This video is brought to you by spore'ln quality, integrity and tradition. Okay, that is never good. When you hear that noise, it's uh Saturday, night 9:30 at night, customers said that freezers been down since this morning. It's gon na be like a refrigerant issue, more than likely because of the weird frost pattern, but then it also looks like it's all.

We know it's also iced up in the corners, so we got to get a defrost at first, so I didn't just shut down power on the roof. Get this thing you frosted, then we'll turn it on and figure out. What's up, so that looks really good right. It's supposed to be like that, nice and good.

You know when the ice is up. You want another interesting thing. This is a Oh, am motivated, that's crazy! That is an OEM factory motor from day one. These are that OAM fan blades to things from like 93.

Look: it's got like a whole hub on there. It's crazy man. They don't make it like that anymore. Those blades are finally getting that oh they're, all kind of out of whack, it's about time to change them, but um yeah, this motors been changed.

There's oil on it too, so it's almost like a bearings going bad with this one right here, there's an OEM motor. I can just about style, but because of how much I stir is the motors are gon na get wet. It's just one of those things. You really can't avoid all right.

I got one evaporator saw one side of it defrosted all the way through, but I'm always amazed with the lack of electrical shorts. I mean: how is that not shorting out baffles me? No we're gon na get all that defrosted. That's the electrical section all right. This is the electrical section after it's all defrosted, limit switches, look okay, they're, tucked away back in here.

There are older ones, but I don't see anything wrong with them, so we're just gon na keep on troubleshooting. We got to get all this ice over here melted and all the expansion valve section too, and here is the expansion valve section stall as a flare valve, that's kind of cool yeah, it's a packed in there, so we're gon na get that all defrosted too. I've said this before I'll say it again: restaurant work isn't for everybody. Sometimes you got to get yourself in little weird spaces, and you got to be able to lay up in here to make your job easier, so can't be weighing 350 pounds laying on one of these shelves or anything all right.

Expansion valve sections cleared. There's still some ice here, I don't know if I'm gon na get all that tonight, try not to make a mess. What you got to do is you got to put a pan under it and usually use a torch. That way, you don't make such a huge mess we'll see.

I might try to get this piece right here, real quick, so I can put a pan right here, but yeah all right. Well we're gon na get. This thing started back up if it's uh. If I don't see anything jumping out at me, I'm not gon na spend much more time here.

I'm just gon na get them running and then we'll come back finish diagnosing unless I see like a big defrost clock problem or something like that, so we are back in runni and that left motor is definitely going bad. The right motor had oil all over this. So or the hub so we're gon na change both motors both weights, but we're gon na make sure we can get them operational. I don't have those butterfly happen if I have one motor, but I'm not fine, I could change it tonight.

So all right. So the system is running, you can clearly see it's got a goopy frost pattern, the bottom of its frosting, the top of its. Not I'm gon na pull up the thermal-imaging camera and see if we can get a shot with the thermal-imaging camera and see what we argue now, but I'm just curious what it looked like all right. So with the thermal-imaging camera, you can clearly see that the bottom of the coil is blue, while the top of the coil is all red, because it's nice and warm we've got an old master built.

Condensing unit looks like this: isn't the original compressor, because I know this system originally was 502 and this is a full four unit, so this has been changed. I don't think I did this, but anyways systems running Cyclops has a bubble in it, but I'm not too worried about a bubble. It clears up, got a nice warm liquid line, nice cold suction line. Coming back, it's running, I don't doubt there's other problems with this, but let's check to see if this side, condensers clean condenser, looks relatively clean, I'm gon na let this thing run for a little bit test the defrost here in a minute: don't let it run for A few minutes that way the coil gets cold enough.

Clearly, I think we got an expansion valve problem now, but I I'm hoping I can get them through the night, because I really don't have to change all that stuff. Cuz gon na have to change the expansion valve gon na have to just from the looks of it. Just the feeding. We've got a clear sight, glass and it's feeding funky there's a problem.

