 This video is brought to you in part by TrueTechTools. Quality tools, essential support. All right guys, so we're doing a fresh meat case here that's not doing so well and this is going to be some of the older equipment that I get to work on. So we've got this down here on bottom. This is the compressor for the fresh meat area. The unit's not running and it's warm. The oil's kind of low like it's been cycling off of the pressure switch. We're going to do a leak search on it. What this does is the refrigerant lines go down and across over here. The condenser goes up to this up on top. So I've been here before but it's been a while. Let's go over here. So the refrigerant line for the liquid and suction come across this wall. They come over here and go right along the bottom of the cases that goes over these cases over here. So this is the one that's starved. You can tell it's not getting much refrigerant left. So it's going to the main ones, the easiest flow. And you can tell these cases are in really bad shape. We just got to look for the big leaks and get it back up and going. It takes care of this case here and this one down here. And like I said, it goes right across there and comes back over to here. This is just like I said, a little mom-and-pop store. They don't have humongous budgets for all brand new equipment and stuff like that. Unfortunately, they just do small sections at a time and this thing is leaking somewhere. So we're going to start looking for leaks and see what we can find. Okay, we've got everything zeroed out here on our scale. Contesto. You should feel like you need to test this stuff. You can always pick up from TrueTech tools. So that's where we're at. We're going to get started. We're going to see if we can do this thing or run it again. Nope. The way this thing is controlled by temperature is by the low pressure switch here. And basically I made a mistake by starting off looking for the leak because it was in defrost. If I would have known it was in defrost, I wouldn't have had any refrigerant. Now I don't know if it was actually low or if it's just this pressure switch. It's out of whack or do we have a TXV that's not feeding the one case? We only have one case that's warm. The other ones are okay, supposedly. Not grand. There's no thermometers in there or anything like that because you can see the condition of them. What I want to do is I'm going to valve off the lipid line. We're going to see that side glass goes empty or stays clear looking. That way I know whether or not I'm really low or not because at this point right now, I'm not sure if we're even low. If we even need to be looking for a leak, I need to be able to determine whether or not that is an issue with the TXV or if it's low on charge. It's just really hard to tell when you can't get to your high side ports worth a crap to get under to them. It's just, like I said, this is some of the great working environments. The way these old-fashioned pressure control type systems work is your temperature is equivalent to pressure. Your pressure starts to come up. It's equivalent to the temperature that's inside the box. So as long as all the evaporators have the same pressure theoretically, they're right now right around 25 degrees. So we'd probably kick this in around 38 degrees somewhere in that belt park. That way it has time to melt and then kick out at whatever below that. Usually you find out what's the lowest the machine can do and let it go down cold. And as long as it always kicks on at, like, say 38, 39 degrees, then it usually gives a natural defrost. You don't need a defrost clock generally with one of these systems. However, they've added one to it. It has some extra precaution. So right now we're waiting for this thing to kick back on. Like I said, I think that one TXV may not be feeding correctly. And if that's the case, then we'd have to get another TXV. And just once in the history, it looks like we've had a TXV head that was acting up not long ago. We're going to go ahead and lower the cutout pressure and I'm waiting for this thing to figure out the price of my house. So what I'm going to do now, down to 8 psi, let's go ahead and open it back up and see if that thing goes solid. Unfortunately, the valve in that, so far, part, it's hard to even see what's going on. Let's see what we can do here. More, so we know that we've got enough refrigerant to start filling it. So if we don't see anything, then it must be open or must be full. If it looks like that, we'll give it a second here, because there's no vacuuming or anything like that. Let those evaporate as well. Fill up the refrigerant. It should back it up and it's solid in a second. So we should have a steam control up on the roof. It's not working right. That's another disaster. Let's let this run for a little bit. Yeah, it's not even cold. We can't cut guts out of it, clean the pin, see if the pins move freely, relubricate them, whatever we've got to do, and see if we can get it going. All right, so what we're doing here is we're jumping that turd out, which is a spatial jumper with heavy gauge wire. We're trying to get it down with a little hole down there, so I'm going to leave it as little as possible. We're going to keep it in a positive. That way, a little bit of a trickle while we're doing the check on the TXB and what we don't have to pull back and all that stuff on. Otherwise, that turns into a mess too, because half the time you don't have valves where you need them at to pull back them on. All right, so they did not replace this particular one. That was the other one on the other side. All right, so we got that out. Looking at it. It's not looking great, but we'll go ahead and clean it up real quick. Then we'll go ahead and yank the rest of the guts out of it. Okay, we've got her cleaned up there a little bit, especially the end there. Just use some non-chlorated brake cleaner. I am trying. I'm trying out the iPhone here, instead of using the GoPro, which you