Complex High Pressure Problems On An Old R-22 Package Unit!

Hey guys as y'all can see behind me today has mostly been a rain day but lucky for you I have a video from the other day and in it I have like a 23 year old R22 system that had all kinds of problems and in the end I'm discussing a problem that I believe is going on and I think it was mixed refrigerant. I'm not sure what was in it very likely something mixed like R22 mixed with something else is what i mean and i'll discuss what it does to a system to a heat pump and some of the symptoms you'll see that the first time i ever ran across something like this it was actually a 410 system and somebody had put 407c in it and it had similar symptoms stay tuned knock knock this is my chest real quick holy smokes oops that is the wrong kind of filter grill and that is a terribly clogged filter filter grill should be a 25 by 20 this is a 20 by 25 the first number listed on your filter grill will be the top all right they have this let me get a little bit of light set on 75 and it is 75 so what we're going to do is crank it up so that all the heat comes on electric heat and heat pump and we'll check it outside my phone's playing some dope that's a group if y'all are seeing this there's ants coming out of this thing or dirt so i assume there's been ants in there lovely when you crank it up like that you want to get to it quickly and right now i can't just round it off too rusted we have us a 30 amp breaker and a 60 amp let's turn off the 60 right now so we can just check pressures without it heating up the house i mean if everything's working. The heat pump strips right now is in the 50s like 55 degrees out here. If everything is working it's going to heat it. It's going to cook the house. Let's see what we got. That suction is pretty low. I mean really low. This is one that has I think it has just one TXV that meters both ways. I am not seeing it icing up on one side. Coil is not dirty. The reason I'm checking this coil because right now that's the evaporator what we normally call the evaporator is right now the condenser hold on a second i need to make sure i know what refrigerant we're dealing with here 2003 this is going to be r22 i just want to see it R22 right here okay that changes things a little bit all right so this is not 410 those are more like 410 pressures so that pressure is too high for R22 which makes me wonder if the blower is running all right blower's running let's leave that open for just a second see if that changes my um my pressures it changed my pressures a lot there might be a reason that door was really hard to get off there's my access right there to under the house all right what i'm thinking is i have a collapsed duct somewhere because that door was extremely hard to get off and when I took it off my pressure is kind of normalized. For R22 running in heat you're looking for something a little above 200 and because I've got the panel off it's going to be a little bit lower. By that I mean the temperatures out here are cold. The normal air temperature that it's going to be getting is going to be between 72 and 78 and the air it's getting right now is 50 degrees so that pressure does not surprise me for a healthy R22 system but this watch this now you see with 410 pressures should be over 300 320 something roundabout for R22 which this is this pressure should be more like 212 220 something like that and as you see it's going way up too high did y'all hear that door it was pulling air hard let's see if we can see something from right here can't see anything looks like we're going i gotta get this panel off so i had to go get my key my universal i'll move this there we go let's go look under the house for anything abnormal we don't see anything abnormal down there we gotta gonna make sure vents are open stuff like that a lovely a holly bush right next to the opening i love holly bushes especially when they're planted right next to an air conditioner all right let's go this is not going to be a long return it goes to flex right there that is my return this right here let's follow it a little more that's my return i'm gonna i'm gonna show you something there's an elbow on that there's an elbow on that so it's not key it may have collapsed somewhere in there there's something i kind of want to see we're going to go in turn on the blower and look to see if the any of the duct lining in that small little metal return has come loose let's turn on the fan we do have some airflow there's one very rare thing i want to check it's kind of hard for me to believe that let me put this back together it's kind of hard for me to believe the flex duct has just completely collapsed or partially collapsed on the inside and nothing visible from the outside there are other things we need to consider this is a r22 system and um we have no history on it and look at all this ant mound they're not having any history on is part i'm a little worried about because something that can mimic the conditions we are seeing is a mix of refrigerant we don't know what refrigerant is in this i'm just being just voicing out loud what i'm thinking the fact that when i took the panel off pressure's kind of normalized does make me think there's an airflow problem but we also have to um consider other things that's a dead ant mound there's no ants in it it's up here before i lose if I don't find exactly what I was doing this soon this is gonna be my last call of the day that's water coming out my conduit I'm