Refrigerant/Refrigerator Leak Detection Part 1

[Music] foreign [Music] okay so today's lecture is going to be a little bit about troubleshooting a sealed system and we're going to go through some of the steps that you would do uh when your refrigerator is not cooling yesterday one of the refrigerators here at the school someone had told me from another building saying that the refrigerator is not cooling and I send some students over to check it out and we brought it over here to take a look at it one of the first things that they did is they opened up the unit and they checked the freezer and it was completely warm it wasn't cooling at all so he saw that the fan in the freezer is working what type of condenser is this guys do you know what it's called what happens when gets real cold you walk across a bare carpet you know and you touch somebody oh static it's called a static condenser static electricity but this is It's called a static condenser and a static condenser is a condenser that does not have a fan to cool it down most refrigerators this condensers folded up into a smaller compartment down in the bottom next to the compressor here and it has a fan that helps cool it down this one is called a static condenser so there is no fan on the back of this refrigerator so the only two components that are really running when it's cooling is the fan in the freezer and the compressor so while they were checking it out they saw the fan in the freezer was running and the unit was completely warm they touch the compressor the compressor was hot or at least warm like like didn't know whether it was working or not but they knew that the compressor was warmer so whenever we check a refrigerator for not cooling we don't always want to go to checking sealed system if you're going to a customer's home doing a sealed system job is the last thing you want to do you want to check everything electrically you want to make sure the compressor is running the fans running and everything is doing its job and once you've exhausted all the electrical problems we want to go to sealed system okay so uh when we went to this unit we saw that it was compressor was warm I said let's check the relay and overload to make sure they're good and all Mount the windings in the compressor uh but one of the first things I wanted him to check was what do you remember what was the first thing I told you to check voltage voltage to what to the compressor itself voltage to the compressor so you know I want to know okay the Fan's running but is the compressor getting power and he was he was getting 120 volts so that means electrically the Tyler and the thermostat or even if it was a computer board if I had power down there my problem is not electrical as far as like the controls my problem could still be a bad compressor but it's something I have to work out and diagnose so once I checked out the windings and everything else put everything back on we plugged it in it felt like the compressor was running the next thing we did is what did we do after we saw that the compressor was running what what other things did we physically look for that we didn't put a meter on to test it without a meter yeah uh leaks now before we even checked for leaks what what did you do that said hey something's not right you felt the compressor the compressor was warm but what else did I always tell you guys when you're working on a system I want you to use your hands and feel what are we feeling for what temperature temperature on what temperature on the suction line or on um that's the first thing you're going to see the suction line yeah you can do it but a lot of times suction mind coming off the off the evaporator in the freezer is almost going to be like room temperature okay okay you don't want it too cold if the suction lines too cold it'll start sweating that's why they put this insulation around it this this insulation here because if it gets too cold just like when you get a get a cold drink with ice water and you set it down on the outside the glass is so wet it leaves water on the table condensation or humidity in the air once it gets too cold condenses and then it'll drip water so we don't want that suction line that cold so really what we want to feel is this line coming right off the compressor what we call that line in the compressor it's called a discharge mark and it should be about 20 degrees higher than ambient temperature so we want to see you know at least 90 100 120 degrees 120 low high but 90 to 100 degrees coming on this on this discharge line and we felt it it felt like room temperature now does that mean that we have a good or bad compressor it is very possible that the compressor is still bad because if the compressor was electrically running the electric compressor is two parts compressor has the electrical motor like a dryer motor it is what makes a compressor run but then we have a physical piston inside of there that causes compression of the gas and that's what pumps the gas around so you could have a relay overload in the windings of a compressor all checked good does not mean the compressor is good example a water pump in a washing machine you can measure the windings on a water pump and have good resistance you can have voltage to the pump it could be something broken inside or a sock caught inside or even once I brought in a pump that the impeller was all chewed up and the pump was running but it was not pumping compressors had that problem as well the linear compressors on LG they put the valves on the top of the piston and not above the Piston like like a car engine as it's like a head and the valves go bad they get damaged and so what we have what we call an inefficient compressor a compressor that's running but it's not able to pump because in a compressor it has to have a way to separate the suction from coming in to the discharge coming out so we can create uneven pressure so what we want to do is put high pressure here low pressure there high pressure high heat low pressure in the system low heat so therefore we want that difference in pressure so we have to do that so when we ran this unit we determined the compressor was running and we said okay let's see what kind of pressures we have in here so we did