HVAC Video Tutorials

okay guys this is Crystal with open the public HVAC school and today we’re going to be talking about wiring for your blower motors whether you have an air handler with electric heat or a furnace for gas heat and we’re going to get into whether you can use a three speed for a four speed or if you’ve got one of those old-school two speeds we’re going to talk about how to change up your wiring and how all of this functions so let’s get to it so here we have a basic wiring diagram of a three speed now this can apply to a four speed as well because all that means is we’re just going to have one extra speed to play with usually a medium high medium low for two speed motors what most people don’t know is you’re supposed to swap those uh from your heat to your cool dee pding on which speed you’re going to use say high speed in the summer and low speed in the winter but most people don’t do that they just keep it wired up the same way so what does all of this mean well whether you have a 200 I have my panel right here uh 240 volt motor or a 115 120 whatever you want to call it volt motor they both need to have a common in which it’s hard to see here because most common wires are white so um here’s my poorly drawn line here or common if you will and here’s our speeds so on most blower motors uh well I guess most of the more common ones I’m used to seeing they have black for high blue for medium red for low these are just your different speeds if you have a gas heater a furnace a usually one of these beads are going to be on your heat on your control board and one will be on your cool so this is what is going to change how fast the motor is going to go and so when you have a electric heating these are usually either connected to a fan relay or a fan relay board something like that and they’re going to be on different sections on that as well which will be labeled heat and cool fan on Etc this just means it’s a ground so the motor doesn’t short in case there’s a surge something like that this is going to ground the motor so it’s good to go and these two are going to go to your capacitor and all this is is it’s a line through just like on our condenser capacitors it’s going to send a quick burst or charge and then it’s going to start up the motor so our start winding is going to be here so on common on 120 volt gas heating that’s going to be on a neutral line on your board because of how units sometimes aren’t properly grounded it’s basically like a secondary ground kind of it’s a little different that has to be on the common even though it says line so if you’re looking at your motor here and even though it says our white is line and then one of these beads will be your other line or 120 120 if you’re looking at a 240 volt motor even on a 240 volt motor We cannot put two speeds together and here’s why your common doesn’t run on the same leg of power that your speeds do so essentially what you’re doing is if you put two of your speeds together instead of using your common wire it’s going to burn the windings and short the motor kaboom so because these are all really really close together on the windings they can’t be run together for power this is going to be coming in from the opposite side so even though this motor is running off of 240 volts you absolutely have to have a common wire even on a 240.

