Hi, my name is Adam. I’m here with HVAC Technical Academy. I’m here to explain the vacuum pump process.

First thing you want to do is hook up your low side and high side lines with your ball valves off, obviously, and then connect your vacuum hose to your vacuum pump. You turn the vacuum pump on, then you open up your manifold and your ball valves, and you open up the vacuum. Then you wait for the pressure in here to read 500 microns or below. Until then, you just wait.

It can take 10 minutes, it can take up to two hours from what I’ve heard. Once you reach the 500 point, 500 or below, you close everything up. Definitely close your ball valves before you take the hoses off the high side. Then you turn your machine off and you’re good to go.

Another thing about the machine: you need to open up this ballast here, otherwise it won’t do its job properly. That expels all the non-condensables that you don’t want, which is what you’re trying to do — pull out the refrigerant and get rid of all the non-condensables.

Thank you for watching.

Hello everybody. My name is Brayden, and I am at the HVAC Technical Academy in Sanford, Florida, and today I’m going to be telling you everything about condenser fan motors.

What a condenser fan motor does is pull air through the condenser coils to remove heat from your refrigerant. Ways to tell if it goes bad are: you’ll have system shutdowns, compressor overheating that can ultimately lead to compressor damage, and warmer air coming out of the vents.

Some ways to test: you can test with your capacitor, from your four-prong to your two-prong, and make sure you know what your minimum and maximum range is. Another good way to test is you want to flip this over after you remove all your screws, then you want to spin this and check for seized bearings. You’ll feel any resistance and you’ll hear it if you have seized bearings.

So let’s say it’s bad and now you want to replace it. You’ve got to remove your set screw, take off the fan blade, make sure your wires are disconnected, and flip this back over. Then you want to remove these four screws right here. That’s how you take it off. Then you put your new one back on, connect your wires, get everything back to how it was, and that’s about it.

Most common things that will go bad are age, wear, capacitor, and bearings.

Thanks for watching my video. I’m Brayden at HVAC Technical Academy, and have a good day.

Hi guys, today I am going to be talking about filter driers. First of all, my name is Deon from HVAC Technical Academy. I will tell you guys about filter driers and where they are located.

Right here is a bi-flow filter drier. Right here is my condenser. In a condenser you have a reversing valve. As you can see right here, this is my liquid line and I have a bi-flow filter drier. Now I’m going to explain why I have a bi-flow filter drier on the liquid line to my condenser.

Inside the condenser you will have a reversing valve. The reversing valve reverses the refrigerant flow of the system. So, in order to reverse the refrigerant flow on your liquid line, you would have to have a bi-flow filter drier.

The bi-flow filter drier can be thought of like a filter in a car, or a filter in your air handler, or any kind of filter. The filter drier catches non-condensables and any condensables that are left over from the system or from the vacuum process. That’s really about it for filter driers. They just catch non-condensables that are left over from the system.

They can usually be located on your liquid line to your condenser, and with a bi-flow drier it will work in both directions because of the reversing valve. The reversing valve reverses the flow, so you have to have the bi-flow filter drier connected to your liquid line.

To get these on, you can braze them on. You can braze the filter drier onto the liquid line on both ends. Make sure it’s brazed on properly.

When do you actually remove the filter drier? You remove it when you have a leak or a major component removed. So if you have a compressor burnout, or your compressor or another major component needs to be replaced, that is when you replace your filter drier, or when there’s a temperature difference.

That’s really it about filter driers. I hope you enjoyed watching. My name is Deon from HVAC Technical Academy and I hope to see you again.

Hey everybody, my name is Gabriel from HVAC Technical Academy right here in Sanford. Today we’re going to be talking about the recovery process, what it means, and we’re also going to be diving into some EPA. We’re going to go ahead and recover this system for Mrs. Smith.

Now, whenever we recover a system, we want to make sure that the system is off. And also, a disclaimer — we’re not going to be doing the actual process because we don’t have this system hooked up right now, but we’re going to be going through the process for educational purposes.

Right here, I have all my equipment already laid out. We have a Fieldpiece recovery machine. We have our recovery tank. We have our scale. We have our Fieldpiece manifold gauge set. And of course, we have our system right here. Before we do anything, we want to make sure that the system is off.

