The basic troubleshooting mindset now when i go into some specifics. Basically, this is my highlight reel of stuff that i'm good talk good good. At talking about. At least i like to think i am electrical refrigeration circuit, best practices, installation practices commissioning that sort of airflow.

All that when it comes to gas furnaces, i'm probably going to result in you killing somebody. If you listen to me too much so i'm not we're not going to talk gas furnaces, that's i know you have a lot of them here, but you know i've come from florida right. We do so decent about 80, but not that much so most of you could probably teach me something about gas furnaces. What is troubleshooting, how do we troubleshoot best? What are the first steps? It always starts by listening.

Good troubleshooters good diagnosticians are people who listen far more than they talk. We've all met the guy and hope. Maybe some of you may be the guy. If you are that's okay, just work on it where they go in wanting to be the hero right away.

They're wanting to prove how smart they are right away, hop right in. Oh, it's a capacitor! That's simple! These things go bad all the time, a little about diary of the mouth right. A good troubleshooter is good at finding faults right away, but doesn't need to talk until they've got all the information, because that customer may share some information with you that it may not just be the first layer. I didn't put it in here, but one of the really popular things that i shared on social media was the the hierarchy of technicians.

You know it's based on maslow's hierarchy of need, but it was a pyramid and it showed the different types of technicians and all the way down. The bottom was the you know: the sales tech down there, the parts changer you know and then at the top was what we call the unicorn tech and it's, of course a joke. But the idea is they're. Just it's hard to it's easy to find as a unicorn and these unicorn texts what they do.

Is they don't just find the problem? They don't just fix, fix the problem. They don't just fix the problem and find the cause of the problem, but they also optimize the entire system as part of what they do so some easy ones things like a compressor. For example, you know emerson copeland talks about this ad nauseam because they don't want their compressors to keep. You know being sent back when there's nothing wrong with them at the very least.

But if you have a compressor, that's failed say it has a shorted winding. It's grounded, let's say it's grounded. If you stop there, you're gon na often miss the reason why the compressor is grounded. If you find the reason why the compressor is grounded and you stop there, you may miss significant system optimizations that can be made often airflow.

Let's be real honest i mean airflow. Is the thing duck design all that installation, uh practices, that's huge could be long. Mindset could be what could be, what took it out. So how can long line set results in an electrical failure? Well, anything that causes overheating over time can cause an electrical failure.

It can cause a mechanical failure. A mechanical failure can cause an electrical failure right. I always like it when technician goes out in florida. This is again florida man.

You know everything happens in florida for whatever reason we go out and it's grounded whatever's wrong with it faster is blown. It's always lightning. It's amazing. Now we do have a lot of lightning in florida, but lightning gets blamed for everything.

It's probably lightning. You know. That's probably took the compressor out, you know, most of the time an electrical failure is caused by some sort of mechanical failure. A lot of the time, not always but a lot of the time and the example that i always give is it's like saying: you've got a ceiling fan and the motor's burned out, and you say: well, you know that's an electrical failure.

It has nothing to do with the fact that jimmy's been standing there, you know holding it still for the last half an hour and spinning it backwards and whacking it with a you know, with a with a hammer or whatever you know, like mechanical failures, cause electrical Failures all the time, so knowing that we've got to drill down to the cost, but once we find the cause, then we even need to get a little further and find the actual source. And listening is one of the best ways and also you'll, see here at klos. We do not have a policy against mullets for our installers we're going to do the five pillars first, which is one of the first documents i ever wrote for training was when i was working at a large uh company that primarily did residential new construction. Five things now, some of you who see this list of five measurements um are going to be like.

Where is static pressure? Well, this static pressure isn't here and it's just because i'm not actually somebody who thinks that you need to measure static pressure on every single service call, even though i'm a huge advocate of measuring static pressure. I'm also not somebody who thinks that you should put gauges on every system that you touch. In fact, we talked about many times about non-invasive testing, but this is not about taking a system that we already assumed to be working properly and just confirming that it's working properly. This is when you know you have a refrigerant system problem, there's something going on in the refrigerant circuit and you need to test them.

The reason why i did this initially was that when we first started getting txvs and again, some of this is like i i mean i like to think i'm a pretty young guy, but a lot of this stuff is already dated, like everything's come with txvs now, When i first got into the trade in 1999 2000, the majority of systems were fixed orifice, the majority of them had pistons uh, some sort of fixed orifice, and so when we went to txvs everybody's, like will you charge a txv by fill in the blank? What do you charge your txv by? What's the method, sub cooling right, so they'd say charge it by sub cooling. So what does that mean? You hit the sub cooling number you're halfway through your truck jumping in it like you're ready to go right, but the problem with that is is that it it's more than that, especially when you're troubleshooting an issue. So a lot of guys would say some version of charge is good. How do you know the charge is good because the sub cooling is 10 or 12 or eight or whatever right the charge is good.