so just to kind of explain that again on your gas your common is your neutral and then your lines are your 120. so a common question I get asked in the store is occasionally someone will have a four-speed motor and unfortunately if we have something here that has had three-speed motor instead of a four speed can you use a motor that had four speeds and switch it over to a three speed motor and the answer is yes absolutely you can and so what you’re going to be paying attention to with that is one the age of the motor that you’re replacing and two that of course all the other specs line up make sure it’s a half horsepower motor you know match it up with that make sure yes your blower motors both are the same voltage and this goes the same for whether you’re buying this on Amazon anything like that really need to make sure that every single one of these specs are matched so just like we were talking about with the condenser Motors you need to make sure that that horsepower matches need to make sure that the RPM matches you know make sure that the capacitors match so even if you think oh yeah I’ve got a higher capacitor instead of having say a 7.5 you’ve got a 10 that you were using on your old motor does that work no it does not they have to be the exact capacitance so if you get a motor a new motor that takes a 10 and your old one had a 7.5 you absolutely need to get a new capacitor for that now getting back to the speed so not only can you use a four speed for a three speed you can also use a three-speed if you had a four speed you can also use a four for a three a four speed for a two a three speed for a two and you’re kind of seeing where I’m going with this so what is the deal with that why can we do that and this is only with blower motors okay don’t do this with condenser Motors this is a special sort of case with how blower motors function versus condenser Motors and how they are wired up out in your condensing unit say your motor has four speeds so instead of just a high medium and a low you would have a high medium which would be a medium high a medium low and a low obviously whichever medium speed you’re using if you’re even using a medium speed you would replace this medium with even if you’re using medium high or medium low these can both be replaced by medium on a three-speed motor you can swap that with say if you’re going from a four wire setup or I’m sorry from a three wire to a four wire you could just replace whichever of these with your medium so that works just fine these are fractional horsepower motors it’s not going to be that big of a deal in this sort of situation okay so now we know that each one of these beads it’s okay for you to change it to whatever speed you need and what you can do is you can just cut off and cap these wires or if on your boards you have a spot that says something like bear or M1 and two Park any of these are dummy terminals they don’t go anywhere it’s just to put your extra speeds you’re not using onto a dummy terminal so it’s kind of it’s It’s a neutral to put those wires on there so they don’t short out against anything normal wiring setup unless you’ve got kind of an old school one or I have seen some good men even some newer Goodman that are using a three wire setup which is usually something condenser motors do but I am seeing it even recently on New Motors so normally on your capacitor since this is just a line through as long as these two brown wires or if you see this dashed one here if yours is brown and white it doesn’t matter this can sometimes confuse people since it is just a line through for your capacitor it doesn’t matter if you have them like this or if you swap them and this is only going to be in this case if you have the two Browns or the brown and white wire go into the capacitor so this is your normal wiring setup now let’s talk about if you have a three wire setup with the three wire setup you’re going to be looking for something that says line like this one and then it’s going to have something Branch off just like this it might be down here or it could be up here you know maybe come and connect up to the side and there’s even some I’ve seen it kind of does a little bracket like this on the side but this should be your cap and it would say the same thing here capacitor something like that and all this is saying is that this common wire should be connected to one side of your capacitor and then your cap or normally it’s a brown wire with most of them I’ve seen I have seen some that are purple um is going to go on the other leg now the difference between this and the two brown wires is that as we know this is going to be one leg of power and again remember be common must be on the correct one so when you’re looking at this where one of those brown wires has that brown and white stripe on it that’s the same thing as this wire and this is why we don’t put this with the brown and white stripe motor so in this application it would definitely make a difference you would short the motor if you put one leg say on a universal motor if you put the brown and white with the white it would burn the motor out so you need to make sure you have that solid Brown on one side and the white on the other now that’s just if you’re using a universal motor and which you can do that since we know that this common is one leg of your 120.