also kind of worried about this blower running backwards right there's another screw right here I don't think it is but this door is gonna be hard to get back on are y'all seeing what I'm seeing that might be my problem that insulation has come off the door is there another screw here somewhere let me kill power again not sure that's enough to cause what I certainly don't help but right now let's um check rotation on that blower motor it has been replaced so it's possibility it's going the wrong way well please tell me that breaker didn't just fail oh that's the 60 no wonder I'm pretty sure it's going the right direction it is I took care of that insulation I watch these pressures it seems to be stable heat strip running and it looks like we have two here let's give that sequencer some time pressure is doing better keep an eye on them they might rise again you see right here is very likely inside or right underneath that blower motor as well the fan seems to be doing better let's check our heat strips and check right here we're still at 20 amps my bag out of the way and we'll figure out why we only have 20 amps keeping an eye on those pressures that's low voltage has jumped from one to the other first i want to see which one is not pulling 20 amps and it's this one right here so first i'm going going to check between here and here i'm going to show you what i'm finding it's hard to show so i've got 240 volts between these two terminals that means that this sequencer has not closed so it may take just a little more time i'm going to show that i thought i was going to show that it has 24 volts i'm trying so hard not to there y'all couldn't see my meter but it was reading 24 volts right there 23.8 eight still reading 240 across it so we can fix that one heat strip with a single pole sequencer i'm not sure i have a single pole maybe a two pole let's check those pressures still high higher than i would like and we need to go get her a filter there's a place not too far from here baker distributing i can go get one i don't really think that that flex duct has collapsed because the metal lining in it is still intact if that collapses the outside of it will get sucked down in it and if the interior lining forgive me there's a big old spider just crawled out from under my foot if the interior lining starts to break up or fall apart it normally turns into pieces and you just see like black snowflakes coil or something like that so i don't think it's that flex duct work but pressures comes into play the part that I was telling you about this might not be R22 in it or it might be a mix of R22 and something else that's not supposed to happen but it happens all the time and you have to um especially with a new property you have to consider that people will take 407C and drop it right on top of R22 or 422B and drop it right on top. Maybe in cooling they can get away with it but when they turn it on in heat they have high pressures like this. I'm thinking that's what's going on here and that also tells me that somebody has had to add refrigerant to it. An old R22 system like this that's no big surprise. That heat strip never came on. This is one where I need to give them an estimate and they're not in my town so quote them everything or just quote them the sequence or everything by everything. I mean removing the refrigerant um Technically I should probably do a leak search Let me see what I can get approval for. We also have a blower sequencer here. It looks like it has fallen apart Sometimes those are used as like a time delay or at least they used to be. The contactor looks a little rough too. Those are for my blower motor. It would have been really easy to take this wire and put it put it up there. right now I gotta work up an estimate before I do any work anything I do right now is over my limit see that's what did I say it was 2003 January 2003 23 years old and let's lock this door filter right now I'm just gonna make sure we don't have power nothing nothing nothing we are good this This particular sequencer only does one thing and has one set of contacts on it. So it's pretty easy to wire up. Using a two pole sequencer, y'all forgive me, that is a Q103 and I'm having trouble getting it out the bag. I'm going to use the M1, M2, I'm going to use the M3 and M4. Let's go ahead and put low voltage on first because it's on the bottom. I'm deciding to this is m1 and m2 which means it will energize first and I'm using m3 m4 so it's going to energize delayed compared to this one over here m1 m2 m3 m4 so the sequencer should come on after this right here which is probably for my yeah that's going to be for my blower motor so blower motor comes on first then this we don't want to hook up to m1 and m2 and have this sequencer energize heat before this one energizes the blower motor so m1 and m2 should be almost immediate i did verify that heat strip is working y'all forgive me i kind of got into a hurry and i'll tell you this i had to use the bucket that's why that video was cut kind of short so you know what i'm talking about you know what i'm talking about i went through the entirety of today without seeing a bathroom without eating just trying to keep up with what's going on and i've still got maybe three that i've i kind of had to put off until tomorrow good to have the business and i'm thankful that i'm not in Las Vegas i mean i would like to be there but when it's this busy i need to be here thanks for watching guys and i'll catch you on the next one