Soldering An HVAC Linest Using Staybrite 8. STRONGER THAN BRAZING!

what's up guys and welcome back to the channel in today's video we're going to be installing a line set on a brand new system this is a DIY install they're just having me do the the soldering of the line set so I'm going to show you what we've got they did a really nice job we're just going to button it up for them we're going to show you how to solder the line set how to pressure test and how to evacuate the system so let's do some work all right so here's our new system they have it set on a new pad the only issue that we ran into was the existing line set was a 5 8 I believe and as you can see the new one is a 7 8 this is a 14.3 Seer system so we're going to be running a new line set he said we can just run it up in this corner right into the soffit and we'll show you what we got up there and here's our new line set this is a 7 8 it's got this nice white insulation and another liquid line so we're going to go ahead and get this unspooled and we'll get it set up in this corner all right so here's what we got upstairs I've got our coil set up as you can see it's a 7 8 this is the existing line set and thankfully this is a really nice workspace a lot of room this is where it goes down into the chimney there but what we're gonna do is drop it right down in that soffit so it should be pretty easy and then we'll just hug that corner all right got our hole drilled so we're gonna go downstairs and we're going to roll out that spool and start feeding it up through that corner these guys did a super nice job with this install everything looks really nice a nice transition there got their drip leg got the fusible switch there that's a nice addition 96 furnace so we're gonna open up these lines real quick let the nitrogen out and we're also going to be installing a TXV on this as well all right so we got pressure in the lines there a little top down stairs and get our line set set up all right so what I typically do with a new spool is just put a little bit of pressure with my foot and just roll it straight out I will give you a nice straight line set to work with all right so we're just going to set that down we're going to get our 3 8 attach it to this I usually just tape it in sections so that it's all contained all right so we just sent our line up into there I'm going to go up there and see where we need to route that but overall this was super easy and after we have this anchored to this corner we can take this tape off I just wanted to keep everything in a nice straight line so let's go up there and see what we got all right so here's what we got we got hung up on a nail right there so what I'm going to do is I'll probably just do like a gradual band right here and then I'll probably go ahead and make my attachment down there to the condenser and I'll put a fitting right here and run it over to our evaporator coil all right guys so here's where we're at we've got our line set ran up the customer is going to attach straps here and then remove this tape so it'll just follow that curve all the way down our drain was right here so it worked out nicely we could just tuck that back there and I'm hoping if on my truck we might just be able to do a 90 fitting right here or maybe even a 45 if I can sweep it this way so this is my setup for brazing and pulling a vacuum with our Milwaukee packout box we've got our true blue kit our propane stuff for soldering our press kit and our vacuum pump and then the top holsters have our Jaws for that and stay right eight stuff and then over in this one we've got all of our fittings for soldering fittings and stuff like that for those of you guys who are in the field might give you a little idea on um I love tool organizations so I love getting ideas from others so we're going to Scotch bright our fitting here I think this is going to work perfect we're just going to go right into the condenser and then the line will go here so we'll just have two joints all right so we got our lines fitted down here we have just 1 4 45 everything is really tight there's not any big gaps stay bright 8 does not like big gaps so these are going to be super easy um you can choose to wrap these if you want to but as quickly as stay bright 8 is done and how low of a heat it is you don't even necessarily need to wrap these but you can get a wet rag and do that if you want to another trick is if you want to not have any seams in your insulation this insulation will come all the way to here but I've got it scrunched up and then this just tightened a little bit to hold it in place and then once everything is cooled down we can let that off let's go ahead and get our our soldering done down here and we'll try and give you a close-up here of what we're doing okay so a couple of technique things here you want to keep your spool kind of like a loop like this to where you can reach around if you have it straight you're very limited as to what you can access so leave a little Loop and about six inches there that you can go around another tip is when you're heating this fitting you want to apply the heat where that solder is going to be sucked into so for this fitting we're going to heat it up about right here and we're going to heat up the opposite side of where we're feeding in our solder and the capillary action will pull it into this joint then when we're doing this one here we're going to heat up this section and it's going to pull it this way into that section same with this one we're going to heat it about right here and it's going to pull it