do some work on this but I sort of duplicated what we were going to do to this unit and if you look closely on this can you zoom in on that if you look closely on this gauge I'm going to take this tape off for a second the needles at zero and when he connected the gauges to this system it read just about zero PSI and I was talking with the student that was working on it and I said zero PSI does that mean there's no refrigerant in the system and most of the time people say yeah if it's zero it's empty there's nothing in there because if I put freon in what would it normally do it would raise the pressure Zone what are the pressures of a refrigerant system like with 134a usually when it's off what do you think the pressure should be between 60 and 70. and one thing about 134a looking at the temperature pressure chart the 134a at 70 degrees is about 70 PSI its temperature and pressure about the same so we put it on there if you could see that this gauge was reading just about zero okay so that would be an indication that the refrigerant has escaped or we had a leak within the system or in order to check pressures he had to add an access valve adding a temporary access valve like this some of them called bullet valves this clamps onto the pipe and then after it clamps on the pipe you have to use a tool that will pierce a hole through the pipe in order for it to access I have seen students put these valves on but never accurately pass through the tube and they're here and they're not checking pressures okay now on this valve there's a little core inside of there they call it a valve core and on this hose and I know you're not going to get that on camera there's a little piece of metal inside this hose that presses down on it I've had students that had this hose stalled the other way around put this one here and that one there well the difference on this a hose here is there's no depressor for the core I've had people put this on here and look if I put this on nothing happens if I switch the hose and put this one on as soon as I put it on it starts leaking out whatever little pressure that's left in there so I've had students put the hose on backwards and they ran the vacuum pump to pull a vacuum to charge it ran the vacuum pump for 20 minutes got 500 microns and then put the freon and started charging it with freon and they're like Richard I can only get two ounces and they're supposed to take four ounces it's not taking the freon and I'm running a compressor if you got two ounces in there even though it's under charge you should still feel Heat okay but the problem was is that since they had the hose backwards when they pulled the vacuum they only evacuated the hose and have a really evacuated the system when they let the charge in the holes was the only thing that held the charge the charge didn't go in the system so you got to make sure you have the hose on it correctly so anyways we connected the valve on here and I'm going to bring the gauges down to the bottom here and you're using these gauges get it threaded here when we're using these refrigerant gauges when you want to test pressures in your system you do not want to open the valve opening the valve has nothing to do with this hose and this gauge they are directly connected as soon as you attach the hose to the system your gauge is going to give you a pressure reading if there's freon in it and your valves connected properly the only time we open the gauge is if I wanted freon to come out I wanted to pull a vacuum on the system I wanted to recover on the system I would put the holes to my machine opening the valve is in between these two here and opening and closing the valve is only allowed to Freon out or freon in or vacuum or whatever that's when we open the gauge we do not open the gauge just to check the pressure on the system okay so anyways the question I asked earlier was that zero does that mean there's nothing in the system so what does that mean it's empty yes not totally thought when you guys learn Refrigeration you learn about PSIG pounds per square inch gauge pressure and basically what that is is this is a gauge and it's reading the pressure inside the system and the pressure of zero in most numerical mathematical things zero means absolute nothing it means nothing but what zero and refrigeration system means that whatever's inside the system the pressure inside this system is equal to the pressure outside the system because this gauge is what we call a compound gauge we have zero going up with positive pressures but we also have zero going down it's not considered PSIG it's not gauge pressure it's inches of mercury vacuum from 0 to 30 inches vacuum if I'm on a 30 inch vacuum that is equal to Absolute nothing in the system so we run a vacuum pump this gauge goes from zero down to 30. that means everything in here has been sucked out and the pressure in here is lower than the pressure outside so that's what zero means zero means there's still something in there it could be air it could be freon but the pressure inside the system is not higher than the pressure outside so zero means it's equal to the pressure outside okay we call that atmospheric pressure at sea level here in Florida we're at sea level I mean it rains we're already under water sea level is 14.7 psia pounds per square inch atmospheric so at zero on our gauge we have 14.7 PSI a actual 14.7 pounds of pressure okay so if you're reading 50 I'm here the actual pressure is 50 plus 15 or 14.7 does that make sense so when we're reading gauge pressure we just want to know the pressure inside the system we don't want to know the pressure inside the system different from the pressure outside the system all right so that's what that means so going back to this unit then what we did is we went ahead and we put engage and it said zero but goes back to one of the first things we did what was the first thing we thought was wrong with the unit the compressor so we still wanted to know if the compressor was running and working I don't care if it's at zero when a compressor runs this insulation here has our heat exchanger which is our capillary tube and our suction line and a condenser is our discharge the compressor is going to suck from the suction and pump out to