can tell it's a cleaner picture, but still. All right, get that in there and we'll take the guts out of here. I don't have anything to hold the phone to do it, and this is about the worst freaking location possible, so that's what we're doing. Okay, we're going to take this apart next, which we're going to get some oil. All right, we're going to run that down a little bit more, because that pressure's built back up again. If that thing is found off like it is, you're strapping it from the liquid line through, so it has to pull through the other units. Probably going to have to run her into a little bit of a negative to get it to stay down to at least, you know, one or two PSI. I'm not going to get gassed out underneath her like I was starting to, so. Again, you got to play with these old beasts. So here we are in the negative two. Shut it off. What's it going to do? It should come right back up again. If not, we'll put a little refrigerant in there, but it's still got some bleeding through. It may actually hold this time. Yep, there it goes back up again. It's boiling off. That's why sometimes they'll go into a negative on a pump down just to get as much out as possible. And that's not right because it will continue to run if the unit is out of refrigerant. But at the same time, you don't want to short-cycline either and damage the compressor or pump the oil out. So this one here, we're just about there. It would just stay around that poor mark would be good, but unfortunately, I don't think it's going to. And that jumper down there, that's made for my old test leads. So it's about, 16 gauge, something like that I think. All right, let's see how that does. All right, so it's staying right here at zero. Turn up just a touch and the compressor to bring it up out of a negative. There we go. That should be good. I just do not want it pulling air in. One or two pounds of pressure, no big deal. But trying to get a part, clean it, put it back together as quick as possible. That refrigerant is going to boil it off. That part usually doesn't have any problems. The part that does is that needle. You don't have to get the needle in as pliers. I don't pull it out. Yeah, this is great. That's why I carry my leatherman everywhere. Don't get up. Needle's not pulling out all the way, no problems. See? See that gunk on the end of the needle? I cleaned that up and it should be okay, hopefully. Okay, it looks a little bit better. Let's put it back in there and see if it goes in and out easily. And if it does, great. If not, then we need to order the valve. It goes up and down freely. No problems at all. Very nice and free. That's why I said these dang TV TXVs do not really have a lot to go wrong. They usually just get gummed up or the hits go bad, but let's put it back together. Not a lot to go wrong with the spring. Spring can get weak. That's about it. Let's put it back together. So we get the valve opened up there if we need to adjust so we can. Let's go ahead and kick it on. This right here is basically a heat exchanger. DC preheating. Just trying hot liquid or sub-cold liquid through the suction line. Some breeze goes back to there. All right, let's go ahead and open that back up. Then we'll have to adjust the pressure switch again, too, because we didn't think of that. Which sucks, because then our temperature is going to be out of back. So we may have to adjust it a little bit. Probably do this change the cut out to allow it to run longer or not as long. Kind of remove those. Let's go ahead and kick it on and see what we get. It's coming up ever so slowly. All right, so it just kicked on. The first slight latch is out. It should go up here in perfect. If the cold is starting to get cold. All right, so it's not really getting cold. That head might be junk. Very easily could be. You see it's in pretty rough shape. I'll try adjusting it. All right, so we've got the valid information there. I backed it out. It took me turns as far as the wrench could go back and forth, and I still don't feel any real cold coming out. So I'm thinking that head is lost as a charge, which is not fighting the spring and the spring's linen, which then cuts off the flow. I'm just going to order a whole new one. I think that's about as much as I can do for the day. So we got that marked at the top mark for colder. Kind of got it back close as we can get it. Checking temperature right now with my testive pros. We're not quite this one here. We were right there about 39 area. The other one a little bit lower for less law. Yeah, right there. So we'll take it just a touch lower, and it seems like it's doing good now. I got the valve ordered. The head on it right now actually is a medium temp head or a low temp head. How it worked, I don't know, but we're going to get the right valve for it. It's balanced port, flare and flare, and everything's back to normal and everything's sealed up. We'll check it once it's running before I decide whether I'm charging for the refrigerant because that may not have been needed. That was my fault for getting a hurry. All right, so we came back with the TXV, which TXV we ended up needing was a balanced port, and we got that there just pumped her down the same way I did before. It's around 18 psi area on the suction, and we just released it. So far we have a little bit of bubbles there. It's still needs to stabilize. It wasn't that bad prior to even now. We figured now we are using more refrigerant because we have that coil to fill up, so let's go take a look at that real quick, see if it's feeding. We got the new one in there. I haven't tucked up the bulb or anything like that just yet, but we'll do that here just a little bit. There's the new one, which I can just not guarantee you that the bulb is dead. Oh yeah, we got plenty of cold. You can feel the colder across that suction coming back cold too, so let's go up on top and I'll show you what we got up here. Yeah, nothing. Nothing at all. Totally did. So we got it all mounted