that way now before we get started we need to use our stay clean by Harris this comes as a kit you can find it in our Amazon store simply go to the video description click more and there you'll see in my braising category the stay bright 8 Kit as well as all of my other favorite HVAC tools so all we're going to do here is we're going to slip this out and we're just going to put our flux on the mail end we're not going to worry about the female side and once we slip this in we'll have a little bit of excess you can wipe that off if you want to so we're going to go ahead and apply our flux here on this male end I'm gonna slip this guy off go ahead and put our flux on this side and go ahead and slip this on all the way slide it back in and we are good to go so we're going to wipe this excess off here now this does not take much heat at all and in fact you can let the flame off of this joint and still allow the solder to flow so you'll watch as I take off the flame I can still flow this solder and get a really nice joint good easy as that now what you can do too is take your flux and you can wipe this off I didn't get to it quite fast enough but I'm not worried about that little bead foreign as you can see we're still able to flow this into that joint [Music] and that's it now the beautiful part about solder is that if you were to drop some braising Rod onto this it would go straight through that pad whereas this simply slides off just showing how little heat is really involved with flowing this product now it's important that you wipe all of your joints down to get any excess flux off so as you can see all of these joints turned out super nice occasionally you'll get a little black spot that's not a pinhole it's some oxidization in that solder um everything flowed really nicely of course we're going to do a pressure test but check out how easy this is to put our insulation back shot that thing off you simply uncompress it and now there is no joints and we go straight up to the suction Line Service Port all right so we're up here in the Attic we've got our line coming out of the soffit there and we're going to run over to the unit so we're going to have two couplings here now a couple of things to note you do not need a nitrogen flow when you're doing stay bright 8. it does not create that black nasty stuff same as um with brazing because there's such a low heat involved with this now another thing I will add is if you want to put this on and solder it don't do that make sure they're both connected because if you don't that solder will just run out the other side making it impossible for you to put your next piece in so make sure you have both pieces connected and when that starts to flow even if it goes further it will start to fill in this joint as well instead of just running out the side of the fitting all right so we got our fitting put on there everything is prepped but I wanted to go ahead and install this side because I don't want to have a bunch of movement once I have these soldered up so one thing that you'll run into with a Goodman and with pretty much any AC system is when you cut this little cap off you'll have this pushed in and your pipe will not fit so what we did was we just used one of these reamer tools reamed it out and I made a mark so that I know when it's in fully and we got it to go in so what we're going to go ahead and do now is scotch bright this clean up the outside of this put our flux on and then slide it in and we'll be ready to solder all right so I couldn't get a good video of it but we just got this um soldered in and we got all the screws taken out for this cover in order to install our thermal expansion valve we need to take off this cover and these ones are designed to where they just slide off and they don't really interfere with your lines so hopefully you can see this you don't necessarily have to take this all the way off as long as you can get to where you can work in here all right that service port right there is where we're going to install this part of the TXV so this guy is going to just thread on onto that quarter inch Port right there and we need to take out the Schrader core before we install that that's a crucial aspect of installing this TXV all right so we got our valve core taken out uh just for a clearer reference here this is the port that where we removed that Schrader core from so what we're going to do next is we're going to route this inside of there get it attached and just be real careful not to Kink this or anything it comes with a 90 like that but just be real careful not to Kink this Okay so we've got that threaded on we can just kind of unwind that and we just have this hanging but we need to leave this hanging until we get that tightened and then we can permanently put this on a Meanwhile we're going to take that TXV and just kind of hold it once this cover is on then we can permanently attach it to that threaded piece right in there okay so we have our covers put back on you need to make sure that you put the cover on before you attach the TXV and we just made a little slot here in the insulation so that this tube can go out of the coil box so next what we're going to do is we're going to take this cap off as well as our little plastic cover here and our new TXV comes with new seals so we're going to grab one of these seals put it here and we're going to take this piston out before we put our TXV on now on the side of the condensing unit you'll probably have a piston in a baggie that has a little removal tool we'll need to use that to pull that piston