the discharge and pull this down to zero normal running pressures when it's running when it's off is again we're supposed to be about 60 70. but if I'm low on Freon or loss what would happen if this would pull down into a vacuum so let's get my uh power here now if I take this refrigerator and plug it in add zero PSI what we're going to look for is we're going to look for it to pull down into a vacuum because we don't have sufficient pressure in the system if it pulls down into a vacuum that's an indication if we can pull the tape off here if you guys can see that the needle is now starting to revert back down towards 30. okay and to me immediately I know the compressor and the pump is running I don't have enough gas in my system but we still have to have some other tests made one of them would be how do I know it's a leak and not a restriction well when it's off pressures are both supposed to be 60. if I had the high side hose connected and connected to the high side of the system I'd have 60 on both when it's off I only had zero on the low side I could have had one of two problems if I had a restriction what does a restriction actually mean what does that mean you might have some material well what is what is a restriction though not what caused the Restriction but what if I told you this system has a restriction what am I really talking about is our recycling bill there's a blockage of some sort yes like the compressor pumps into here it comes back down and it comes out of here into a dryer filter it goes to our capillary tube here and that capillary tube goes to the evaporator and a suction line coming back down a restriction can be anywhere within that system okay restriction would be like like you went to a doctor and I said oh man your arteries are clogged with cholesterol and act like your your heart can't pump the blood properly through your system well this is just like the heart this is pumping the freon through the system everything else in this refrigeration system is nothing more than pipes it's nothing but tubes a tube in a tube out and a tube in and a compressor is the only functional moving part in a basic refrigeration system now if we go to one that has two evaporators in the upper lower half now we add other components but we're not talking about that today so anyways okay we're at zero I saw it pull down to 30 but where is my needle now what is what is it saying now I'm at zero if I had a restriction one thing is compressors can't normally equalize the pressure what I mean by that is the compressor is pumping Freon into the condenser and when I turn the refrigerator off the compressor has has pumped all the free onto one side but sucked on the freedom on the other side so they were here equal now the compressor pulled from one side and pushed to the other if I had a restriction compressors really don't have the capability of allowing the pressure to go back and equal into the other side through the compressor the only way it would equalize is going through the evaporator and coming through this capillary tube back to the compressor on the low side Okay so the separation is done by the compressor but when it went to 30 inch vacuum and went back to zero what would that indicate to me it evened out but a little bit more if there was a restriction restrictions usually happen at the dryer filter in a capillary tube 99 of your time this is right where your restriction is going to be not only that it might be this one portion where the dryer filter and a capillary tube meet because usually restrictions in a system are oil from the compressor got pumped through the system condenser gets cooled down that oil was in vapor form as it's flowing but if I cool it down remove the heat it starts clogging back up it can block up my capillary tube here and cause a big problem so if the Catholic tube was restricted this would pull down to a vacuum and sometimes not go back up to zero it pumped everything to the condenser but the Restriction prevented it from coming back to the low side of the system but that still isn't a hundred percent proof that I have no restriction so the next thing we want to do is we want to determine do I have a leak or do I have a restriction and there's one other test can be made can you pause the video for a second okay so if I thought that it was low and I might have had a restriction I still want to know do I have a restriction or do I have a leak well right now this pressure went down into a vacuum when I plugged it in pulling down into a vacuum so one of the things I do is I'll take some freon and I'm just going to crack this hose here now this hose is on backwards too but it's not going to hurt it I purged it to get the air out now I'm going to start adding freon into the system two things I want to do I want to start feeling my condenser line which immediately right now I can feel it heating up then you guys want to check this out go ahead and touch the can touch this discharge line right here come check it out yeah okay so I didn't fully charge it but I added enough Freon what I want to do is I want to see if I can get it out of a vacuum if I see it pull back down to a 30 inch vacuum right now I left it open for a little bit I did not measure the charge in but what I want to do is I want to feel oh wow these Loops now I can start to feel heat coming down to about here or here it's starting to get cold like room temperature so my condenser is half full right now okay if I had a restriction and it was by capillary tube okay as I add freon you're still going to feel this heat you're still going to feel this heat initially but once it pumps all the freon into the condenser and it's restricted it cannot flow back around now it pumped all into here the condenser becomes like this Freon tank it just holds the freon if you grab this tank right now this tank is filled with 70 PSI of freons you say well heck I don't even have 70 over here you know why isn't it hot well once it's released the Heat and we're not pumping through the evaporator I think it's not going to be hot anymore so if I felt this heat and the heat started going away that's an indication I have a restriction if you see now I have this thing running at zero PSI now let me just double check if