you’re going to have a jumper wire here with that common wire and I’ve seen common wires that are purple I’ve seen some that are orange white again make sure you are looking at that wiring diagram repeatedly I’m going to tell you this to make sure that you connect the correct one so this is since this is your start winding this is your power so that jumper needs to be and it can be on any one of these because that is on the same leg make sure your power wire goes to your common and it’ll just jumper off onto whether it goes to a relay if it goes directly to power somewhere along those lines most the time it goes on a relay it needs to be on your common so if you do get a universal motor and you do just reviewing and you do have one with a white and black stripe or a white and brown I should say you’re just going to tie that off and you’re only going to use the solid Brown with the common one on each as long as the jumper is with the common wire no matter what color that common wire is make sure you’re only putting that power on the common wire so what do all these speeds do obviously we know by reading this chart on this motor the black is high blue is medium red is low now since this is a four-speed motor obviously we’re going to have a medium high we’re going to have a medium low again if you’re switching a four speed to a three speed no matter which medium you might be using on your heat or your cool you can replace that with the medium speed and it will not harm anything now most units unless you’ve got a ream um and I guess there’s some other brands too that do it normally it’s going to be a low speed for your heat and a high speed for your cool sometimes they’ll swap it to where you’ve got a medium low and a high were whichever and the point is when you’re connecting this to your heat you don’t really want to put it on high it’s too fast of a speed to be putting that on your heat and the reason for that is the heat needs to be running slower slower air over those coils so it has time to heat those coils and then dissipate the heat into your Supply Air so that’s why we want to make sure we’re at least putting that on a medium low or low on your high speed Cooling if you’re replacing it with a motor that might be newer and it might not have been as strong as a newer motor there are old school Motors that were called shaded pole you might even have one of those older Motors to where it doesn’t have a capacitor and that is what we call a shaded pole motor so on these newer Motors if it’s got too much umph or Torque and you’re noticing whistling coming out of your unit or you know vibrating you know sounds drop it down a speed so if your high is just blowing too high and it’s causing really loud noises vibrations whistling drop it down to a medium speed so that way it gets rid of that noise just a side note if you do look around in your housing and you don’t see a capacitor one of two things is going on either you have a variable speed motor which has capacitors in the module attached to the motor or you have you know if you’re saying hey my unit’s super old then that probably means you have a shaded pole motor so make sure if you you know to check for that capacitor because you know you’ve been watching videos and they say oh check the capacitor you don’t have one it could be one of these two things so again just make sure to check your capacitors if it doesn’t have one then you’re going to need one with the new motor or you could have a variable speed motor in which you have to change that out exactly the same type of motor now constant torque can be a little different but we’ll get into that later so just to review make sure no matter if you have a 240 volt or a 120 volt motor always make sure that that common or it’ll say line on your motor needs to be on common it has to be on there with one of the speeds you can’t just put two speeds together so obviously it’s a little easier with furnaces because your Commons going to always be on a neutral line and on your 240 volts these are essentially both power but again make sure this goes on the correct leg of power on your fan relay board or the power that’s directly connected to it from some sort of relay hopefully this has been helpful for you and of course if you have any questions just comment below and I will try to respond to them as soon as possible thanks so much guys take care and have a wonderful rest of your week

hey guys my name is Crystal and today we are going to talk about how to wire condenser Motors whether the OEM or a universal motor this will cover both the four wire and the three wire setup on most Motors you’ll find a wiring diagram I say most because not all of them do it this is why it’s especially important to take pictures of where your motor wires are connected your motor should be connected by four bolts attached to your lid and then hang upside down there are some older or different styles that have the motor in a belly band with the shaft pointing up instead of down but for most of you

it will look like this if you want tips on how to replace your motor check out our other video tutorial with a step-by-step breakdown this little guy is what you would call a dual run capacitor it’s used for both your motor and your compressor you should see these labels at the top of your capacitor to describe briefly what it does a capacitor disperses an electrical charge to both your fan motor and your compressor just like condensers these are different these numbers have to match especially Motors compressors have a little bit of leniency but not much despite what some people will tell you

putting a larger capacitor on a motor that takes a smaller size capacitor will cause the motor to overamp and eventually burn out the labels on the capacitor will say Herm which is for your compressor wire the fan is for the brown wire from the motor well in this case it’s the brown and then on this motor the purple would go to the c or your common the C is your other leg of power which will have a jumper wire that goes on it from Back to the contactor so to review the black wire goes to the contactor for the one side of the 120 the purple wire goes to the C on the capacitor for the other leg of

the 120 and the brown wire connects to the fan on your capacitor like so just like everything else your contactor might look different if it single button or switch with a solid one it could have two buttons or what we call poles or it could even have three when your thermostat is turned to cooling it sends the signal out to the condenser to turn on what happens is the 224 volt lines that come in on either side of your contactor will signal the contactor to pull in and make contact once it makes contact it will close the circuit and allow the 240 volts through to get to your condenser always make

sure you take pictures before removing any wires but normally your black wire from your motor if it is the black one again you need to check the wiring diagram that black wire from the motor needs to be on the side of the contactor in which the power comes through not on the side where the power comes in from your home each side of the contactor is a separate pole but the four quick connects on each side are on the same leg so we’ve kind of established our Motors are all different pay attention to the voltage a lot of people get hung up on amp draw the difference between a motor that draws 1.5

