Dumpster-dive Honeywell 2-port valve teardown

when dave at eev blog goes dumpster diving he finds things like big expensive computers when i go dumpster diving i find things like this suspiciously clean honeywell two port zone diverter valve so what i'm going to do in this video is i'm going to take the cover off it for a start i'm going to show you how this works now if you've got a slight touch of deja vu i've shown the three port version of this that has the water inlet pipe at the bottom here this is strictly just a two port so it's water passing through but i've shown that with a system called the y plan this type of valve is used in the s plan and if you're an american heat engineer you'll be quite interested to see the differences particularly because everything operates in the uk while it usually operates at 240 volts in the home uh heating systems so let's take a look at this i shall put this cover out the way it's not really going to reveal anything other than the fact it is a genuine honeywell device with a synchron motor in it that is made in usa that's also quite unusual to find something like that so here's the the idea about this when the heating system calls for say for instance radiator water for the the hot water radiators this valve will be actuated and if you look down the end of it you will see a sort of rubber ball blocking the way and as i push this little lever over or should i say release this little lever that valve will change position there's not an awful lot of movement you know there's hardly any movement in there it doesn't seem like it would pass a lot of water but the the valve is actually moving out the way it just rolls out the way and passes in this void it passes the water through to activate it all you do is apply power and this is simply a synchronous motor that winds that valve and literally just stalls at the end there's no switch i mean there is a switch at the end you can hear it clicking here there is a switch to a signal that the valve is in the open position but it doesn't turn the motor off it doesn't lock the motor anyway the motor just literally stalls and draws fuel current six watts all the time which is just done for simplicity it doesn't really damage the motors although they do get hot and over time they will gradually fail but in this case uh you can swap the motor out just a couple of screws and a couple of little crimp terminals so let's show you what happens here here is the original cable and for such a clean valve it looks kind of chewed up and used particularly given that it looks as though the end of the wires may actually have been nipped slightly so uh let's wire up i shall bring in the cliff quick test and this thing has the five wires it has the green is at earth so i shall stuff that into the earth the brown is the life 240 volts the blue is the neutral and at this point in time i could power this up and if you watch the mechanism in here you'll see it gradually moves and it moves and it hits a switch at the end i shall zoom down this later on so you can actually see it doing this doing its stuff and then when you remove power afterwards there is a switch going in hits the end limit that's it it stalls the valve is open when you unpower it take the power away it just go back under spring release listen to this did you hear that winding back so the other two wires orange and grey are just wired to this micro switch here they've not got any live connection to them it's purely an open contact so to demonstrate this i shall connect my bench power supply i shall connect say this to here i shall connect a little beacon with the positive to here and i'll twist the negative around the orange there because it's just going through a switch thing's worthy of note with that beacon having fixed the beacon because this originally came with a big blob over one of the transistors which meant it didn't flash it turns out that this was the static version of the beacon because other people saw the chinese writing on top of the box the sticker over it it turns out the reason they had a big blob over the transistor shorting it all out was to make it a static beacon and that was deliver it so as if it's not a slap in the face for the microcontroller in here but this little uh eight pin chip it's a microcontroller that all it does its whole life is just flash that end off but if they don't want to flash they just short out so that microcontroller is trying to flash something on and off but it's just staying static it seems it reminds me of the butter passing robot in rick and morty the futile function so here we go i'm going to angle this up i'm going to zoom down i'm going to zoom down that's the best bet so you can see this so let's bring in the little beacon that's going to show you when it's closed this is the mechanism that's going round and there's a little tab that's going to actuate the switch let's actuate that now so you can see it happening so the motor slowly winds around it's quite heavily geared you can see it moving in there and as the valve opens once the valve is fully open it hits that switch which brings on the load and it will just stay in that position pressed against that switch actually activating the pump and boiler until the call for heating is removed in which case it will turn off the pump and boiler wind back and it will close the valve again okay now we have shown that let's explore it internally so i shall put these out of the way the most common failure mode of these things is usually the the motor actually conking out after a while they don't last forever i suppose the switch could go as well in both instances you can buy a replacement motor and the switch i think is a standard microswitch we'll take a look at that we'll explore deeply and see what we can find so let's get this off the valve body first so it has four points that appear to be threaded in but two of them are screws going into this so to change the whole actuator head all you have to do is theoretically undo these two screws and lift it off is that going to work yes it is then we've got these effectively all nuts right tell you what let's open that as well let's go all the way we want all the information so there are studs into these little threaded inserts by the look of it and this will show us what's inside this valve it's quite neat quite neat construction i would expect that it is a honeywell device a screwdriver prising layers apart that is probably just stuck together with