This video is brought to you by spore'ln quality, integrity and tradition. Today we have a walk-in freezer door that has got ice buildup and the door is not shutting all around the door. We've got frost all around it and you notice that we have frost all around the doorframe, so we're gon na diagnose, I'm assuming a bad door. Heater trust me from experience that whenever you're working on a walk-in freezer door, you want to identify where the panic alarms are and make sure you don't beat anything on the other side of that wall.

I have set up one too many panic alarms and it's not a fun thing. The police usually come Code. Blue they're, not happy about it. Code.

Blue means no lights, no sirens, they just get their butts here. I'm not kidding with you. I've had them come with helicopters and then other times. I've had them send just one officer, so we're gon na go ahead and let the manager know that they need to call the alarm company and put that on test just because we don't want to accidentally set it off audio sync: okay, we've got the thermal image.

You can obviously see that inside the freezer is very cold, because that's the dark blue around the door is warm, but it's not hot, and that's because the door heaters bad. If the door heater was working properly. We would have read right here where it's blue. You see how it's blue, I know it's kind of hard to tell, but that's because I just touched you see you can see my fingerprint left on it.

So the door heater is not working right. Now. We're gon na go ahead and get an amp clamp on there to just to verify. You can see how it's kind of yellowish bluish around the door frame, but it's red on the wall so that door heater behind that where the yellow is, should be red.

Alright, I had the manager put the alarm on test for eight hours. That way, we have plenty of time and if we accidentally set it off, they won't come we'll just make sure we call them if we get done earlier, which we will be so I'm testing the door heater wiring, it's it goes in here. Behind this heater track comes in here and we've got no current draw across it, so we're gon na go ahead and check voltage to make sure that it's a voltage is being applied, should have 115 volts, go into it alright, so we have 120 volt 121 volts Going to the heater: let's go ahead and ohm out the heater now and we have nothing so the heaters been severed somewhere inside there, so we're gon na start pulling this apart. I do have a new heater door track hinges and all that good stuff.

So because of the ice buildup, you can see that the doors not shutting right so we'll fix that and just to be safe when I'm working in walking boxes like this, you know put a beanie on hoody try to stay warm because you don't want to freeze Your ass off alright first step we're going to defrost the door heater, we're gon na pick up the water as it drips down. So I have someone with a vacuum right now to catch all the moisture that comes down we're just gon na. Do a really quick without burning the sidewalls, get a defrost it and then we'll pull the track off and go from there. So it's just gon na be step by step.

We got the threshold up, you can pretty much looks like the heater might be bad in there, but we still got ice all underneath the threshold, so we're gon na use the map guessed torch, we're gon na heat, it up, use the vacuum, get because the water Instantly freezes, because it's negative 10 and this freezer in here and it's 40 degrees in the walk-in so but anyways so we're gon na vacuum that up get it all. You know defrost it and then we'll start pulling the side plates off and all that stuff so set up a battery charging station. That way we can have some music while we're working, and then we got. This is a battery charger.

There's a battery charger. There's a battery charger that way charging up my batteries. So alright we got everything underneath the threshold cleaned as much as possible, nice and dry, no more moisture because of some crappy growl, which I still might pull some more the grout out. We ended up chipping all this out and we're actually going to get a new threshold to cover over that that'll come clear to here and clear to here, and then we can seal that up and not have to grout.

It will just fill it with silicone. It's another cool to cool use for the airbag tool is keeping the door centered we're gon na change. All three hinges: we're waiting for a new threshold to be made so we're gon na do everything else, while we're waiting so yeah. I, if I had two more I'd, put them on the sides, but I think it's gon na hold it good.

So that way we can swap out the hinges. Really quick, we've got the hinges, replaced those were easy using those air bags, the door didn't move at all. We just tighten them down. The door closes.

The reason why we change the hinges is because of the stress I just from experience. The ice buildup causes stress on the hinges because the employees are always slamming the door shut. So for my experience, if I have a door heater, we're changing hinges to door gasket. It's like it's all, melted down here in the bottom.

Maybe the electrical short happened here is something where it melted it, so we're gon na change the door gasket and we've got a new door sweep for it too. Okay, so I got my threshold. It's just a solid piece of stainless steel, we'll put some grip tape on it, but I'm just kind of marking out where I want my holes. I don't plan on putting any holes in the middle, so we got that kind of marked out and then we'll put one hole.

Maybe a couple holes in the hold this down to the ground and that's it and then we'll fill that with silicone and go ahead and wrap the heater on it. We went ahead and drilled some concrete holes with a concrete bit we're gon na put anchors down. There then secure this guy down, so we're completely dried under this first threshold that the heaters gon na sit on. So we silicone all underneath there we've got our screw holes.

We're gon na set this down. Lay the heater then do the heater all the way around and then do the threat. You know the final stainless threshold after it is not the prettiest thing, but it's going all the way down to the bottom, like we had a little extra, so we had to kind of spool it up right here and then we're gon na put the threshold down. Put a little a couple dabs of silicone yeah, it's coming through here, we'll connect into all that.

So should be good all right! It's just I hate doing door heaters, but whatever the track is always a pain, so you have to notch out the bottom corner. So it doesn't pinch the heater off, but we got it all in we're over the factory heater track, so it does make the perfect corners up in here. There you go now. You can actually see it.