amps versus say up to maybe two 2.1 isn’t saying that it will draw more than the original it’s whatever your original motor used never change your horsepower or RPM even if the capacitor matches your fan blades are designed for that RPM and horsepower unless of course it’s your dream to have always had your fan blade fly apart and crash into wires or your compressor if it doesn’t list it look at the direction the fan blades are spinning when you look down from above into your unit when you replace your motor the air should be blowing out of the unit not into the unit let’s move on to four wire

setups most units are three wires for a motor typically a condenser motor unless of course you have what’s known as an ECM motor or an electronic communicating motor again make sure the motor you purchase will run on the same capacitor and that it matches your original Motors specifications multi-horsepower Motors like these fall under that category the great thing about Universal Motors are they can go either direction so if it’s spinning the wrong way you swap two wires and you’re good to go if you need to purchase a second smaller capacitor for your motor if say the new motor takes a different

size you would be doing what’s called a four wire setup which I’ll demonstrate here when a capacitor has only two poles like this one there’s no polarity meaning it’s just a line through as long as you place one wire on each pole it will work so Boop and then Boop next we have two power wires marked as line like the OEM remember where your black wire went on your contactor the universal motor wire will go in the same spot on the same side the other wire in this case the white wire will go on the same side but on the other pole like this as long as they are not on the same pole this is how a four

wire setup should look thanks for watching another OTP HVAC school and again just comment below if you have any questions and we look forward to posting our next episode if you’d like to see more episodes like this just hit the Subscribe and do us a favor and hit like thanks so much guys and have a wonderful rest of your week

hey everyone I know it’s been a while this is the busiest season for us uh this obviously this time of year when it can hit Triple digits for several weeks in a row videos are going to be a little slower coming out uh but today I’ve noticed on some of my wiring videos that people were still asking me colors of wires and I can’t emphasize this enough the colors on wires aren’t what you’re looking for what you need to know is how it’s connected so this is going to obviously be for people that you know can see the wiring on their old Motors and if you get a new Universal motor I’m going to show you

what those mean and how to wire them just like your OEM motor so let’s break it down let’s make it simple and understand how this works so we can stare at papers and charts all day we can look at these all day but what does this mean and how do you translate it into wiring well each one of these is showing you here here’s our motor and each one of these is telling you exactly how to wire it so between these colors on this particular motor it’s saying orange is going to be 120 black is going to be 120 and the blue is going to be your start winding which is on your capacitor now there are several

different ways you can do this because of the nature of how a condenser motor works it just needs power and power and then the start winding simple thing here that you’ll notice is that the capacitor wire comes off here this symbol right here is the symbol for capacitance so here on our drawing is these two brackets which simply means this is the line that’s going to be on the same capacitor together so between just these two wires if you see the word cap or you see this symbol for capacitance you know that this blue wire that comes off of the motor is your start and then your C your common your

one leg of 120 is going to be what Hooks up with that blue wire so these are going to be together the reason behind why we’re only putting this with your common is where your windings go so just remember we’re going to go with the wire that is on your C on your capacitor standing again for common so your common and your start winding should always be on your capacitor because it can be extremely unnerving to look at a universal motor and look at this and go whoa the universal motor looks way more complicated so let’s look at our three wire set up for our dual run capacitor which I’ll show you in

a moment and then our four wire set up if you have a smaller fan capacitor with only two PS so here’s a universal condenser motor remember first and foremost before we get into this to match all of the specs on your motor so make sure that your motor uh say with this one it’s a 208 230 1075 RPM which if you watched my other video on what the RPM means on full load amps versus uh what it actually says on the motor um I get into all of that on the other videos so you can go check those out if you’d like uh that way you understand what that actually translates to but just know that if it says 1075

it’s the same thing as 1100 RPM 1050 RPM or 12200 RPM all the same so as you can see on our original motor and sometimes when we get this close it can get a little fuzzy but yeah I’ll call it out for you on your your original motor you can see it is a quarter horse 208 230 1100 RPM it also will tell you most will tell you the rotation and what size capacitor you would need so just make sure as you pick and this one’s a little fuzzier here see if I can’t move out just a tiny bit well in any case uh those specs will be right here this is a multi horsepower motor and it goes from a third to a sixth