up there, fit on this side instead of this side. Well, it just kind of goes down through there and you can see it's feeding quite a bit. It's no suction port, so all we can do is check temperature and see what it is compared to the back in stoodle fashion way. I don't know if my probe will reach afar or not. Sometimes it has problems with all this metal and stuff. All right, so we've got her in place there. Don't like too bad when you get all the coverings on and stuff. I'm going to go ahead and let this start dropping attempt some more. Once we get down, you know, around 40, we'll check the super heat and see where we're at. Got to check our cycle ash yet, just if it's full or empty or what's going on, and kind of go from there. Go ahead and get her clamp on there and check her super heat, see what we get right now. We're about 51, so we're getting there. You can see where they clamped on this once before here with tape, so we can go right right there. Yeah, horizontal is the best way, but vertical work too. Ooh, what are these going to do with my phone? Okay, what we did is I went ahead and just left the suction on, just opened up suction and discharge, put the probe right there on the discharge so I can measure it on the phone at the same time. Right now we have 20 degrees subcooling. We have about 20, maybe about two quarter turns here and see how it does last up for a while. All right, so when we was here last time I jumped the gun and started wanting to add refrigerant, which here's the reason why it's low. So now that TXV's opened up, you can see we're a little bit low there. So we're adding right now, going to get that going, because I think it's super low, 18 degrees. That's probably because we're not being fully liquid to the TXV. So as soon as we get that, we'll be able to tell whether or not we've got an issue with TXV yet, but I'm pretty sure we don't. I think it just matter we're getting starved. So it should be going good hopefully here and then we're going to look for a leak, which who knows where it's at in this place. Okay, now that I'm leaking on my flare joints, I did insulate that right there, and we're going to check up on the rough and then we're going to try to get back. Okay, this is the condenser. You've got some, you've got multiple different circuits on this condenser and they come up through here. You can see the ones that are valed off or cleaned off. This thing's an abortion. You've got two different vans, two different blades. You can see that one's going one direction, one's going the other. They're right, but you got a fan switch here that shuts it down and the ambient gets cold enough and then it'll just run off one fan and then it has headmaster on top of that. So that's, that's what we got going on here. I'm going to scan this over. Right now about two pounds into this jug and we had nine before that and two the day before. So right now you're at about 13 pounds, but these have some pretty good size receivers underneath here and this one here's no exception. And that's the problem back in the day that refrigerant was a couple bucks a pound. It wasn't a big deal. It was R12 back then even. So they are just hungry, hungry hippos. And I'm not picking up any leaks. I mean I had a little something up towards the front that could have been a false alarm. I'm not sure. You can see the refrigerant flow is kind of slow, but I don't feel anything on my dryer like it's restricted, which we can check temperature on that stuff, which those are all things I need to do at a later date. Right now we're already almost five o'clock. And yeah, I'm just gonna need to come back, spend some time on it. I can't come back tomorrow, so I'll have to be on Monday. Gonna continue scanning around. I've scanned back in between on behind all these areas back in here, which this is where kind of makes it nice to, you know, you can kind of get your wand back here. And if you're a 13 pound leak, this thing should be like going off like, I mean, come on, let's be real about this. So yeah, this is the struggle that we deal with when you have these old systems and trying to find a leak and it's like, okay, you don't know. Did somebody has somebody been adding to it? Did somebody not get it completely charged back up when they made a repair? Because it was summertime and now it's cold out. You know, the winter charge is a little different. You know, it's all one of the things I know when I did this one right here. This one took total of 25 pounds when I did it. And I broke it down so you wouldn't know. And that's even a smaller compressor than what we've got over there. All right, so I just checked my temperature down here. My temperature back there, it's less than one degree differential if even that much. I think we're about as good as we're going to get right at about. All right, so we got this board up. I keep getting a small hit right there on those lines, but not every time. I shut the system off, hoping that the pressure would come up a little bit, which it did a little bit, that I've scanned all across here. I mean, we're talking 26 pound leak. So if it truly leaked that fast and it wasn't leaking for long, long time, that's the thing we're fighting against here. Now it's not doing it. It may have just been because the suction line was cold and the temperature difference. You gotta figure out you got something. All right, guys, so we're going to go back on Monday. I'm going to recover the system. I'm going to put some trace gas in there, and then I'm going to pump up with nitrogen, see if we can find the leak. I have a feeling it's probably in the suction line somewhere. I'm not sure otherwise. It could be up on the roof the way the wind was blowing and stuff. Wasn't going to find it that day. And like I said, it's gotten late. So that's going to wrap this video up. Appreciate you guys checking it out. Make sure you smack the thumbs button on the way out. Until next time, guys, we'll catch you on the next one later.