I go to the freezer here starting to cool refrigerator is Cooling but it was at zero and if it was at zero that means now we had a leak and not a restriction okay but we tapped into the system because we checked all the electrical mechanical components that we could we exhausted every other possibility before we went into the system see what's going on now the only thing we're trying to do is do I have a leak or do I have a restriction now when I unplug this unit look at the freon gauge here on the low side what's happening now to the gauge is starting to rise back up right it rises back up because the system is doing what we just said it a minute ago it's equalizing the pressures if the unit was restricted it'd be super super slow Equalization or no Equalization then I would know hey I got a restriction in the system and I'm going to start here at my dryer filter and check to see if I'm restricted right here okay so this thing went back up we're good to go now I want to know if I have a leak we have many ways to test for leaks I'm going to go ahead and just take this tank off and get out of the way so where's all my goodies on my toys right here action is going to be your leak detector but before we apply a leak detector we want to visually inspect a system what am I looking for does anybody have any idea what I'd be looking for if I thought my system was leaking freon no I'm looking visual somewhere maybe what'd you say a crack somewhere or look like a stress in the middle yeah but you're not really going to see most leaks but what'd you say did you say something no okay so I said with Freon what also flows around the system I said it could cause you restriction what was it it's in the bottom of the compression the oil the oil if a system has a leak especially on the high side there usually is evidence of oil that leaked out with the freon from one of your braised joints or even if the pipe is corroded and bad okay so now the question where's my leak I'm at about 60 PSI and the compressor is off so one of the first things we want to do is we want to check all the braised joints themselves to see if they're leaking so we would take our soap solution and we got a little brush here and we're just going to apply it to our braised joints here and I'm also going to put it on the valve that we just added to make sure that our valve that we added was not leaking okay because we did put pressure on it and I did take a picture I'll put it on the video of what the needle looked like after we pressurized it we marked where the needle was and in 24 hours it dropped 10 to 15 psi so what we'll be looking is for small my new um bubbles coming off of any one of these graze joints which we didn't see anything and it doesn't always have to be a braised joint but they're usually the most obvious things we would look for when we're looking for a leak the lead can be anywhere in the system and one of the bad things is is coming out of this condenser it runs into this line that goes up into the refrigerator here and it comes back out over here what is that line called anybody know or a hot gas Loop and what happens is that refrigerant that line runs around the door of the freezer and they use the heat of the condenser to make where the gasket on the door meets the refrigerator and that heat helps keep the refrigerator from sweating remember I said when the humidity in the air when it reaches something cold it sweats refrigerators will sweat and cause water leakage if there's a problem with not enough heat so that condenser back in the day they used to use electric heating elements inside those walls to keep it from freezing around the door the government said listen you got to stop making uh or you got to start making refrigerators or other appliances more energy efficient so the manufacturers removed the electric heaters and put a refrigerant line in the wall instead and use the freon to warm up the wall now that line runs inside the wall the refrigerator you cannot leak check it with liquid detection really you can't get inside the wall at all so what we have to do is we have to check all of a system that we can that is exposed our condenser our compressor and the evaporator inside the freezer you'd have to take the cover off and do that I'm going to the evaporator whenever you are running a refrigerant system do not take the cover off of the evaporator the freezer cover and check pressures because we need the airflow over the tubing in the freezer to apply heat to the evaporator if we don't have a cover over the evaporator our pressures will not be accurate if you're doing a job on a system and you find out that you have to service it I've had people call me and said yeah I I changed the compressor and I'm not getting the right pressures I'm getting like 10 15 psi but I weighed in the exact amount of freon my first question is do you have the cover of the evaporator I had a question from someone today who called me on that and one of my top techs called me the other day on it and I asked them do you have the cover of the evaporator oh yeah yeah I do he told me like a minute later oh no I forgot the cover's not on well you cannot check the pressures on the system unless the covers are accurately air flowing over the coils because the heat of the air going over the evaporator is how the freon evaporates that's why we call it evaporator comes in the evaporator is a liquid and that hot air causes that free on the turn to Vapor so it can come back to the compressor so you cannot check pressures after that okay so I soak tested and we didn't find any leaks here I know there's more things I could check but I do want to check this line right here I feel this line has a lot of like corrosion on it it's not smooth it's supposed to be black and painted uh like this because it's steel and actually the paint helps keep the steel from corroding but this refrigerator is quite old I'm just going to take for the heck of it and just run it across my line here and just to see if I see it now you want to put it on generously all right yeah I made a mess on the floor so in the customer's house you want to put something down on the floor here or whatever and you do want to wipe this stuff off because some of these soap