Low Refrigerant? Freon Leak? Check This First!

today's video I'll be showing you a simple method in checking for any refrigerant leaks at your condensing unit the most common area that you're gonna find where you have generally most of your leaks are going to be here at your king vows generally the Schrader valves inside end up drying out the little gasket or seal here you can see this is what a Schrader valve actually looks like and this is what's inserted here inside of your little valve and basically that little black gasket or seal over time as I said it just starts to dry out and allows for the refrigerant to slowly seep out here we have a close-up and you can see that the valve just kind of just sits right inside and normally most of the calls that I receive come from one of two places and generally 80% of the time it's gonna be your Schrader valve or your king valve a lot of times in my experience what I will encounter is if you have an inexperienced technician what they'll do is they'll get a call for a condensing unit that's not working properly or efficiently and what they'll do is they'll come they'll put their gauges on the system they'll see the refrigerant slow and then they'll just top it off not really considering or diagnosing as to why the refrigerant was low in the first place for instance this unit was already worked on by a technician and they charged the system up with the refrigerant for this condensing unit and three days later I received a call that the system was not operating or functioning properly here I have two separate gas leak locators or detectors and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a little bit of the solution and then I'm gonna apply a little bit on to the Schrader valve now if the Schrader valve starts to show any indications that it has a leak you'll see bubbles starting to form at the at the front here at the base of the King valve you just dip it in and now you can see that it is starting to bubble very slightly which indicates we have a very small leak here I prefer using this fluorescent one because when you're working out in the field sometimes the Sun is that is peak of the day and it'll actually just blind you so you won't be able to see it so here with the fluorescent one you can see that it's already starting to bubble over so that tells me that I do have a leak here at the Schrader valve now another place that you want to check for leaks is going to be at the top of the king valve these also have a seal if you remove this cap these office will have a rubber gasket here that also I've seen many times dry out and you basically do the same type of test you would take your leak detector obviously your gas and you would just kind of just fill it up here on top and if there was a leak you would see that it would start to actually bubble over right now it's not so this tells me I do not have a leak here a lot of times as soon as you put this on there it'll just start to bubble over and foam over and then you'll know that the leak is here on top but you're gonna put do this procedure both on the high and the low side here I have my Schrader valve removal tool there's many different ones you may have a lever some have a little ball but basically you just tie one end onto the valve you don't have to over torque it do that you're basically just gonna put this and press it in and what I like to do is whenever I'm using my Schrader valve removal tool I like to slowly tighten the valve first just to make sure that I actually grab the valve and then what I'll do is I'll slowly keeping pressure inwards I'll slowly just kind of rotate it until the lever pops out you have remove the Schrader valve you'll feel like a slight click and then you'll just let it pop out like that and then you should have a lever here and that will actually close the line from allowing the extra refrigerant that's in the system to escape now I'm simply going to remove this top portion and the Schrader off should be at the end of the tip here I have my new Schrader valve and basically we're just going to put it in we're gonna close this up and then I'm gonna open the lever and then push in and rotate clockwise to put my Schrader valve back inside the king valve now we have the new Schrader valve in we're gonna perform our leak test you can see the solution is for me but it's not bubbling over like it was before you'll just see bubble like just forming at the base so right now we have eliminated the leak lastly if you do replace the Schrader valves here is the cap that was on the system you can see it's very starting to crack here at the base it's just at this point very brittle what I would recommend is placing it with a brass cap and you can see these have an actual little rubber gasket or seal inside they're just very efficient and effective and just protecting against the elements this video was a help if it was informational please subscribe

Channel: Sam

Views: 403,622

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Id: 9irGQQJfhH0

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018