For our recovery tank, you never want to go above 80%, because you want to make sure that you have 20% or less room left in this tank.

Right now, I want to talk about the hoses that we have connected here. On my manifold gauge set, we want to put our suction side, which is the blue side right here, on our suction valve. Make sure that’s tight. We also want to make sure we get our discharge hose on the discharge line, which is right there. Make sure that’s tight. Right here, I have my service wrench ready to open up the discharge side. We want to make sure that’s open. We’re going to do the same process over here on our suction side, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

First thing, you want to make sure your gauges are on. Make sure everything is tight, all your hoses are on tight. I have my refrigerant hose line connected to the “in” on the recovery machine, and on the “out” side we have an external hose connected to our recovery tank.

Just to show how this process works, we’re going to be opening up the system through both our discharge line and our suction line. Once that’s open, it’s going to flow refrigerant from these two lines into our manifold. We’re going to make sure that we open up both our discharge and suction lines, make sure that we have our refrigerant line open, and then that’s going to open over here, flow through the recovery machine, go in, then go out into this external tank.

Before you do anything, you always want to make sure that the recovery tank is filled with the type of refrigerant that you have in the system. If we look over here, we have R410A. We never want to mix refrigerants. This tank is R410A. We want to make sure we see the tare weight on the tank, and this one says 17.6. So, 17.6 — we’re going to put this on our scale. This one comes with a Bluetooth scale, so we’ll set it over here. Always take a picture before you begin the process, because you want to make sure you know how much you have in this tank.

You want to make sure that all your lines are open, everything is open. Before you do anything, you want to make sure that you purge your hoses. Right here, we’re going to purge our hoses. It’s going to be a quick 4 seconds — you’re going to hear a hissing sound. That’s good. We do this because we don’t want any air going into this tank. We want to make sure everything is clean, because when we hook up the gauges and the hoses, we have air in there, which is a non-condensable. We don’t want that in our tanks.

Then we can go ahead and turn on our machine, and it’s going to begin recovering the refrigerant from the system, through the recovery machine, and into the tank.

I just want to bring awareness that this tank, depending on the ambient temperature outside — right now it’s kind of cold — but once you start feeling that this tank is getting hot, you want to ask Mrs. Smith, “Hey, I’m going to need to use your hose to cool down my tank.” We want to cool down this tank because when it gets hot, it actually slows down the recovery process. When we add cold water to the tank, it speeds the recovery process.

Right here, we want to make sure that our pressures on both sides — right now it shows zero on our low side and zero on our high side. That’s telling us that the process is done. You want to make sure that it goes to zero psig on our recovery machine. Then we can go ahead and close off everything, and then we’ll click self-purge on the unit to make sure that we get all the refrigerant that’s trapped in these lines.

Then you want to weigh the refrigerant that you recovered and take a picture of that. Once you’re done, make sure that you close off your hoses. Make sure that you close off your service line and your discharge line.

And there you go — you’ve recovered the machine. Thank you, guys.

Speaker: Joshua Teel

Hi, I’m Joshua. I’m a student at HVAC Technical Academy, and I’m going to show you how to do a pump down. The purpose of doing a pump down is to isolate the refrigerant into the condenser. So, if we’re doing any work on our evaporator, like a cooling clean on the evaporator coils, or if we’re trying to replace our TXV, then to successfully do a pump down, we have to connect our gauges — our high side and our low side.

After we connect our gauges, we use this tool to close the liquid line first. After we close it — and it has to be lefty loosey, left tight — and we’re going on it, we have to go fast. This will close the liquid line valve side. After that, the pressure will start dropping on our low side gauge, and we have to make sure it doesn’t pass or reach zero psig.

So immediately after we close the liquid line, we then have to close the valve on our vapor line. If the pressure doesn’t hit zero psig, you will successfully seal and lock the refrigerant inside the condenser. If you fail to do that and it does reach zero psi, it will cause the refrigerant to go into an air hammer, and it won’t want to be accessed or pulled out.

I’m Joshua, and I’m from HVAC Technical Academy.