detectors are corrosive you can use this same thing when you're checking your gas stove or dryer like if it has a a gas leak like natural propane gas but don't let it drip onto the panel of the stove and leave it there it'll cause a corrosion and discoloration of the metal you want to clean it up right away get it off okay so I still don't see anything leaking here I don't see any bubbles it could have been from here it could be anywhere it's hard for me to find but I want to look down here do I see anything that looks like oil I don't see anything here I'm feeling the line right here this line feels extremely corroded come over here and test that line for me please so this line going up here today to the condenser Loop I want you to just check this line from from here all the way down to the bottom of this Loop right here where my finger is just generously tap it on there do not rub it you want to tap it so that it just dabs onto the pipe if you rub it you make it too thin and it's not going to do its job okay so go on the bottom of that Loop too now the leak is not super big it went down 10 psi overnight but that's a very very slow leak if I had a big leak it'd almost be Zero by the next day okay so liquid detector didn't help right so the next thing we want to do is try an electronic leak detector and that's what we have here electronic leak detector has an on and off button a reset reset is like if it detected like a leak of freon it'll start beeping faster as it finds a leak the closer I get to leak it'll start going when it finds a leak it'll get louder and I'll demonstrate that to you um and we got a sensitivity up and down higher the sensitivity is for smaller leaks but you don't want it to beep too fast because if it beeps too fast you'll never know the difference from when there was a leak and not a leak now the mute button is is if you don't want the beeping noise you just watch the lights because if you didn't use the beeping you could watch the lights as you find a leak the lights will start to all light up the more closer you are to the leak the best leak you have the more lights we're going to have here so that's Leak Detection so I'm going to turn it on and that's what a leak would sound like at first notice the light was all on but it went back on so that's just a test to make sure the lights are working and all I do is we're going to lower our sensitivity to the lowest sensitive thing we can do now this is very important and we don't let this tip get dirty if it gets dirty it'll register leaks all the time and they do sell replacement tips what I'm going to do is just go over here and what you do is don't touch the pipe especially now you got soap on it but just go over where you think the leak is and just hold it there if there's a leak it'll start beeping faster like it did when I first turned it on so I just go here and I go slowly and I do this and I'm going to check this line down here and the line goes into the wall there so I can't go any further and the line comes out of here I'm gonna check it I'm gonna check it suction line capillary tube and and I can go into the whole condenser and a whole evaporator but EPA questions talk about soap and electronic leak detector and it says when trying to when trying to find a leak and you're using electronic leak detector is that to pinpoint the leak or find the general area of the leak what do you think the answer is general area and one thing nice about this this condenser being a static condenser there's no fan back here if you're checking a refrigerator and the refrigerator is running then the fan will blow air and that Freon will be all over the place I can be over here checking and it's going to register Freon and I have no idea where it is so if I went over here and started beeping fast at this point it doesn't mean the leak is right there and the leak can be here or here just the freon is Flowing towards to the area and that's where we want to go back to our soap once we've got the area where we think our lake is okay so the electronic is just trying to get you close to the problem and then the soap is going to break down the exact problem yes sir to check do it with this we have to plug in the refrigerator no because when it's running what is the low side pressure what was it when I charged it up it was running at what is zero so that means the pressure on the low side my evaporator and the suction line is the same as the pressure outside so if I run the compressor like that it it's it's not going to push Freon out as fast as I would like it so that's a good question that's why I have the nitrogen tank I'll get to that in a minute so I've charged this system when it's off if this is 60 the high side is 60. I still have 60 PSI on both sides of the system so another thing is if I find that I think that that brace joint right here is leaking for example but my leak detector didn't quite detect it we have this little clamp here and I'm going to get this on the camera here this little clamp is got place for the pipe to go through and then let me grab a pipe hold on one second foreign so let's just say we have these two pipes that are that are braised together and we thought that this part of our pipe was leaking so what we could do is this tool here clamps around that pipe it doesn't close all the way which is okay but it has openings here and it allows for us to take our electronic leak detector stick it right in the opening here and I'm actually inside of it and so it concentrates if there's a leak just to my leak detector so it doesn't go out in the air so it it makes the leak detector a little bit more sensitive and easier to identify by the leak in the system so if I thought that one of my brace joints on here was leaking I could clamp around the pipe even though I thought the pipe had a hole right there I could take my leak detector turn it on set my sensitivity and then stick it right in here and if it was leaking it would start beeping louder so that would be a way for me to say yeah my leak is exactly right there you wouldn't do it throughout the entire system but if if you wanted to try to pinpoint a little more with this you could do it now what we used to do back in the day before we had all these fancy devices