 Guys we've got us a mini-split so we're going to go do a leak check. Customer says that the unit has been freezing up and it defaulted out twice and it's for a little computer room which ain't much of a computer room which is a tiny little burger so we're going to scan it over see if it's leaking into the normal spots like the coil or the flares. I guess they recharged it a while back it's been a while like a couple years so it's a tiny leak if it is leaking if that's even what's wrong with it but before I disturb anything first thing I wanted to do is scan it for leaks and see if we can find something wrong with it first. So we scanned the whole thing over top back and bottom all down through here even got in here to the flare fittings I don't have anything on those. Don't have anything as far as a signal so we're going to go outside we're going to go ahead and check it and see what we got out there. I've got it back together here so let's go ahead and turn it on crank it down but the batteries are about dead and let's go up on the roof and see how the charge is because there's really no sense of spending a bunch of time if it ain't doing its job and for those new to the Mitsubishi world this little thing here once it's programmed you can take it and throw it away. It does not sense temperature all temperatures since inside the head. Common knowledge to a lot of guys out there but to anybody new you know it's something I didn't realize when I first started so I'm bringing it up now. Make sure you always strap your ladders and three rungs up. It's pretty windy up here. I had my ladder blow off before because I usually don't like strapping it but I try to do it on a routine basis now. Let's take a look at this Mitsubishi and see what we got going on. It's putting out some heat. Just doing a visual look around. I'm not seeing any oil any oil on the coil as of now. Kind of a cruddy design this one here has the whole top lift off which kind of breaks the airflow going through the coil. A great way to work on these with the covers off. So let's take a peeky and see what we got. We're running just a tad under 30 degrees which would tell me that we're probably a little low. I'm sure it's slowing down a little bit based off of it knowing that things aren't quite right. It seems to like keep itself going. If I'm reading that correctly which is really hard to see looks like three pounds one ounce possibly which I'm gonna write inside here and inside the cover so they know for later. It does look a little low. The best way to do these is pull it and weigh it in but still let's uh let's see what we can find out if we can find any leaks. All right it's pretty cool and it's like I said pretty windy up here. We uh looks like we've got are you serious? They literally got a low ambient control on this thing. This must not be a variable speed. It ain't. This is not a variable speed unit. It's no inverter drive. It's just a generic air conditioner. So they had the liquid line sensor on the discharge gas there and it wasn't even strapped. They literally just wrapped it around or just set it in there and wrapped some insulation there around it. That's it. So unhooked it. It's slowing down the motor so obviously that's starting to make a difference. Look at that. Coming up above freezing now. Imagine that right? Kind of interesting. Maybe there is no leak. Maybe it's just we've got an issue with the placement of the low ambient kit. So let's see if we can find the liquid line here and we'll move it to it and see if it starts working a little bit better. At very back corner down there and put it down and add vicinity down there or you can stick it in the coil which I don't really care for. Like I was mentioning I went ahead and got the aluminum first, wrapped it with the foam tape. Not my preferred method of how things are going but that's how we've got it. So we've got that there. Go ahead and get this back into position. I'm going to go ahead and tap onto the discharge to kind of get an idea for where we're at on things. Usually I'm not real big on tapping these many splits but I gotta get a little bit better picture of what's going on here. So it just came on. It's running. We are starting to build up some head pressure here. You can see our condensing temperatures at 92. It's slowly building up. The fan is finally starting to kick on like it should. Generally this thing is set up I believe to hold around 100 degree liquid temperature. Now since it just came on literally we're kind of watching it before we jump to any conclusions of what we're going to do next whether we add some refrigerant or whatever. We're just going to let it run. Like I said I'm tapped onto the high side right off the discharge. It's the only place to get it. I'm able to get the cover on. This is primarily just a regular generic cheap air conditioner because it's not a variable speed compressor. It's not even a TXV system. It's literally an orifice system. It's trying to maintain that 90 some degree liquid temperature which is great. I think we might be just a touch low but like I said I don't want to jump to conclusions with 410A because it'll bite you in the butt every time. It's been running for a good probably eight to ten minutes. We're holding pretty good right at 92 degrees 32 to 33 on our suction. I don't really want to disturb it any. We could check super heat for giggles here. Since this is just a generic system this is definitely not a fancy inverter so it's all the rules of you can't do this or can't do that goes out the window. This is just a generic air conditioner at this point. Let's go ahead and get that on there and see what