Well, just because you hit a particular number on sub cooling. Doesn't mean that the charge is good because we don't know if there's some other problem with the piece of equipment, you could have a severe restriction in a liquid line dryer and still hit a 10 degree sub cooling before the dryer and the system not be working Properly, you could have a 10 degree sub cooling and you could have a metering device, that's significantly overfeeding or underfeeding, and that doesn't mean that it's over all as well. When i first wrote this, this is one of the main things i was trying to get people to do. Don't just say i set the charge by and why don't we just say i set the charge by blank and now all is good because load changes.

Lots of things change, filter loads up whatever the case may be. You can't just use a single number and that's what i was trying to get people to go away from now. Now our list has gotten a little longer and even some of the things that we've started testing now, like total system delivered capacity, we can do that now in 1999-2000. You know how they were teaching us to do calculation to see how many btus the cooling system was removing.

You know the method that they would use at that time for doing that, the standard method for figuring out your airflow and then calculating the system btus anybody. Anybody know off top of their head, a bunch of math. Oh there you go there, you go he's naming the math, it's a bunch of math and there's nothing wrong with the math and there's nothing wrong with knowing the math i'm a fan of knowing the math. We teach that it's great, but the problem is is that they were teaching you to use a thermocouple little bead thermocouple covered in a little wet sock with what kind of water distilled water right, because we all keep distilled water in our trunks right at all times.

Distilled water stuck in the duct in the right position in the right airstream and then you do the math, and then you come up with the answer. The problem is jim bergman talks about this all the time. The problem is, if, for those of you who have done that outside of a lab environment in out in the field, you'll find that you'd get all kind of different answers with so much variation so much so that it's almost pointless right. So that's why in 2000 or whenever i wrote this delivered capacity isn't part of this list, but nowadays it could as just as well be because if you use measure quick and some you know the field piece we're going to keep a brand agnostic here, field piece.

Testo uei probes that are good, psychrometers and reasonably new, so they're, not all gummed up, and you know, given bad readings and you're, going to get a pretty good idea of how the system is operating in terms of btus and almost as easy, essentially as easy as Measuring a delta t at that time, so nowadays you could take this list and you could actually eliminate delta t and put delivered capacity in there. Total btus remove total btus added by the equipment and it would be almost as easy of a measurement and a much better actual look at system performance, but starting here now, when i say see if anybody knows when i originally wrote this, i wrote suction pressure and Head pressure, but what's a better thing to list there than suction pressure and head pressure on this list of things that you always measure saturation right and when i started doing refrigeration, which now is a good percentage, if not the bulk of what we do. Those guys use even a different term. They don't even tend to say saturation.

Sometimes they do but they'll say something different. Do you know what they call head pressure, they'll, call it condensing temperature or condenser temperature. It's like! Oh, that's actually kind of cool right, because that's actually true, as long as that refrigerant is in the process of changing state ie, condensing that head pressure, you converted to the refrigerant on the pt chart, is actually the condensing temperature. So now, when you think about that number, rather than thinking of a pressure you're thinking of a temperature, maybe that temperature is 110 degrees.

Is that good? Is that bad, we'll talk about how you know, but you can know pretty quick, and these are what we call there's a term for this in science called heuristics fancy word and it just means mental shortcuts. So in our brains we think this. We think that our brain just goes makes that connection, and i think, for many years, we've made things more complicated than it needed to be, and in doing that, people just ignore it. They can't come up with an easy this than that comparison, but if you take these numbers - and you make that just quick - this isn't head pressure.

This is condensing temperature, and what do we compare that to to know anything? The medium to which we are rejecting the heat right, if the condenser is a heat, rejector we're rejecting the heat somewhere. What's the temperature of the thing we're rejecting the heat to, if it's 100 degree, condensing temperature and it's 80 degrees outside the air, there's a 20 degree split between those two? Is that good? Is that bad well got to know something about the equipment? But you know generally doesn't sound too bad right, so heuristics shortcuts is helpful thanks for watching our video if you enjoyed it and got something out of it. If you wouldn't mind hitting the thumbs up button to like the video subscribe to the channel and click, the notifications bell to be notified, when new videos come out, hvac school is far more than a youtube channel. You can find out more by going to hvacrschool.com, which is our website and hub for all of our content, including tech tips, videos, podcasts and so much more.

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