is we would take up like a plastic bag or something wrap it around the pipe tape it on both sides and tape the seam and leave it there we charge it with nitrogen and raise it up if it was leaking from there the plastic if it was sealed up around the pipe and on the end the bag would actually expand like a balloon and you say hey that bag blew up my leak is right there so we would take a bag let me get that so we take like a plastic bag or something and if I thought that my leak was right here but I really couldn't find it but I think this is where my leak is because the corrosion we'd wrap the bag around and we wouldn't use that much we'd wrap it around and I would tape it real real good here and that'll rub tape across the seam if it was leaking from here this bag would eventually fill up with the freon and it'd be like filling up a balloon and it would indicate to me hey freon's leaking out of the system and that bag started blowing up like a balloon so that's one method that we used to use back in the day before we had before I had one of these clamps okay so let's just say hey um electronic heat detector soap detection didn't find it one of the things we want to do is the next thing is let's try to raise the pressure of our system more now this one's almost a fully charged system because it was running at good pressures but normally you just use EPA allows you to put a trace gas or refrigerant like an ounce of R22 or something in the system in this case 134 and then what we would do then with the compressor off and this goes to your question you know they do with the compressor running is I'll hook up a nitrogen tank and I would go like this and then what I would do is I would add nitrogen to the system not a fully charged system but I had nitrogen to the system and try to get it to about 100 PSI and by doing this what's the advantage of doing this anybody got any ideas no not purging but I want to use the nitrogen to raise the pressure to test for leaks but what's the advantage of doing that why would we want to do that make it easier to find the leaks going to come out faster yes but if the compressor was running it raised the high side to almost 120 PSI 120 125 psi on a fully charged system but when the compressor is running the low side goes to zero so yeah the high side goes higher and I can run it and check for leaks on the high side but if I'm on the low side the max I can get is 60 PSI when the unit's not running but by adding nitrogen you can raise the pressure of the whole system to 100 PSI and now we do our leak check again by raising the pressure if the leak is very very small that added pressure might cause the leak to be a little bit higher and make it easier for electronic leak detector to find it okay so the reason why I want to go to about a hundred I got about 110 is because the evaporator is made out of aluminum and you have to look at the model and serial number plate they usually have something called test pressure they said low side test pressure and high side test pressure high side test pressure could be 250 psi because this is made of steel low side test pressure may only be 125 130 so we don't want to raise the whole system pressure more than the low side test pressure because when we add nitrogen it's the whole system not just the low side okay so adding this then I take my leak detector again and then I'll go again do I have any leaks and I go very slowly just move a little bit and then sit there don't move too fast because if your leak's very very small the detector might not get it immediately now if I had a leak this is what it would what would happen watch so depending on the league it would get a lot larger and larger well how come it didn't beat that passes because I added nitrogen so it's not just pure Freon come out it's free I'm mixed with nitrogen and that would not be as sensitive as it was just pure freon so this is what we would look for and then if I saw B here then I want to go back to my liquid and check it for a leak dip but let's just say okay um I've done the soap I couldn't find it I've done the electronic I couldn't find it what do we do next pause the video for a second okay so let's let's just say we tried ourselves we tried the electronic and we just couldn't find a leak we're in a customer's house 45 minutes already we still can't find leak we don't know how big that leak is because when we show up to the home it's already leaked out the refrigerant it could have leaked out in one day it could have been six months before it ever got to that point now the customer would probably tell you sooner than later like not six months later but let's just say it took 30 days for it to leak out to that point but it cooled up to about like three or four days before they called you out so you're like man you know I mean I can't find League well what we did is we we put 100 PSI nitrogen and I put a little piece of tape and put a mark where that needle was and we came back again today and we saw that it had dropped and I'll put that picture on the video but you can't do that in a customer's house and just say Well ma'am I'm going to charge this with nitrogen I'm going to mark it I'll be back tomorrow to see how far it leaks my customers sitting without a refrigerator for this point and you really don't know and what if you come back tomorrow and it moved from 100 to 99. you don't know if that's just because it got colder inside the box and because it's colder the pressure dropped a little bit and that's normal or it's slowly leaking out so then we have this um fluorescent Dot so what you would do at that point if you are unable to determine the customer's leak you only have one choice left if you've done electronic and you've done this now there is one other method of leak detection now we no longer use it's called a halide torch halide torch was like a little map gas or propane bottle and have a little torch on the end where you'd light it and a flame would come off and it would be blue and I have a little rubber hose and you would take that hose like we did electronic leak detector and if it sucked free on in that Freon would get hit by the flame and burn but it turned your flame from blue to green you could still sort of use that but you