There might just be the power head depending on how easy it is to change the valve. We might just change the power head so but yeah, so I'm gon na test that defrost here in just a sec, a really cool feature of the thermal-imaging camera is the ability to see strip heaters. You can tell that they're all working, that's really cool yeah. The heaters are all working, you don't see a problem with those.

Alright, it's cooling, it'll, get them through the night. Probably come back on Monday, it's Saturday night right now, so I'll call them tomorrow. I'll follow up, make sure it's down to town. If that's the case, then we'll probably come back Monday or Tuesday, I know when they get their deliveries.

Ok, we are back today I made it through the night and we're going to go through this system. Let's see if it's iced up again, no, it's not iced up and it's funny because it looks like it's feeding properly. Now it's really weird just let have a look at the back of the coil still only feeding like half the coil, which is interesting all right. This is where we're at at the moment we are currently running unit is not iced up the numbers.

Don't look horrible head pressures, a wee bit on the high side, but in all honesty I think the profiles set up wrong. In fact, let's double check that, because the condensing tempo ver ambient on this guy should be about thirty degrees. This is an older ya, sit submit there we go now. Our numbers fall in line.

Alright, let's go ahead and scroll over superheat is not horrendous. Subcooling is to be expected. We don't really pay attention to the sub point. Cuz.

This unit has a receiver, but typically on a unit that does have a receiver. If you have a clear sight, glass coming out of the condenser, I expect to see somewhere around 3 degrees subcooling normally somewhere in there five degrees in the box. Right now, evaporator TVs a little bit high yeah and that's pretty much it so we're gon na go downstairs. Actually we're gon na do one thing here: we're gon na test the compressor suction valve.

Now this is an old-school method. This is not manufacturers. Don't recommend this, but on older units like this, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and front-seat the suction service valve and make sure that the compressor will pull into a vacuum and that it won't leak by the reed inside the you know. On top of the valve, basically so we're gon na go ahead and get it all pulled apart and then we'll check that right now, okay, you got to make sure that you loosen the packing.

If it has one it does it's very normal for it to leak out of the packing a little bit when you lose man in a front seat this valve and then watch the service gauges as the system pumps down all right. So I front seeded the valve. It pulled down its shutoff on low pressure, but I need to bypass the pressure control to get it to pull into a negative. Now you got to be careful that there's no leaks in the system, because if you pull the low side into a negative, you know it's a problem and again this is an old-school way of checking the valves on a reciprocating compressor.

You cannot do this on a scroll compressor and in all actuality the manufacturers these days, don't really even recommend that you check suction reads this way, because they really don't design their compressors to pull into a vacuum very much anymore. I know that on this particular compressor, I can pull it into a vacuum, so we're just going to we're not going to go crazy, we're just going to go in and make sure that it holds bypass the pressure control, we're going to watch it pull into a Vacuum if I could get to negative five I'd, be a happy camper. Now, if we had a bad read, it would instantaneously flood back up to a high suction pressure occasional leaking by, and I'm not too worried about that so yeah, this one's fine, it would instantaneously, have told me it was bad and it's not so we're gon na Go ahead and open up the suction service valve back seat it and then get go downstairs and check the system out. All right.

We passed the pump down test. We've got an open this guy down place. We also got to pay attention to where you access the system. If you access the system on this side of this valve, when you pump it down, it's not going to show you the compressor, suction pressure.

It's going to show you the suction pressure on this line, because I access on the compressor suction for good yeah. We tighten the packing back up, so there's no leaks the cap on and then we'll jump downstairs and go have a look at the evaporator coil. All right we're downstairs just before I pump it down. You can clearly see that it's like.