kind of kind of super heat we got. Well it was about 15 a minute ago and they do have an accumulator on it for a reason obviously and it's getting down there a little lower and I care to see it but it's been like that so it definitely is not overcharged. Not impressed but I've seen these Mitsubishi's run some stupid low super heat before on systems that you're not supposed to check with by super heat or supposedly subcooling even though I've had the factory tell me you can do it. There we go. Come on back up there to the happy lands. Don't be getting so low. There you go. Bring it on back up. Come on up. Yep she's doing pretty good. I'm gonna say we're probably fine. I'm not horribly worried about that so we're gonna probably just get her back together and get out of here. I fled my hoses all the way to the yellow which is the way I like to do it to make sure I don't get anything in the manifold trapped. So I've showed this a million times but not everybody watches me. We're dumping her back in there. We're not losing anything and then we'll go ahead and just shut her down and disconnect and get her all going back together again that way we don't damage anything putting it back together. That fan blade just barely taps the shroud as you pull it off. You just got to be really careful with it. And like I said it's just an ICM controller. It looks like they've got it set correctly. It does the job. Like I said also I checked all those fittings down in there. Did not find any leaks at all. Everything looks pretty good. Contactors technically just a relay. It's all sealed. No change in anything there. We'll just leave all that go. Motor's not got really major oil or anything on it and it feels like it spins pretty freely. All right just checking our temperature drop out of it which looks like it's doing really good. So it's probably about 70 in here. It's about 28 degrees under 30 which is pretty common so that's good. We're back again. I suck. Got a recall here but he's had it off for a while so I have a funny feeling since this is really really cold ice. Go figure. Cold ice. Ha ha. That betcha this thing's sticking on. Got one of those cheap little relays I pointed out the other day. Let's go look and see if it's running. Here's the generic little relay they got. I bet you it's a DC relay or something stupid. Well if that's just 24 volts we're going to rip that out. We'll put a regular kind of contactor in there. That is a 120 volt coil so I'm going to put a regular contactor in there. 120 volt coil on it. It'll be a lot more reliable than this freaking thing. We have a 30 amp 120 volt here. It's sealed so we've got bug shield on it. Here's the relay. You can see it there. It's pitted pretty good. They actually used copper all the way up to it which is kind of a nice engineering there. It finally failed. We've got it hooked up here. We just basically had it mounted off the side a little bit. I made sure we had room in between here. Had to move the capacitor a little bit. Just used some self-tapping Phillips screws everything's clear and we should be good. This kind of thing happens sometimes when you know it works while you're there. It obviously opened up because it was open. I looked at it but the pads and stuff I mean you can see they're nowhere near as big as what a normal contactor is. Let's get downstairs. Well we just ran it and it got cold but the fans didn't spin because the ice is hitting it. He's just going to let it set and fall out naturally. They don't need it right now anyhow and we should be good to go. I'll probably tie this on with the other little mini split that I just did that was also a short little video just to combine them together. So if you guys want to stick around I think I'm going to go ahead and just run that video right now. Oh my favorite mini splits and you make it even better it's called a pioneer which looks like all the other brands at Medina, Dinah, whatever the hell they are. They must have one person pouring it all out but you can hear it kind of the customer's complaint is it doesn't seem like it's working. They don't know if it's warm in the room. It just seems like it seems a little different. I can hear a little bit of noise out of it. We did not install this contractor put addition on the house. It's been two years they said I am going to check for oil spots. The head's right on the other side of that. Let's get into these fittings. See I wouldn't be surprised if it's like all the other ones that the fittings weren't done right. Flare fittings and that they leaked. Let's get this thing opened up. It also appears to be the guy with a hack. You can see where they use channel locks to get on there and put grooves in the brass and they use leak lock. So let's see if we can get Gage on there. At this point it's got all the signs of a leak. We're running about 300 pounds ahead which is about 95 degrees for your discharge. It's ramping up a little bit more. On something like this it runs 410A. It holds 29 measly ounces. What I would probably do is pull the charge away at end if I really have doubts on it. I did crank it up to 80 degrees to get it running at highest mode possible. It is jumping up a little bit. This is kind of a slow one. I don't like I said I don't work on Pioneer. People buy this off the wall you know. Nobody services around here and then you can't know everything about everybody's little invention. Going to pull that thing off the side of the wall there. See if we can get a sniff on the flare fittings on the back side. So we got this off and I went ahead and put a little slit in some of this stuff here just to see if we could get any sniffs