Boost Your RV Air Conditioner Performance With This Cheap, Easy Fix!

[Music] hi this is Darren with my review works today we're in Port Angeles Washington and what we're working on today is a Coleman air conditioner now there's really nothing wrong with the air conditioner there's something wrong with the way the air conditioner was installed so think about this with me an air conditioner has to do a pretty important job and it's only given a hole in the roof of 14 inches by 14 inches and in that 14 inch space I have to get all of my room air from my room through half of that 14 inch space so seven by fourteen up and I have to pass that through my evaporator coil okay first I have to condition the air I'm gonna be a dehumidifier - the first step is the first thing I'm going to do and then I'm going to pass it through my coil I'm gonna cool the air down no more than 20 degrees the most an air conditioner gonna do is about a 16 to 22 degree change in temperature so if it's 100 degree in your RV and you got your conditioner on it's gonna suck in that hundred degree air blow out 80 degree air okay if it's 80 degrees in your air conditioner it's gonna suck an idiom about 60 so you can do the math 20 degree difference the dripping that's taking place on the outside of your RV well if it's raining it's rain hard but if it's a dry day and you have this dripping coming off the side of your RV and your air conditioner is running that is a humidity that was drawn out of your RV passed through the absorber coil drip to a drip tray and dripped off the side so the dripping on the outside of your RV is coming from inside your RV now what we're working on here is a coleman air conditioner like i said now there's nothing wrong with this air conditioner or something wrong with the installation of this air conditioner so when we look up here we see this this is the divider it's a foam core divider and there this is the way we found it there's a huge breach this is the side where the warm air gets returned and this the side where the cold air gets supplied back okay that's not correct so that I've already taken the screws loose and then we decided to do a video so this divider it's kind of a big deal because remember that 14 by 14 hole I need to get separation warm air going in here cold air coming out this side going through my ducts now if you look over here when there's dividers in place see this breach right there so we need to go a little bit farther in this because this is my duck duct dot where my cold air is going into this duck let me get the light here so you see that opening right there okay so the cold air is on this side and I'm going into my duck but guess what I'm also sucking in warm air here so we're gonna have to take this whole plenum down and reposition this divider again I've got a 14 by 14 hole warm air comes in on one half of my 14 inch hole I go through an absorber I dropped my temperature no more than 20 years or so degrees and then I come back here dehumidified and cooled and then I go either through an air dump right here or if this is closed I'm gonna go through my ducts like these right here okay so next we're gonna do we have two more screws take this list to get this divider positioned in the correct spot to keep my 14 by 14 but to keep the hot and the cold separate they shouldn't play together and right now what we have is we have like a dog chasing his tail kind of thing where that hot and that cold is mixing together you're never gonna have an efficient cooling situation like that so we're going to take this plenum down and we're gonna look at that divider what we might do is get some of that HVAC foil tape to kind of tape up some things to kind of make that divider as intact as we possibly can ok so we've taken the screws down we're gonna pull this down and here this is good because now you can see everything I was talking about let me get a little flashlight going on here so here being the air being drawn in from the room air it goes way up in the top through an absorber can you see that little radiator looking thing way up in the top up there that's the business end of the air conditioner this is the divider this is the cold side there's your fan the thing that makes all the noise and then this divider here we can pull it down but we're gonna position this it was it was kind of like that we need to make it more so that all this cold air is forced through there and we might even make that a little bit more aerodynamic these little stuff there so yeah what's the pink puke up there probably a bunch of mold no I'm just joking that's expandable foam that's expandable foam and you know when they were building the thing they put the expandable foam there's probably gonna be one on this side too yeah so we're just gonna kind of take a little razor blade and kind of clean it up make it a little bit more aerodynamic what we might also do is get some of that HVAC tape and kind of make it you know more aerodynamic so it might be a little quieter might be more efficient and what you want to do is you want to eliminate all this turbulence as this air is drawn well and so here's another problem this this romex let's just put the whole romex all on one side and not on both sides yeah so anything we could do to eliminate this air breach so let me just fix our omics just like that yeah and you only get better no beta okay so basically I've got