We only gave you the bottom half of the coil, which is weird, so we either have an oil issue or which I don't think, that's the case. We have a feed issue with the expansion valve all right using a thermal camera right now, I'm looking at the bottom of the coil, the dark, blue and you go up higher and you can see it's warmer at the top of the coil. So we're not feeding correctly and we could see that with the regular video camera too, so we're gon na jump in there and figure out what's going on why it's not feeding go over here I mean it looks like it's feeding now, there's something going on there. So it doesn't look horrendous, but we're gon na get that Valve pulled apart.

It's a flare valve so it'll be an easy take apart. You can't always do this, but because it's a flare valve, I'm gon na leave a little bit of positive pressure in the system and then also after I pumped it down and shut it off. The solenoid valve shut off so refrigerant is shut off at this valve and it shut off here right. So there's residual refrigerant still left in the lines.

Maybe there's a little bit of oil on the coil, but it comes back up on the suction line and goes into the compressor. Well, what I did was I front seated the suction service valve on the compressor. So that way, if we do open the system to atmosphere, it's only going to be opened not in the compressor, so the oil and the compressors not going to get contaminated with any moisture or anything. Now it's gon na be a little tricky.

It's not gon na be a perfect vacuum, but this makes it a little bit easier for me. So what I'm gon na do when I go to evacuate the system is I'll, go ahead and open this guy up, because I can shut this valve down and I'll pull a good vacuum on the compressors. You know make sure we pull a good vacuum on that and then I'll slowly open the system up. Just to that way, if we do introduce moisture, it's just a minimal amount, but it's not sitting there just getting absorbed into the oil and the compressor.

Now again, this seems a little silly, but it seems like it'll work to me to do this nice and slow. That way. I can work down there for a while and not worry about a bunch of moisture getting into the compressor. So you know, if anything does get in there.

You know it would be even better if I had another port right here, but I don't so yeah that won't work. So if I had a port right here, I could pull a vacuum and not have to worry about getting anything in the compressor but anyways. My ramblings have an installation manual for the heat craft coils and if we go that's a 9,000 BTU coil. So if we go right here to a 9,000 BTU, it says to use a 1-ton valve, so we're going to make sure we put in a 1 ton expansion valve.

I have my B Q kit here and we know we have a BQE flare body, we'll look at the kit right here for 404, a a 1 ton is a blue and a cartridge and then we'll use a Sam's zebra low 10th power head, we'll go and Assemble it real, quick, very important, put the identifier tag on the power head right here, saying it's an air cartridge and then what I usually do is put an X on that and X on that. So that way, when I go to the supply house, I know what I need and I'm not you know missing those things, but we've got our valve bill. I'll, put the little tag on there and we'll get back inside. I already made up my mind that I was going to change the valve, but the strainer is plugged, so I changed it anyways just to eliminate that question, but yeah we had a nice dirty strainer on this guy, so it was not fun.

I'm upside down inside out in this walk-in, but I got the valve changed. We got to work on getting that sensing bulb defrosted the old ones right there, so we'll go get the vacuum started and then we'll work on defrosting. The sensing bulb all right, I'm just getting ready to tighten up this dryer. I went ahead and put in a port right here.

So that way I can all start evacuating right here. Turn the system on we'll pull everything out and we'll still have the compressor shut down that way, we're not contaminating the oil at all. It's not ideal, but I didn't have a port big enough to put on the 7/8 inch line and I really didn't want to have to drill into it so we're almost there. I'm gon na just tighten these down and then we'll get the vacuum pump out.

Now. I've said this many times you will not achieve a perfect 500 micron vacuum when you have a pump down system, because you will end up pulling all the refrigerant past this valve, because this valve is not leak free. But if I can get this below a thousand microns I'll be a happy camper, I'm cheating like I thought I was so. I've still got the compressor valve front seated, sometimes I think stuff in my head and it's hard to verbalize it.

So in the beginning I was trying to explain how I was doing this, but so the compressor still has never been open to atmosphere when I bumped it down my front seated this valve, so all I'm doing is evacuating the line set and the evaporator coil. All the way to this valve right here, so we are good. This way the evacuation will go a lot faster idle. I'm just worrying about the lines essentially so solenoid valve is open right now, because I turn the disconnects switch on so we're almost there all right.