out of anything and never seen that white stuff before on some sort of cloth tape or what exactly it is. Not real sure. There's no flare fittings out here so it must be on the wall. I mean our pressures ain't by much off. I'm going to go ahead and take temperature rise across this thing and see where we're at. I mean there you know it's 35 degrees out here area so I mean it's not horrible. It's definitely no hyper heat type technology I don't believe so go in there and see if we can get any sniffs on the inside unit. What temperature do you usually set it at? The last year it didn't feel like it was cold out here like it is now. I mean I've got 97 or 97 coming out and I got 77 going in. It's only 20 degrees and I'm granted it is a little cooler out but normally they can do a little better than that. I'm going to shut it down. I'm going to scan this coil in here and scan the coil outside and see if maybe we have a small little leak there. You know I was checking it while it was running just to kind of let it build pressure that way if there is a leak maybe it would show up a little easier. I got nothing on the evaporator. There's a little scan out here on the condenser. Let's see if we can get anything out here. I'm thinking it could be 5-10 ounces low maybe if that and that's really small for two years worth of leak if that's even with a problem. If I don't find anything I'm going to give them the option of pulling the refrigerant charge out and weighing in or I can just add a few ounces to it and see how it does then after that which the right way is to pull it out and weigh it in. I scanned the whole thing over all deep down in here down in the compressor area on the backside front side of the coil. Didn't pick up anything. Like I said it's doggone close. From what I'm seeing here this doesn't have an electronic expansion valve. It looks like capillary tubes right there. So I'm thinking you know this thing ain't going to be super high efficient. You know I'm not usually you'd see the head down in there and I'm not seeing the servo controlled type metering device. They said go ahead and recover it and weigh it back in fresh that way we know. I don't see anything hitting on this fan blade so that rumble must just be the vibration of the compressor. When they fiber padded it down they kind of used bolts right into that concrete pad kind of pointless when they got it like that. We pulled the refrigerant out recovered it weighed in exactly the 29.5 whatever 30 ounces. I turned it up to 85 this time let's see if it does any better than what it did the last time. It should push it up to 100 capacity I would think. Just as I suspected we're at 483 area on our discharge and we're checking outdoor temp which were 43 area give or take. That's a little more along the lines of what I'm used to seeing 485 area. It's a 130 degree sat temperature there. I'm going to make a little sticker and put it on the inside of the cover of what we had at what temperatures but we'll stick that on the inside that way whoever comes back next time will have a ballpark you know at least one particular temperatures. Maybe even be hitting up around 490 area we'll give it a little bit. 410A is always a treat always has a tendency to grow and grow that's why I'd like weighing it in I didn't want to just add refrigerant and hope that I got it where it needs it and then they have problems in cooling or vice versa when it gets warmer. We had 97 before and we're already 106 and rising 111 113 so I mean who knows they may have not got it you know they may have a little bit of a leak when they were starting it up so we at least know now we have a date and time that we we put it back to factory spec. I'm going to make a little sticker and put it on the inside of the cover so we have it for later that way we kind of know that you know at 42 degrees I had this temperature rise I had this pressure you know I don't know if that's in your book I doubt it is but it's at least gives us something. Well from what I see on the paperwork looks like we're on the right track here it's test procedure says for five minutes running its highest heat setting and its lowest cool setting for at least five minutes I was getting 109 it was a little higher at the in the beginning but it had 79 coming in so 8999 109 have almost 30 degree area for a rise it might have been better than that in the very initial beginning but you know it's monitoring temperatures all that stuff who knows what they do in their logic but it found the guy's numbers and it corresponds to what he had before it does appear we have a little bit of a leak somewhere we're going to go ahead and you know let them check it out try it out if it goes down again we'll spend more time tearing into it next time right now I don't see anything I mean if I'm not finding nothing there's not a whole lot I can do only thing I could do is yank it off the wall but I scan behind there it sounds to me like it might be down five ounces six ounces something like that and at this point you know it's working good for them so let's just try this first is what I'm going to recommend and kind of go from there you can't find it you can't find it so put today's date problems load heat pulled charge after no leaks found recharge spec 30 degree delta t at 42 degree out of air temperature I'm going to put that on the inside plus it'll be on her bill that way one of the other text comes back they'll be able to get the quick history of what was done it'll have a date there and that'll help them know what's been done in the past to kind of go from there which I would say a further deeper leak check is about all you can do