um when it says to a sixth by the way I recommend only going up to a fifth because technically this is going to lean more towards the third side and quarter horsepower but you can use this for the quarter horsepower 1100 RPM Motor now see here how it says 1075 and the other one says 1100 that’s perfectly fine obviously you can see this is a little little bit different than the OEM and remember at any time you can pause this if you need to I’m going to not try to speed through it that way you can kind of go through at your own pace or rewind and slow it down but this is our original so keep in mind

like we mentioned before the line that comes off of your s on the motor that’s going to be your start winding or your one leg of your capacitor uh the C whatever color that might be is going to be your one leg of 120 and your R which is the one that goes back to your contactor is going to be your other leg of 120 so now we’re going to take the knowledge we know and we’re going to apply it to the universal and we’re going to do this one of two ways let’s first start off with the three wire all right here I’ve got this for you guys and again keep in mind color does not matter I have so many of you

messaging me on the other videos you know I have a red wire I have an orange wire I have a yellow wire wire color doesn’t matter because what we’re doing is we need to know what these mean most universal wiring diagrams are going to look like this it looks pretty scary right but look here so on our motor it tells us the white wire this one right here is going to be our one leg of 120 the black wire is going to be our other leg of 120 so again just make sure when it says these two in between them it has either a line or arrows something like that that’s going to be your high voltage so power power

okay these right here on Universal Motors what they are telling you is what the motor defaults to for example it’s telling us on this one and this one does have a key for you so keep that in mind it should label it what these do is they change the rotation of your motor that way since it is universal you can change it to whatever rotation you need to Simply by changing the wires on this one it gives you a handy little note here that says to reverse rotation interchange orange and yellow leads so we find our orange and yellow or whatever other color wires yours are some of these have like an insulated

plug big thick rubber plug that’ll have like a you know multicolored wires or it will have like a white and a black and those you just pull the plug apart you twist them and then you put them back together and that will reverse your rotation but these this particular style that’s what these wires are for so since this one defaults to counterclockwise lead end which means if you’re looking at the motor this way that’s the rotation it’s going to be so this one is saying it’s going to be counterclockwise lead end so looking from this side of the motor now remember easy fix for this is if you get a

little confused about you know which one you need just put everything together plug it up and if the air isn’t coming out of the unit then you know these need to be swapped so these again in between all this which looks like a bunch of jumb nonsense that’s what these mean so now that we know what this is telling us now we look at this now this can get a bit confusing if you’re doing a three wire setup so I’m going to break down what this means because there’s no simplistic way to put this the brown and white stripe this one is in the same function as the white wire so the white wire on this motor

yours could be yellow purple orange Etc on this particular motor the white wire is the same as the brown and white stripe these are on the same exact winding which means if you’re going with a three wire setup just like the original motor you don’t need that brown and white stripe anymore so when doing a three wire setup you’re not going to use this wire by process of elimination we now know that that brown and white stripe since we’re not using it we know that this wire and this wire is the same and and and I’m talking about the brown and white not the solid Brown we we now know that that capacitance

symbol is telling us that the solid Brown is our start which is going to go on our dual capacitor which we now know that the start is going to go on the fan on our capacitor and since we know this is going to go on the fan the other side of that capacitance see how this wire is the same as this wire so process of elimination we know that the Brown is going to go on the S and the white is that c that the other side of that capacitance which is where this is branching off remember what we said before now we know the white on the capacitor is going to be our common that’s the breakdown of what these