I opened up the king table on the receiver. Let the refrigerant flow through, while the suction service valve was still front seated, so the refrigerant just flowed all the way through into the suction line turned off the disconnect switch wind downstairs leak checked at nothing. I'm gon na do a quick lead check here, get anything on my flares. Using the D text.

Select leak. Detector always done me very well, so there's no leaks on the flare nuts. No leaks up here. At this point, we're ready to open up the suction service valve, and but I don't want to turn it on yet because I need to go get the expansion valve sensing bulb mounted and it's still got ice all right there.

So I need to get that defrosted, but I'll go ahead and open up the compressor valve. So that way I just got to turn it on when I'm ready all right. Well, this thing is acting like it might be logged as well. It's not a whole lot.

I talked him into changing the coil. You look at these top lines right here, they're, not Frost enough and we're still not getting really good. Feeding going on we're. Only feeding like half the coil and defrost heaters are not running so for a little bit.

I'm gon na take a lunch all right, so my system is running. Super heats a little bit high, but it's still pulling down right now. Everything looks okay, but I'm pretty confident we have an oil logged evaporator being that we're not feeding the top half of that thing. Unfortunately, there was no way for me that I know of to tell and the fact that we saw the plugged up strainer indicated to me that we had an expansion valve problem, although we did have somewhat decent superheat, so maybe not, but I kind of fit.

There was some sort of a feed issue. The Box is about 10 degrees right now, yeah at this point, it's working, so I'm gon na talk to the customer all right. Well, we're gon na wrap it up. I I will talk to the customer and see what they want to do.

The system is operational, you know sometimes there's just no way of knowing oil log evaporators can be a pain for sure. So you know how am I gon na get that oil out of that thing? Well, I can put a p-trap on it because it's never had one. I could also take the coil down and try to blow it out with nitrogen, but the question is: is it worth it that coils from 1993? I can't see them having me try to get that oil out of that thing. If anything just change the system but anyways I'll put that in the customers hands and see what they want to do, but it's working everything's good for now, they'll be okay, we'll just I have some persistent icing up issues because it's only feeding happened.

Well, luckily, a lot of times this equipments oversized it'll limp along until they make a decision on what they want to do all right. These are difficult ones. Oil logged coils can be they make me, pull my hair out. I've only had you know so.

Many oil log coils - probably maybe I can count on my hands - maybe five - that really were oil log coils, because they can be very difficult to diagnose. Okay, I don't have you know I've had people ask me like how do you diagnose an oil logged coil? It's difficult, you got to use your instincts, you got to go through everything. Usually it's not an oil logged coil. Usually it's an expansion valve issue or the wrong distributor, nozzle things like that.

Okay, but when I had made the decision to pull the valve out, it was a flare valve so in order to get to the strainer because of the location of everything I was gon na have to pull the valve apart anyways. So I decided that it was an old valve. I'm gon na go and replace the entire valve. I went ahead and changed it.

When I pulled the strainer out. I got satisfaction because I was like okay that strainer is plugged. That was more than likely the issue, but even after that started to back up, and we saw that we still had the same issue. Okay, that's what confirmed the diagnosis of an oil logged coil.

Now it's always possible that that strainer has been plugged up for a very long time causing high superheat causing flow issues which wouldn't let the oil get back up to the roof. There is no p-trap on this system. There never has been because of the way that it's piped there'd be no point in me putting a p-trap inside the box, because the riser is on the outside of the box. So it's not like it comes out of the cone goes directly up.

No because this box is exterior to the building, it goes out of the blunt you know it goes through the walk-in cooler out of the box and the place for a p-trap would be on the riser and there's not one there. So more than likely, this thing has been, you know had that plug strainer for a very long time. It's been collecting oil in the coil and it just led to these issues. So I went ahead and brought all the information to the customer and let them make the decision they're still in the decision-making process, but I'm pretty confident that they're going to go ahead and replace the equipment.