our razor blade and I'm just gonna cut some of this stuff off and and really we're just trying to make this more aerodynamic it's nothing not a big deal no big physics lesson here okay and then there we go and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get some HVAC tape and just kind of make this a little bit more aerodynamic right here so all we got here is our HVAC foil tape but I'm just gonna kind of tape it up here and maybe put two pieces just to kind of make it a little bit more attractive for the air to flow into the ducts I'll do one more so like no big deal it's not like it's a big thing oh I got a breach right there I gotta fix that so and I'll put one more over it just to kind of make it more roof shingle II so I don't have this edge right there just a word if I was air that's been reconditioned and dehumidified then I would be very happy to go inside of this duct right here there we'll do the same thing to the other side there is all taped up so it's nice in our dynamic so now what we need to do is this is the divider here so we've got the romex wire out which was in here this would be the ceiling plenum and so we're gonna put the shiny side towards the cold side and the non shiny side towards the room side and this is supposed to be wedged right inside of this little profile right there with the phone okay so what we're gonna hope for is when we're gonna put this in here and we put it into the air conditioner if you remember let me see if I can hold this the third hand it was right over in this area where that duct was kind of showing so what we're gonna do is we're gonna don't let the customer see that actually that may is a lot easier so now we're gonna basically put this exactly where we need it to be and then we'll address this issue over here if necessary and if there is a hole right there we'll take this the swell tape and tape that up on both sides okay okay so we're just gonna kind of get this I know where we think it should be and then we'll put the the ceiling plenum on and and compress it and then there's one more trick I'm gonna do before actually secure this so luckily this comes apart okay so that came apart and I want to kind of get this where it's gonna be okay I see so this goes we what I'm looking for is right through here I'm looking for where that screw hole is okay it's over this side there it is okay so I've got the screw hole here and I've got this rule there so that gives me a reference okay so now that kind of gives me a clue as to where this needs to be and I'm gonna take this back the white part back down and then I'm going to tape up the inside of this divider so you see what I'm doing is I'm kind of making this ceiling plenum the the measuring device your guide my guide yes I'm I'm in deep thought here this is high mental math to figure out where the center line is okay so I'm happy with the center line of that so I'm gonna move this down okay and now there you can see there's still a hole there yeah so but at least this is where this divider must be sure okay and so now that it's where it's gonna be I can take this foil tape and tape up the inside of this okay because if we look on the inside it's got this okay so we're gonna pull tape the whole inside here and then this side on this side yeah so all that makes sense this is where the divider needs to be and we'll tape up the inside tape up though so that we have a really good divider to keep this returnee er separate from the supplier separate from the returnee okay so we've got what we've done now is we've taped up the inside the outside the whole thing so that the air will kind of respect that divider a little bit better you're gonna make me dizzy looking at that okay so now this right here okay so now that we've got the ceiling plenum on and let's compare what we did to begin so now as you see this is completely sealed okay on both sides we put the tape right in here okay and so now at the end of the day the let's remember the lesson here the room air is going to go in it's gonna the only way that it can come back out is not by taking a shortcut which is what it was doing before but the only way that the air that's drawn in can get out is to go through the evaporator coil and then once it's through the evaporator coil the only way it can return back to the coach is through the ducts or through the air dump that's the only way I can go before it could bypass so what your homework assignment is to go to your RV take your ceiling plenum down and look for that I cannot tell you how many times we've been called in for people's air conditioners we're not working efficiently and they're thinking that there's this terrible air conditioner problem at the end of the day all it was was some HVAC foil tape and making sure that dividers intact a lot of times the dividers are not there so now you understand a little more about what the dividers purpose in life is why it's so critically important you want to force the air through the evaporator core and back through so this is Darrin from Port Angeles Washington saying Happy Campers well saying that Happy Campers say my RV works so we hope these videos help you [Music] [Music]

Channel: My RV Works, Inc.

Views: 296,213

Rating: 4.8484759 out of 5

Keywords: RV AC, RV Air Conditioner, RV Repair, RV fix, RV Tech Washington

Id: rxCljBVi8DU

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 05 2019