So it's all in pain in the butt, but it's like polishing a turd, see man that bottom heater, though whew it's close, but I notched it. So we should be good. Now we're gon na get ready to lay the threshold down and we're gon na fill that with silicone like crazy, we are getting ready to lay the threshold down and notice. I put silicone everywhere, so this creates a watertight seal and hopes to keep the water out of here.

So that way, when I set the threshold down it said it should smoosh that stuff out, it won't be a perfectly pretty in the corners, but it is what it is. This silicone isn't very clear, it's more of a white. You know whatever color but anyways. It's all good we're gon na set this guy down and then put some grip tape on the threshold.

All right, it's not gon na get too much better than that. It's not perfect, nor will it ever be. There is silicone under here, so I'm not gon na worry about it. There's there's a little bit of lip, but those have to deal with it.

You know the grip tape, it ain't gon na last forever, but at least it does something for now. So we're gon na go ahead and hook this guy up start up the heater hopefully pray. I cross our fingers, it's not cut alright. Now we have a working door.

Heater 0.74 amps 115 volts going through it we're gon na get to that push back in there. We've got a new threshold, but the grip tape on it is what it is. It's not going to be perfect. We put a new heater track cover.

We put new hinges new door closure and new door gasket, so this should last a while all right - and this is what the door heater should look like when it's finished. So if we look inside the box you're seeing some warm stuff, because that's all my a my my crap, but basically looking at the door heater - is nice and warm now all the way around. Well, we had a door heater that failed on a walk-in freezer walk-in freezer door. Heaters are never my favorite thing to do because they are so time-consuming that took me seven hours.

I think, because there's so many steps you have to follow and if you don't follow those steps they you know, the heater fails, really quick. So the biggest thing I can stress to everybody is to lift up the threshold and get all the moisture that you can out of the threshold. If you don't, what will happen? Is it will refreeze and lift up the threshold and sever the heater again? Okay, that's the biggest piece of advice when it comes to doing walk-in door heaters is to make sure that you get everything out every bit of ice from underneath the threshold, and you saw that I actually had to pull up the threshold even more and get to The secondary one and pull out all the crappy grout that you know the tile guys had done now. That happens a lot with walk-in freezer doors, people tile over them all kinds of weird things, but so once I got all that moisture out of there, I dried it up, really well heated it up with the torch kept pulling the moisture out of the concrete got It all dried up, be careful.

I made a big mistake. One time heating up the concrete, the concrete will pop. I learned that one really quick that thing popped right into my eyeball and I closed my eyelid. This wasn't this time, but it happened another time the concrete popped where I was heating it up and the concrete exploded kind of in a little shrapnel went everywhere and I closed my eye and I had a scar on my eyelid right here.

It was such a trip. I was so lucky that didn't hit my eyeball, but anyways yeah be very careful when you're heating up concrete. So I use the map gas torch a lot when I'm working on these walk-in freezer doors. You got to be very careful because you can really quickly melt the plastic around the doorframe.

You can melt door gaskets and all that stuff. Okay, so we got all that moisture out once we did that we created a watertight barrier by using the silicone we used. It's a silicone that can handle the low temperatures and then also it can handle moisture, even though it's not supposed to be put in water. It's made, for you, know low temperature and moisture Laden environments, basically, okay, so we use the silicone and filled all the the empty space underneath the first threshold, and then we set down or before we set down the other Thresh.

We put silicone underneath the outsides of it so that way the silicone smushed out and then we just overfilled everything so that way the water has to go through almost two barriers of silicone. To make sure you know, because what happens? Is people don't realize it? This can also happen with walk-in freezer evaporators. When you defrost, a walk-in freezer and water gets on the floor that water has to go somewhere. If it doesn't refreeze instantly, then it'll get underneath the tile and start lifting up tiles and or lifting up raised floors and different things like that.

So that's why it's so imperative, when you're working and walk-in freezers that you don't get any water on the floor same thing, though they have a walk-in cooler and they'll clean the floors with buckets of water. Well, when they splash on that threshold, it'll get underneath the threshold freeze and then lift it up and sever the heater, so anyways went off on a tangent there, but showed some images with a thermal imaging camera. I've been finding a lot more cool uses to use with the thermal-imaging camera there'll, be a link in the show notes for all the different tools that I used and mentioned in the show notes of this video yeah, really not much more going on there. You know I I don't like to make them super long and show everything, so I just kind of show the key points.

Obviously I don't want these to be used for DIY kind of a stuff you know, so I want to make sure that I leave out a lot of the key features that I realize that most of you, service, techs, should understand or already know, feel free to Reach out to me, if you guys have any more questions, you know this probably won't be the most popular video out there, but I like to make functional videos and not be so worried about the most popular amazing thing, because walk-in freezer door heaters were always a Pain in the butt for me, so I really like to show like my methods, because they they seem to work really well. Okay, really appreciate you guys taking the time to watch this. Do me a favor, consider subscribing to my new youtube channel. I haven't posted any videos yet, but it's called HVAC our tools.

There's gon na be a link in the show notes of this video other than that. That's pretty much it guys we'll catch you guys on the next one: okay.