out but if you don't you can use like a little pick like this and you can pull it out that way as well all right so we're going to go ahead and braise this fitting on here's what we got so far TXV is mounted with that white seal in the Piston has been removed and this will simply go just like that of course with the white gasket there now make sure you don't forget to put this cap on with the threaded portion facing outward before you put your fitting on so we're going to prep this joint and then we'll get this soldered up real quick [Applause] nice seal all the way around so we'll let that cool and then we'll go ahead and permanently attach it with our little white seal on the TXV all right so the last thing we need to do is Mount our bulb this little bracket comes with the kit and you want to mount this um in the 10 o'clock or two o'clock position so we're going to put it in the two o'clock position here and now we're ready to go ahead and tighten up this screw and then we this kit comes with this insulative tape so we're going to make sure that this Bulb Has No exposure to outside air it just needs to be measuring the temperature of this suction line now the TXV itself does not have to be wrapped just the bulb itself okay so this is good and tight it's not going to go anywhere so we're just going to wrap this section we'll butt this all the way up to it and then we'll go ahead and wrap the rest of it with our tape all right guys so that's the finished product our bulb is sealed we can leave these exposed no problem our TXV is mounted the last thing I'm going to do is tighten these so you want to grab this part of the housing and then tighten these two nuts now these are supposed to be 20 foot-pounds I'm going to go get my adjustable torque wrench you don't necessarily need that you can do this by hand just by feel but if you really wanted to you could get or maybe even rent an adjustable torque wrench to make sure that you get it to 20 foot-pounds all right so everything is done on this side the very last thing we need to do is just put our two joints right here which will take about five seconds and then we'll be ready to pressure test thank you all right so this joint is Peachy everything looks really good both sides and boom we just put a piece of tape there and we are golden all right folks we are finished our line set is completely done and we are gonna get out our nitrogen and do our pressure test all right so we got our manifold set up we've got red going to the high side blue going to the low side got our nitrogen set up here both of these valves are closed as you can see we've got zero on there so we're gonna go ahead and crack this open and we're going to set this to about 350 PSI so we're going to do our pressure test at so we're gonna start feeding this in through the lines what I like to do is I'll cut it off at about 50 instead of wasting a bunch of nitrogen if we do have a leak so so we're about 50 psi right there so we're going to let that sit for a second make sure it doesn't drop and then we can do our full pressure test at 350 PSI okay it's been a couple minutes we have not dropped so we're gonna go ahead and crank this on up to 350. I think we'll be all right with the 300 PSI pressure test so the sweet part about this gauge set that it has a tightness test so this is going to go down and stabilize until it gets to a certain point and once it does we'll go ahead and hit our tightness test and we'll let it do its thing all right so our pressure test was good uh we go went ahead and disconnected our pressure um we disconnected our lines Here and Now what we're going to do is we're going to take out the Schrader core of our suction line and that's where we're going to hook up our true blue kit now this is the apion quarter inch Schrader core removal tool this is an essential item for any HVAC Tech as well as a diy-er who wants to have some nice tools and work on their own equipment so how it works is let's say you have a leaky Schrader core that you want to replace all we're going to do is we're going to slide this back to where it's out of the way we're going to thread this on to our service valve then what we're going to do since this is straight we're going to go straight in we're going to wait for that to click into those grooves and then we're going to press it in and you'll feel that little click that means it's locked into the Schrader core now we're just going to unthread the old core now if your system is actively running as soon as this comes unthreaded it will push this out the pressure will push this out then what you're going to do is just shut this off loosen it and there you have it you can then take this Shader core off put your new one in slide it in and reverse that process push it in thread it until it's snug and that's it when you go to take this off you will still have no pressure here so don't worry about refrigerant coming out all right so we got our Shredder tool on our Schrader core has been removed we're just going to thread this on to our tool here make sure that it's good and snug and then the large half inch side we're going to hook up right here and lastly we just threaded on our micron gauge this is the furthest away from the vacuum pump that we can get so this is an ideal setup we're going to leave this closed off turn our pump on we're going to let it pull a vacuum in this hose and then we'll open that and we'll notice the pitch change so this is the navac 3cfm battery powered vacuum pump it has a slow start and using it in conjunction with the true blue kit