HVAC Technical Academy
Sanford, Florida
May–June 2026 Session

Speaker: Zion Mitchell

Hello, my name is Zion Mitchell and I’m here with HVAC Technical Academy and Miss Smith gave me a call and said that she has a problem with smoke coming out of her heat strip and she was worried and I gave her a good rundown. I told her that the only way a heat strip could, like, you know, the problem could be why smoke could be coming out is because dust particles, depending on how long we used it for, could get inside the heat and it could cause it to smoke. So, that calmed Miss Smith down pretty good.

But also, I want to explain what a heat strip is. A heat strip is an electrical element that’s in your air handler. Basically, let’s say your thermostat wants to call for emergency heat, it goes through the heat strips causing the heat strips to heat up. Fun fact, if it’s a straight cool, it’s a primary. And if it’s a heat pump, it’s an emergency.

So, we took this out. Oops. Sorry. We took this out, tested it, and found out we have to put in a new one. This one is no good. So, we’re going to go put in a new one.

All right. All right. Now, we got to put in a new one. Oh, wow. Look, there’s a new one. So, what we do? All right, I’m going to give Miss Smith a new heat pump, so we should have no worries.

All right, put this all the way back here. All right, reconnect this. All right, reconnect this. All good. And we are up and rolling.

Thank you so much for you guys watching and hope you guys have a good day.

Ready for the next step (YouTube title, description, website post, SEO package, etc.).

HVAC Technical Academy
Sanford, Florida
May–June Session

Hello. My name is Michael McNichols. I’m at HVAC Technical Academy. Today, I’m going to be talking about capacitors.

Essentially, what capacitors are, they’re your third leg for a motor. And what that means is that you’ll take that L1 and L2 from your contactor and then that goes in. That powers it up. And you still need that little bit of power left. And that’s where capacitors come in.

All right. If you come over here, you’ll see this panel’s already been taken off. Thank you to whoever took this off for me.

As you can see, the capacitor will be essentially just against the side. Now, if you look at this one, you’ll see all this corrosion up here. Not good. Not good at all.

So, when you see this, usually it could still work, but probably save your chances and just replace this one.

Now, I’m not going to take this one out. This is not my unit. So, I brought two capacitors with me to run through, see how they work, test them, and tell you how they go bad.

Now, when you’re looking, measuring capacitors, and testing capacitors, you want to make sure before you do anything, make sure you look at this top lip over here. Make sure it’s not bubbled up or it’s not going over to the side.

You see how everything is laid in flat, hermetically sealed as it’s supposed to be because it’s a capacitor, right?

So, if your capacitor looks normal, you’re good to test.

Now, before we test, you take your voltmeter, set it to microfarads because that’s what capacitors are measured in.

All right, you’re going to take one probe. For this one specifically, if you look underneath each terminal, you’ll see that some of these are engraved with what terminals go to what.

So you’ll see it’ll have HERM, C for your common, and FAN for your fan.

So when we’re measuring, you want to keep note on the label. We’re looking for a high of 45 and a low of 5 with a tolerance of 5%. That means it can go up 5% or down 5% and it’ll still be fine.

Right? So we’re going to take one probe. We’re going to put it on our common. We’re going to take our other one. We’re going to put it on our HERM.

And we’re going to look at what our device says. Our metering device, or voltmeter if you’re technical.

And you’ll see that our common to HERM gives us 43.4, which is still within range of our 45 high, which is good. This capacitor is still good. Halfway at least. We still have to check that fan.

So, same thing as before. You take one terminal, common, find your fan terminal, and give it a second. If it’s good, it’ll give us somewhere around five.

As you see, it reads 4.84. Still within range. So this capacitor is still good. Hook it up and it’ll be fine.

This one, a motor capacitor, or run capacitor as some people call them. I’ve heard them be called run capacitors.

As you can tell the difference, this one is bigger. Much bigger.

This one you’ll find hooked up to your motors, air handler blower motors mainly.

So you see this one’s easier to test. As we look through the characteristics, still flat, not bubbled, not oval. So this is still good.

When we test, there are only two terminals. We have two probes and it gives us 79.8.

And if we look at the label, that is an 80 microfarad capacitor with a 5% tolerance.

This capacitor is still good.

And that’s all you really need to test your capacitors and change your capacitors. Capacitors are really easy, one of the low-hanging fruit in HVAC.

Pretty simple. Pop them in, pop them out. Make sure your wires are taken care of. Make sure they’re all wired in place.

And with that, we’re all set.