cannot and listen to me don't ever use a halide torch on a refrigerant like 600 or 290. okay because that contains propane gas in it and it's flammable and you're using a flame to leak detect okay so don't ever use a halide torch anymore and even with these electronic ones you have to have the newer ones that don't have like a spark because if we're leaking we we want to make sure that we don't ignite that gas so the next thing we want to do is we want to charge the customer's refrigerator back up and usually what I tell the customer is like man listen I know this system has a leak I don't know how bad the leak is how big or small it is but I'm going to charge the refrigerator and it was Cooling I don't know how long it's going to last it could last a day it could last a month it could last a year before all that Freon lay down so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a little bit of fluorescent dye and by adding that die if it's going to leak we have this UV light tester here this little UV light and we go around the system like this and if it's leaking it's going to create a light green glow yeah I'm sure like you've ever been like to the skating rink or other places where they have the black light or the bar or something a black light and the white shirts are really bright or the yellow is really really bright and this is basically what this stuff does so you add some of this to the system not a lot but you add some of this to the system it's a leak it's going to leak out now here's the bad thing about this stuff you got to use your hoses to pass this into the system your hoses and everything is going to get this yellow dye everywhere so we put it in the system when we disconnect this hose some pressure is going to be here I want to leak out so when I come back tomorrow with my ultraviolet light I might see that that glow right here so what I want to do is I'll take like my bag I'm going to make a small little hole in the bag put it over and over the valve and that's probably make a smaller than that just over the valve like that so when I disconnect my hose if any of that dye is coming out when I disconnect the hose it's not going to get over all my pipes and everything and not distract me because I don't want to see it unless I have the lead okay now remember this is on your horses and stuff so the next refrigerator you do you're going to add a little die that's left inside here into the system it's not going to hurt the system now this particular stick says five to nine point nine pounds so this is this whole tube is designed to do a refrigerator or a sealed system like an air conditioner that holds five pounds of freon this is not designed for Residential Refrigerator but we could use it so we got to make sure that we don't put too much in there I'm not going to put this entire cysts stuff in the system I'm going to put a little bit in and that's it so I'm gonna evacuate my system just like I would do when I normally charge it pull a vacuum on the system to charge it and then I'm going to add this to our system so I'm gonna put this on here I'm just gonna let a few little bit drip into my holes and I can see it bubbling up and put this cap back on I thought it would at least have something on there to keep it from leaking out so I got enough in there I don't need the hose vents good we'll have to we'll have to clean this up after so now I got some of that guy in here I'm going to reconnect it to my freon just leave it right here so now I'm going to just charge my refrigerant system and I'd probably overcharged it by now but and what I would do is I would weigh in the charge and everything I'm not going over charging the system I'm just going over what you would do so I added some of that dye into the hose and then I had the freon push it into the system now well it there's no valves or anything on here I thought there would be and when I took it off it just poured out so I connected to the hose and just held it upside down and let a few drops get in I don't need that much okay so I just made a mess everywhere so anyways now the system's running I'm still low on charge so in the customer's house I'm gonna just charge it up like I would normally do I'd weigh it in I wouldn't just do it like I'm doing pressures but I tell the customer listen you can use the refrigerator don't buy tons of meat or or other perishables that you know if the refrigerator stops cooling overnight that you're going to lose hundreds of dollars of food but I need to see how long it takes to leak out so I'm gonna have the customer run it and I'll call them back the next day hey how's it going oh it's still cool and it's making ice it's doing everything okay I'm gonna wait two or three days and come back and see what the pressures are inside my system is it normal I highly recommend you wear gloves when you're dealing with this crap now I'm leaking so anyways once we put it in the system I still got to get up to about zero PSI on the low side just so it's normal operation remember again the system's running at zero on the low side so my leaks on the low side it's not going to be evident right away but every time the compressor Cycles off it's going to go up to 60. so if it's leaking it's going to keep leaking out that side so then once we've done that what we want to do is we want to take our our UV light and just look at what this this stuff looks like under the light when I take it away and then I put it back you see how it changes color so what you want to do now is you just want to go break my bag up there I don't take the hose off yet now I would have left that bag there taking the hose off I just want to take it off now and I just want to go around and check all my all my system and just the end and see that that glow okay and so you would use a UV light like this to find the leak so what we're going to do is we're going to charge this up and it's charged up right now and then we'll come back next week because there's no school tomorrow and we're going to go with the UV light we'll test out the whole system to see if we can find the leak now if this condenser is leaking you can order the entire condenser and just replace the condenser if just this pipe was leaking I could cut this and bend