.

So you know we we take what we can get basically. But um I always give options to the customer. Okay, in a perfect world I Want to change the blower assembly in this thing both both blower Wheels shaft bearings, pulleys all that stuff right. and then I want to put two new smoke detectors in it? Um I would love to get in there and make the refrigerant charge perfect.

You know? let's go recover the gas out of everyone. Weigh it back in like let's be awesome on this, right? but they don't have the money for that. Oftentimes you know they just want to get it going. So in this situation I brought to the customer's attention Hey, um I'd suggest we replace the blower assemblies.

but regardless, um, you know or replace the unit right? And you know of course they're like, well, you know, unit's a lot of money. You know it's working. Why replace it? I understand that argument, you know I'm just telling them like look, you know we can change the blower assemblies. It's going to be a lot of money and it's going to take some time.

Uh, you know getting that thing out is going to be a chore for sure. Um I've done it before but it's a pain. but basically they decided hey, okay, it's a smoke detector the they want to see if they have any more issues with it. Okay, before we go in and drop, you know, two grand into this unit to replace smoke detectors and and get them properly wired because once we start digging into them, we really gotta, uh, set them up properly.

they're not interlinked properly. you know, like the fire alarm companies Connections in them isn't right. Like we have to get all into that stuff. Um and they decided, hey, let's see if we have a problem with it again.

So I said that's fine. So essentially we reset the smoke detector. um I told them hey, you know what, the filters are really dirty. they're disintegrated the sampling tubes like when and also too when you have a duck detector this old, you try to pull those sampling tubes out, you're just asking for trouble.

You really are uh often times on these units too. On these older Linux units they would have a sampling tube that would run because there's two heat exchangers in this unit and there's a uh I think there's a partition between the two if I remember right and that sampling tube. Oftentimes they have an extension on it like it's kind of a pain in the butt. Same thing with the the return air side.

Uh, the sampling tube. It usually runs all the way through the return air side and then penetrates the other side just slightly and it's a pain. But anyways, just be cautious on these older units. if you try to pull the sampling tubes out.

from experience, you're in for a world of trouble. The newer units: The sampling tubes are super easy to pull out. Um. so anyways, the customer decided that they want to wait and see if they have any more problems with the duct detectors.

but they did want me to go ahead and replace the pulleys on both units. so went and picked up all new pulleys from the motor repair shop which I have a great one near me that has everything we need. Um and uh went ahead and got all the pulleys new belts. went ahead and got match belts for the the Dual belt.

one. Tried our best to align everything Now I have that laser alignment tool. it's not not perfect. Okay and you know the the one flaw that I when I bought that I knew there was a flaw in it in in that in order for that laser alignment tool to be perfect, it really should be setting inside the groove of the pulley and then looking with the laser all the way across because that's the only way that you would get um in actual alignment.

But what I do like about this laser alignment tool like it's a really cool thing is that it has the triple magnets so that way you can see the the adjustment this way from the motor right. So if the motor is like pitched forward or backwards like on the carrier units, you know those motor brackets that suck. So every time you tighten down the belt the motor pitches forward. This would be great at dialing that in so it's not perfect.

Just because all the laser is hitting the zeros doesn't mean it's absolutely perfect. You've still got to eyeball it, You still got to look at it. but it certainly does make it super easy. Okay so we got the new pulleys on there.

We went through both. ACS checked the refrigerant charge airflow. Everything seems to be doing good. That's all that the customer wanted to do.

So here we are. Uh, if you know we have any more problems with the duct detector then we'll go ahead and replace them, but that's that's it for today. Okay I really appreciate you making it to the end of the video. If you haven't already, please consider checking out my website Hvacrvideos.com Uh, we have merchandise available on there as we're coming into the fall.

I Know we still got a couple weeks of Summer left maybe a month or so somewhere in there, but as we're coming into fall, uh, we got zip up hoodies on the website. we got uh, beanies on the website, regular hats, shirts, all that good stuff and I Also do have a merch restock coming for some of the shirts and some of the hats, so stay tuned. Okay, really appreciate you on that one again. Hvacrvideos.com If you're interested in supporting the channel, you know the easiest way to support the channel is simply watch the videos from beginning to end.

That really is the easiest way. but you can also support the channel by purchasing tools at Truetechtools.com If you use my offer code big Picture on checkout, you'll get an eight percent discount on majority of the items on their website. There's a few things the discount code doesn't apply to, but the cool thing is not only you get a discount, I get a small commission from that too. it's an affiliate code, so big picture.

One word at Truetechtools.com You can also support the channel via Patreon PayPal and YouTube channel memberships. There's link in the show notes of the video on YouTube right here and you can see how to do all that stuff all right. I Really, really appreciate you all you know when I read through the comments uh, it's really cool, you know I was uh, we were on the overtime show and we were talking about negative comments and I do have to say for the most part on this channel we have pretty awesome people that are commenting I mean occasionally there's someone here and there but you know my policy is is like I don't really delete comments if you have criticism of me as long as you're not being a jerk I don't really delete those I don't you know I'm not afraid of criticism I learn from it and and I actually do learn from some of your criticism when you guys say hey, you know what I know an easier way or you you spent you worked a little harder than you should have. you could do it this way I learned from that so bring it on I really do appreciate feedback okay, uh, is long.

The one thing that I do delete immediately is when people are trying to guess the names of the restaurants that I'm working at. right or wrong I delete those comments immediately. Okay, we've got to protect the customers. I know that there's a bunch of you guys watching these videos and you know the places that I work at because you probably work at the similar chains and other locations and stuff so you can recognize where I'm at.

Please keep that to yourself. Okay, it is. We try to protect these restaurants because the general public what they think is disgusting. they don't even understand.

like I open an ice machine and everybody's like oh my gosh, it's the end of the world guys. that stuff's in every ice machine. You show me an ice machine and I'll find slime mold calcium. I Don't care whose ice machine it is I'll find it Okay, it's everywhere, right? So you know I Try to protect the customers on that aspect because the general public just doesn't understand.

You know what it is or reaching cooler that has a drawer unit. Guys, every drawer unit out there is going to be dirty because the manufacturers never make them accessible for the customer. So half the time the customer it's it's a pain in the butt for me to get the drawers out to be able to get in there and clean the expecting the customers to do that on a weekly basis. They're not designed to be cleaned.

Okay, it's just it is what it is. But anyways I appreciate you all for the awesome comments that you do leave. Thank you so very much! Uh, if you guys haven't already, one last thing, make sure you go check out My Home House series videos where I'm replacing the air conditioner in my home I've been uploading a little bit more on that. We're getting closer to the final install.

It's going to be coming soon! I Was actually just doing some duct work in the Attic connecting it and sealing it with duct sealer and all kinds of stuff today. so stay tuned, more content to follow. I Really do appreciate you and we will catch you on the next one.