is truly amazing I have impressed a lot of people with this setup they're used to carrying around a corded one and having to look for an outlet and running it through their manifold which has a lot of places for it potentially to leak and to pull air from whereas this just has one huge hose going through here using our Schrader core tool we have no restrictions as you can see we are now pulling a vacuum well guys this has literally been on here for about a minute and we're already at 900 microns and dropping rapidly this is by far the best setup I've ever done in terms of vacuum I don't have anything else to do so I can't just let my vacuum pump run I literally need to have this done so I can get on to my next job so doing this in 10 minutes is really nice and uh the fact that it will pull down to a certain Micron level tells me that this system again is as tight as it can be and that we have no leaks all right guys I forgot my watch at home today but it is 307 we're going to isolate this turn our pump off and as long as we don't raise above 500 microns within 10 minutes we should be good to go all right guys it's been 10 minutes and we are still sitting right at 1 30 so we're golden there are zero leaks in the system the stay bright 8 has been awesome I love that product and I will continue to recommend that let's go ahead and open both of our lines and let the refrigerant in it doesn't really matter which side you let in first I'm just going to let in this side first now a lot of people ask me this and they just they're unclear about how this works so every new system comes with refrigerant in the system typically it'll say right here how many it has this comes with Factory charge of 79 ounces so um basically there's a valve right here that goes all the way down and it isolates the refrigerant in the system to what we just connected and we pulled a vacuum on so as soon as we open both of these valves up it allows all of the refrigerant to come past this valve into the line set on both of these and this is now one system all the refrigerant is flowing through that evaporator coil back through here hopefully that clears up some questions I get that ask all the time how do I get refrigerant um something else that a lot of people don't know is you can get refrigerant online at abilityrefrigerants.com you need to check a box that says you have your EPA certificate I'm gonna do a video in the future that shows how easy it is to get your EPA certificate it's like 80 questions and you have to get so many of them correct and it's a very easy process they even have a little school where you can spend about 300 bucks and they will teach you everything you need to know to pass that test so it's pretty much a Fail-Safe that you'll pass it all the way all right so now that those are both opened our refrigerant is in the system just gonna snug these up these have a Rubber seal which you don't have to crank these Down super tight they're just an extra layer of precaution if you ever do develop a leak that will seal now let's go ahead and get our Schrader core put back in so again now that our Schrader core is locked in to that Groove which I didn't know previously that makes this process way easier I've had some folks that didn't put this Schrader core in all the way and didn't get a good seal so make sure that that pushes into that um that Schrader core and you'll feel that little click all right so we've got that tight notice that kicked back the refrigerant pushed it back so we're going to force it back forward it's a little bit hard to do with one hand but we're just going to Snug this up okay now it's holding by itself so we're just going to tighten it until we see it gets snug you don't want to over tighten this and that pushed itself back out so now that we close this when we take this off no refrigerant should come out maybe just a little tiny bit and that is it folks this system is ready to go so we're gonna throw our gauges on it and fire it up all right guys I just bumped this up it's 77 degrees up here we bumped it down to 70. so a good delta T or temperature drop from 77 would be 67.57 so that'd be 20 degrees at 57. we're at 55 so we've got 22 degrees of delta T is perfect we're still going down just a little bit we got plenty of airflow coming out of the vents so the unit's been running for about 10 minutes everything's beautiful here you can hear our TXV doing its thing again they did a really nice install here so I'm happy that everything worked out and we could wrap up this install and get it going for him oh guys this system is good to go everything worked out really nicely with our staybrite 8. I hope you found something helpful in this video if so leave it a like now if you'd like to see some more full AC installation videos check out this playlist right here and you'll be sure to find some more full installations that you can find helpful if you're trying to do this yourself until next time you guys be safe later

Channel: The DIY HVAC Guy

Views: 125,710

Keywords: air conditioning, copper soldering, hvac brazing, how to, diy hvac, hvac training, brazing with nitrogen, brazing copper with oxy acetylene, heat pump installation, mapp gas, stay-brite 8, soldering copper pipe, hvac training videos, anti diy hvac, staybrite 8, air conditioning installation, how to solder, diy hvac guy, diy hvac replacement, air conditioner repair, air conditioning repair, heating and air conditioning, quality hvac, reliable hvac

Id: 3dbBmMgm7lk

Length: 29min 3sec (1743 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023