it and bring it back to the compressor or extend it with copper tubing I can I can always replace a piece of pipe I've even seen leaking right here and so I cut it here and cut it here and I just made my own pipe and soldered another pipe right back on now it's not going to look nice we'd want to replace the condenser if we could but we can repair it if the leak is somewhere we could find it easily accessible now here's the problem going back to that Yoder Loop if that Yoder Loop is what is leaking in the system we cannot repair it because these refrigerators back in the old days you could get to the entire inside the system the liner inside where you have your food is separated from the cabinet outside and have fiberglass insulation you could take the whole inside of the cabinet out and you can get to all the wiring and everything but this is the 70s and 80s okay not now nowadays they have a plastic liner inside a metal case on the outside and they spray liquid foam in there and expands and fills up all the voids that's it there's no way to get inside those walls except for cutting this refrigerator apart but there is something we could do if we've come back after a week and saw that we lost Freedom it went back to zero when it was off and we use this die and nowhere in the system we can see that glowing like we saw here then we have to assume the only place our leak would be would be the Yoder but the Yoder's not repairable so I know Electrolux has it I've installed it before they have a hot gas tube repair kit okay pause it for a second okay so I don't know where someone's put it but what what the the repair kit is is it's basically it's a kite string and attached to the end of The Kite string is a heating element that's like a long wire okay I will I'll go online and I'll find a picture of it add it to the video with a part number and what happens is you would cut the pipe going into the outer loop here and you'd cut the pipe coming out of the Yoder Loop here and you would just bypass it you'd come off the condenser go right into the dryer filter and now we bypass the odor but the problem is is if I don't have any Freon flow into that Yoder I don't have no heat what did I say that the odor does it keeps the uh door from sweating sweating dripping water yeah so if you bypass it the customer is going to have water and that's going to be a problem because it's going to cause cabinet rusting it's going to cause the gaskets to get black with mold and everything so we don't want that to happen either right so this unit you flush it out and clean it out you hook a vacuum pump up to this side and on the other side you fish that little kite string in and you let your vacuum pump run and suck that kite string through the outer loop and pull it out the other side once you've got the kite string which is long enough to pass through the end of The Kite string and the kite string is probably about 10 feet long or eight feet long so it can pass through the entire system once it comes out you slowly pull it here and you feed the wire through and the wire is thin enough it can fit through sometimes it's harder than others to get it through it's not as easy as it sounds but once you pull it through now you have an electric wire running through that Yoder Loop you connect both ends of that wire to the power wire of your compressor so whenever the compressor is running that heater is on and it's only on when the compressor is running so yeah but won't when the compressor is awful let me ask you a question the owner Loop only gets hot when the compressor is running when the compressor's off it's not hot anymore so it doesn't it's the same thing but now we got electric key to run them through that system so if our leak was the hot gas Lube we can use electric heater to go through that Loop so that we don't have to replace the refrigerator a good example I had a customer who had a Sub-Zero refrigerator built in these refrigerators are ten fifteen thousand dollars but the outer loop was bad but it's in the wall you can't replace it so we could have run that heater kit through and save the refrigerator from being replaced with this electric heater wow so I'll try to find the one I got and show you guys physically if not I'm going to go online and get the pictures of it but we'd come back a couple of days after and we looked for the fluorescent dye and see if you can pair if I cannot find the leak then the only other choice is to bypass the Yoder Loop to see if it and to see if that fixes the problem because again you have to test it for leaks any questions on this guys so this is how you would determine leaker restriction and then how would you find the leak one of the methods so we had soap electronic and then we have the fluorescent dot yeah fluorescent dye is the last thing you want to look at the mess I made yeah I never used this one I had I had another one that we used and usually there's a part number frigid dare sells a dryer filter that has the dye built in so when you repair the system you put this filter on there and that dye flows around the system and we don't have to input it like like that system does there only Frigidaire uh well I'm not saying only it's the only one that I know of that actually has that guy built into its dryer filters so that you could use a Frigidaire dryer filter on a Whirlpool next question just because it's refrigerator it's just a Frigidaire part number like a magnetron as long as the holes and everything are the same you can put any magnetron in there right because the waters may not be the same whatever but a filter dryer physically all it is okay it's just their size of where you would Mount them and if you're doing a warranty job the manufacturer is only going to pay you if you use their parts and not you don't use refrigerator on gegs I'm going to pay you for a Frigidaire product and do you leave that filter dryer in there if you find a leak yes okay so if if we put it on it we leave it on there and that that's our that's our unit okay okay questions on this guys

Channel: TMM Appliance Network

Views: 29,511

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Id: 6KBzES-7v8o

Length: 60min 28sec (3628 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023