the age and the seal here's the big rubber ball oh there is this possible this has been used you can see a little bit of crust around the inside of it it was surprisingly clean actually er but there's the ball and all it does is it wobbles backwards and forwards and i guess that's part of the reason for that that the reason it's a ball is because it's always going to sort of be loose to rotate it's always going to have a fresh clean edge keep in mind this does not if you were to put mains water pressure into this it would just squirt past it because it's not designed it's called a diverter valve it's not designed for actually controlling high pressure water but in the other version of this valve it can actually go from say the closed position it can go to a mid position and then it can go all the way to the position that it will block flow out the other pipe so by using that you can actually control which port water comes out or both all from one motor it's quite a clever system but also really complex as a result of that i i'll put a link to that video down below it might make sense if you've got the three-port diverter valve in your heating system these seals could have done with being replaced as well i guess they are just standard o-rings ultimately that could be pulled out and replaced if needs to be if it was leaky everything should be serviceable the right to repair as they say okay let's remove the motor oh things worth mentioning you can bypass this if you have a situation that uh you want watch to flow through this is apparently often used when the guys are filling the heating systems at the beginning i'm not a huge expert in heating systems i'm strictly an electrician but you can put this into an intermediate position by putting it up like that and then if you let it go it will just go back to the closed position if you pull it open and then as it swings back you press it up that way it hooks behind that little hook and that means it latches of open state but it also means that if this motor runs again it will automatically ping down like that and it will revert back into automatic mode you can't leave it in manual mode let's are those screws capped if i think those screws are captive let's take the motor out so for the motor what we got here oh i see we've got here we've got one screw hold the motor in i could have used a smaller screwdriver for this i should use a smaller screwdriver for this vde screwdrivers rated for uh live electrical work so now i would guess that having removed that screw that this probably twists out yes it does so the gear is going through here and it's basically it's going in and then when you twist the motor this lug here is going under a little plate that locks it in place and the other one then has the screws that's a single screw replacement i wonder if that's i guess that's for manufacturing ease oh it's a fairly easy to turn motor then of course you'd have to have another couple of crimps to actually uh connect onto the live and neutral wires coming into this can we go any further this is where there are big springs let's take the switch out that's a good idea so there's a little insulators over this to stop people poking live connections while it's open maybe would people normally have this open well i guess they would heating engineers yes they would i noticed that a lot of the american heating furnaces everything is a 24 volt well this whole thing is wrapped in cardboard do i have to do any more to get this out i think that's it more or less it's just not coming out oh there it goes the switch is wrapped in insulating cardboard and it's held in place by a couple of standard machine screws and once you remove that you have your switch with its two connections and it is just a standard microswitch so that's replaceable that is a absolutely standard switch format okay now i've done that here comes the springy bit let's get the earth wire off something else worth mentioning the screws are both for flat blade but also torques torques for the factor i'm guessing uh or star and a flat blade for the hidden engineers this is held in place by these little metal fins and this is also it's got springs onto the casing here that's going to be a bit springy yeah this is going to have springy bits that shoot out everywhere isn't it as these things often do this is not something you'd normally go down into anyway so let's get that off that spring now let's get that spring off that should be quite good and then let's twist these little locking tabs off quite tight that's quite thick metal and we'll get that whole assembly off and we'll take a look at it not that there's going to be a huge amount to see okay what are we going to see not a lot there is the metal rotating uh rack and pinion so this would be the rack that rotates there's just a little bush and there's two springs that go on to that there's not really an awful lot uh this is the switch listen so this gets wound round by the motor uh running against these teeth and then that's the bit that hits the switch at the end and that is all you're gonna get it's very simple isn't it very straightforward in fact uh i'm attempting fate by saying i could almost have left those springs attached but i just know that probably wouldn't end well will we try and attach them again this is probably a terrible idea let's see if it just ricochets everywhere when i do this i think the springs were better attached once it was in position although having said that that's not too bad and this one would have to go down there how easy would this be to assemble reassemble once you've interfered with it oh it's not bad actually that's not bad okay if i've got that right have i got that right it just it feels like it should be going the opposite direction maybe i've hooked them on to the wrong bits that's a very good chance i have i shall look at the video afterwards and see how i hooked them on it does strike me that that should actually be freewheeling down that direction so yes i probably have hooked those on back to front but it doesn't matter you can hook them on that's the main thing it's not going to explode into millions of pieces right here i'm going to pause momentarily i'm going to get the notepad out and then we shall continue and i'll show you how this system is wired up to actually using a heating system okay that's it reassembled and working again it went together quite easily the springs i had put in the wrong direction they actually even went