This customer is the same customer that I always work with. It's very proactive about changing their equipment. I will do anything that they want if they would like me to drop the coil and try to blow it out sure I'll do it, but I'm gon na strongly recommend that I don't because of the age of this evaporator coil. I just see a lot of problems.

First off, you know it sounds like it's easy. Oh yeah, just pull the bolts drop, the coil, you know, or even just pull two bolts lean it sideways. You know that kind of stuff, but knowing this equipment getting those bolts loose they're from 93 they're rusted out, it's gon na be a nightmare. You're gon na spend hours just trying to get the bolts out and then once you do that, what have you run into other problems? It's just it the equipment so old that I strongly suggest that they replace it, but we had to go through these steps.

You know I could have just you know, trusted my better judgment from the beginning and told them to replace the equipment from the beginning, but I can't always tell them to change stuff. You know it's. This is one of those things. Sometimes you run into these problems.

The biggest piece of advice I can give to everybody is just be honest with your customer, I was, I went to them up front. I said look, this thing looks like it has an expansion valve problem. We got to start there, there's always a possibility. There could be something else wrong, but let's start with the expansion, oven we'll go from there.

Okay, so I try to you know to communicate as much as possible with them to let them know. You know these are the symptoms. This is what I'm thinking is going on. You know, there's always a possibility that it's something else, but you know this is one of those ones where just changing the expansion valve did not help the situation so we'll see where the customer goes with this one.

I really really appreciate you guys taking the time to watch these videos. Please leave me some comments down on the bottom. Let me know what you think: how would you have approached this differently? Next thing is: what would be your solutions to get the oil out of the coil now? My thing is: is that if the customer wanted to repair more than likely, I would repipe the line set. I would go ahead and disconnect the suction and liquid, give it a good nitrogen purge.

I'm not gon na use any flushes or anything like that, but I'd give it a good nitrogen purge before I gave it a night. Jim purge with the lines disconnected I'd, probably run the defrost heaters, bypassed the delays, run them for a good hour, get that coil, nice and hot, and then purge the system with nitrogen. Try to blow out as much of the oil as possible. Then what I would suggest doing is putting a proper p-trap coming out of the coil on a riser coming out the top of the box and then just give it a couple weeks and come back and see if we have oil returned back to that compressor.

Now the other question is: where did that oil come from now? I did mention at the very beginning of the video that that compressor was a newer compressor. So is it possible that the old compressor that someone replaced failed because of oil loss? You know when we diagnose these things when we have a bad compressor. It's so important, and even I don't do this all the time, but it's so important to pour the oil out and measure it, because if you have a grounded compressor and you pour the oil out and you find out that it's missing half the oil charge. Well, that oil had to go somewhere and that little bit of oil that you see on the suction valve of the compressor, because it had a very small leak, is usually not the case.

Okay, because an ounce of oil goes 5 miles right. So we're looking for a large amount of oil and if it's not in the compressor, then it's somewhere more than likely in the refrigerant lines or down in the evaporator. So it's possible that when that compressor was replaced, however, long ago it went bad the original one because of an oil loss, because it was logged in that coil. So it's possible that this has been going on for a very long time right, big picture diagnosis guys, even though the customer's probably gon na change the equipment.

When I do the change out. If and when we do, the change out, I'm gon na rip that thing apart, I'm probably gon na. Take that compressor. The good one pour the oil out measure how much in it, I'm probably gon na carefully take down the evaporator coil and try to get the oil out.

You know maybe we'll make a video of it and I'll try to remember to link back to this video. Ok, this is the kind of stuff that you want to think past the obvious and just kind of try to figure things out. It really helps you down the line to diagnose and all that. So again, leave me some comments down on the bottom.

Let me know what you think really appreciate it: Monday night, livestream, 5:00 p.m. Pacific time work permitting other than that we will catch you guys on the next one. You.