My name is Michael McNichols. Thank you for learning with HVAC.

HVAC Technical Academy
Sanford, Florida
May–June Session

Hello everyone. My name is Julian. We’re here at HVAC Technical Academy.

Today I’m going to be talking about a contactor.

A contactor is like a high-voltage switch.

When the thermostat calls for cooling or heating, it sends 24 volts to the contactor. The contactor pulls in, allowing high-voltage power to flow to the compressor and the condensing fan motor.

The contactor is located right over here in your condensing unit.

And if this fails, your system might not run properly or it might not run at all.

So, a contactor can go bad by electrical arcing, or debris can get in there between the contacts, and bugs can get in there as well, preventing the contactor from pulling in.

So, that’s all I got for you today.

Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you on the next one.

HVAC Technical Academy
Sanford, Florida
May–June Session

Hi, I’m Julian here with Second Chance University and I’m going to be showing you guys how to pull a vacuum on a system.

Basically, anytime you open up a system or do a major change to the system is when you want to do a vacuum because you don’t want any excess debris or non-condensables flowing throughout your system.

So, first things first, you want to make sure your manifold is on.

And you’re going to hook up your low-side hose right here to your suction line, which is your low side of the system.

And then you’re going to hook up your high side to your liquid line, which is your high side of the system.

Then, right here, you’re going to take your vacuum hose and you’re going to basically hook that up to your vacuum here.

You want to open this up to allow for the excess air to escape from the hose so you’re only pulling from the actual system.

So, first things first, you’re going to turn on your vacuum and make sure that the oil down here is clear and not a milky white because that will mess with the actual suction of the vacuum.

And basically, you’re going to turn on your vacuum and make sure that it gets down to 500 microns because that is the EPA regulation standard.

Thank you very much.

Very good.

So that hose there, do they have to be snug or what happens?

Yes. I like to make sure all of my ports are snug so you don’t have any leakage through any of the other holes.

Make sure these are snug as well.

I typically like to turn the hose with it. When you turn it, it makes it easier to make it tight and snug as well.

So, yep. It’s all good.

Thank you so much.

Sounds good to me. That’s awesome. Thank you, sir.

No problem. Anytime.

HVAC Technical Academy
Sanford, Florida
May–June Session

Hello, my name is Cordale McCoy. I’m here at HVAC Technical Academy.

I am going to go over the recovery process.

Right here we have our scale, our recovery tank, our recovery machine, our gauges, and an extra hose.

The reason we have our scale is we’re going to weigh our recovery tank to make sure we have the capacity to incorporate the refrigerant that we’re taking out into the tank.

And I’ve already made sure that the refrigerant we’re pulling out is the same refrigerant that’s going into the tank because you cannot mix refrigerants.

We’re going to take our gauges. We’re going to connect our gauges to the high and low side.

We’re going to connect our refrigerant line to our IN.

And we’re going to take this extra hose. We’re going to connect that to our OUT.

And that’s going to go to our tank on the liquid side.

We’re going to purge our hoses before we start the recovery process to make sure there’s nothing in our lines.

And then we’re going to begin the recovery process.

After the recovery process, after we reach the capacity for our tank and our scale, we’re going to work in reverse.

Make sure we remove everything and close our lines.

And that’s it.

Thank you for watching the video. See you next time.

00:00:01
Hello, my name is Kortney at HVAC Technical Academy and I’m going to walk you through the recovery process. I have my manifold and gauges connected to this condenser. Here is my high-side liquid line and my low side vapor line. I’m going to use the vapor line to recover the refrigerant into the recovery tank. The reason I have both connected is so that I can get the pressures on both sides while I complete the process. This is my scale. It helps me know how much refrigerant is in the tank when recovering. I’m using R22

00:00:35
refrigerant. This tank is labeled because the EPA regulates that you cannot mix refrigerants. It’s not safe for the environment and it cannot be reclaimed. So during the recovery process, I will open up my low side vapor line, turn the system into recovery mode or vacuum state, and immediately open up the vapor side of the tank to recover the refrigerant. Usually when it’s done, the system will shut off, at which point I will quickly close the tank.

00:01:17
After I’m done repairing the major component, I’ll be able to recycle the refrigerant and put it back in the same system using the exact same refrigerant per EPA regulations. And if at some point the refrigerant was to get cross-contaminated with another refrigerant, it would not be reusable, so I wouldn’t be able to reclaim it. So overall, I’m going to begin the process. And that’s a wrap. Yeah, bro. Bye.