in the correct direction under tension okay without pinging everywhere but it's useful to know this is how the s system works and it's much simpler than what they call the y system the y plane system uses that two-way diverter valve but the downside of that is it's much more complex to wire and more often that mistakes will be made this effectively use the valves on hot water and the the radiators let me show you so i shall zoom down in this so we can we can get a bit closer and here is what happens you have neutral and you have live the live it goes straight to the boiler and as does the neutral boiler because it gets a constant feed so neutral goes over to the boiler as does live live also and neutral goes to the time control let's just draw a little clock here for the time controller controllers for simplicity so it's a neutral and live and that could be a simple time switch and usually a digital one these days and the output of that will have the central heating and hot water let's just go with the hot water because the both the circuits are identical anyway so when it activates that it switches live to the say the hot water outlet and that then goes to the cylinder thermostat so cylinder start so that when there's a demand for hot water it passes current through and it passes current through to the valve so the valve here valve has the motor inside it let's just drop over the top of that so there's the motor and uh it also goes up to neutral so that it's got that power but that also you'll have a connection from there going through the switch in the valve and it's no it's a volt free contact effectively in some of these valves not all of them so that is then used to feed out to two things it feeds a signal to the boiler to tell the borrower to start up when the valve is open to the end of travel but it also often feeds the pump pump many different systems they evolve all the time to degree but this is a fairly common one so here's what happens the time switch calls for hot water the hot wallet water becomes active if the cylinder hot water cylinder is cold the cylinder stack will be closed power will go to the valve the valve will wind into the open position that allows the water from the border to be pumped through the cylinder uh it's heating coil but only once the valve is fully open will it allow current through the switch to actually power the pump on to start running the water through the system but it'll also send the signal to the boiler and it's worth mentioning the boiler isn't being powered from this live it's going through something like this in fact you know what i'll make a video about this next this is a interface module for arduino e type projects that basically lets you 240 volts in one side and it lets you switch your logic level out the other side so you can actually get a signal that there's power and that's pretty much what they're doing here and the reason they're doing they're just switching with 240 volts is just because it's cheaper and easier everything is geared up for cheapness the central heating system is just the same thing again it's another valve but diverting through the hot water loop when the uh the house start is closed um and that also is just this switch is in parallel uh so it powers the pump uh so it typically if this was being used like this you'd actually have this would actually just be going to live on its own without a link to there so that means you can have independent switching of the pump from two different valves or more you could have like multiple zones with a valve for each but if as soon as one of those valves gets activated the motor winds then it closes that switch will bridge the live through to the pump and also bring the boiler on at the same time and that is the s plan system it sounds like a diet doesn't it the s-plan system for a slim waste system and that's how typical british heating systems work it's very straightforward as i say much simpler in the y-plan system and you can just basically cascade them in multiples in the case of the multi-zone underfloor heating it's slightly different there's the valves are those thermoelectric actuators so they don't have an ender travel switch all that happens is that when the cylinder stack comes in it uses a a system and there's the marshalling units it does a diode to our relay but it means that no matter which uh thermostat comes in it will basically activate a relay that just does the same it's then sings that sends that signal out to the pump and the boiler and that is it so that was actually quite interesting apart it's quite nicely made but then it would be it's a honeywell component and it's like one of the sort of shall we say premier heating type components uh so well worth taking part i don't get why this is a it's olive is in good condition it doesn't look like it's been squeezed in onto a pipe and yet this looks like it's been used that'll trace a ptfe tape i think this has been used but maybe they've just put a spare uh well this does say honeywell they've maybe just put a spare olive on it with an intent to use it in the future and it's it's been stuck in the garage and then finally it's found its way into the skip or dumpster but there we go interesting lots of uh lots of amusement taking that apart and hope you found the information contained therein quite useful

Channel: bigclivedotcom

Views: 59,978

Rating: 4.9654179 out of 5

Keywords: honeywell, port, diverter, two, valve, s plan, plan, wiring, synchronous, motor, change, switch, test, boiler, pump

Id: Ufx_t81w3fE

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021

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[u/nemom]

From the description:

"""

I succumbed to temptation and dumpster dived a skip outside a neighbours house to see if there was anything technical in it. It was mainly junk, but there was a Honeywell two port valve in it, so I thought it would be interesting to take apart.

The little correction I made in my schematic of a Type-S heating system was to take the pump/boiler switch feed directly to the live rail. If I'd left it as I originally drew it, then one valve actuating would have back-fed the other valves in the system and prevented them from turning off until everything else had turned off.

Not a bad diverter valve. Rugged construction and quite easy to change the motor. If changing the switch take a photo of it first, and note that the motor has to be removed to remove one of the switch screws.

"""