Universal Motors mean when you see all of this on this motor again it could be yellow orange purple Etc goes on the CA and our start winding for the fan motor the other side of that capacitance is the fan so keeping that in mind all of this the only thing you need to know about that is that it changes the rotation and what it defaults to now on most of these motors somewhere on the label you’re going to see something that says 10 mfb the symbol UF or you’re going to see cap this is telling you what the universal motor needs so make sure if your other motor took say size 7.5 or a five with one of

these next to it you know you need to change that capacitor to match so make sure you pay attention to that now I have a lot of people in store ask me why their Universal motor has a green and yellow striped wire which is the most common Universal color code for ground when you’re motor directly attaches up against your lid or your grill on your motor and it’s hanging upside down you do not need a ground wire because your unit is grounded and your motor is attached to your unit meaning you don’t need a ground wire now if you have a different type of setup on your motor say for example uh some people

have a motor where the shaft is facing up toward the lid and then a band that comes around it like this those Motors absolutely need a ground wire so make sure you keep those on there keep in mind know about wire colors new you know stop worrying about the color of the wire what we’re doing here is we’re learning what those diagrams mean now some of you might have something like a Hile I’ve seen some Yorks that do it as well they have a weird diagram and for that I tell you to go on YouTube or I might make a video here in a little while explaining to you what those mean stop caring about wire colors

okay this is the purpose of this video is I am showing you exactly what these mean that way you know no matter what wire color you’re using you know where they go and you’re not having to freak out because you now know what these diagrams mean one more thing to uh cover is the black and for most Motors the black is going to be your run now not all again so pay attention to that the run on your motor M will go back to the other leg of power on your contactor all right guys we are here at masasa H sometimes it can be a bit hard to film up at work U it’s a busy time of year so sometimes we’ll have

people walk up and knock on the doors and all kinds of stuff so uh this is just kind of letting you know what our common start and run is so we’ve covered common we’ve covered start and now let’s talk a little bit about run now again these wiring diagrams and this would be for an oem motor or something similar these are going to represent your common start run so between these two it’s telling you these are your lines so we’re reviewing a bit you’re not going to be looking at these videos um trying to learn a lot it’s just you’re trying to figure out how to put in your new motor right run is just

you know on a separate winding from your common but they’re both going to be power now your start winding for your motor more often than not I see brown again do not look at colors remember how we know this is going to be our common is it will have that line sometimes it’ll be arrows I’ve even seen squiggly lines but in any case we know the one that’s branching off one of the main power legs is going to be our start winding for our motor uh the start winding is different in how it plays its role for your motor again just for simplicity’s sake make sure that you have whatever color wire it is right

here again it can be brown I’ve seen purple I’ve seen blue just to make sure that one you know or any of these colors or it could be a different color wire is the one that goes between the capacitance on your 120 your common on your capacitor now once we know this we know that whatever color this one is going to be whether yours is white I’ve seen yellow I’ve seen orange uh I’ve even seen red again it could be purple with red polka dots between these to on our start when we’re looking at a dual run capacitor on your dual run capacitor you’re going to have three pulls the one that says Herm which

we’ve gone over before in other videos is your compressor wire that has nothing to do with your fan motor so for your fan motor we’re focusing on these two which one will be labeled C four common and this one is going to be labeled fan all right so compressor we’re not going to worry about that on our motor right so C we know that whatever color wire this is it’s going in between the start here or the start’s going to Branch off and sometimes as I mentioned there can be a little line like this coming off of it with the symbol and that can say cap that’s going to go on your fan terminal on your

dual run capacitor the one that goes between your run and your common on your motor which is again the one that’s going to be by itself will be your run so whatever color you have here guys that’s going to be the one that goes on your C uh on the C you’ll notice you’ll either have one or two more wires on here since you know on your C that has to be 120 volts on there you should have a jumper wire on that terminal and that jumper is going to be going back to your contactor whether you have a single pull contactor or you have a double pull contactor then that’s where that’s going to be going the

terminal on the capacitor that has usually two wires on it and then you should have one and one um that one that’s jumping back to the contactor that’s going to be your common as your machine turns on your AC unit outside your thermostat in you know calls for the cooling it’s going to come out to your contactor and on either side of your contactor um some of you have some that go on both sides but there are these wires that are coming to your contactor here that has the lowside voltage coming in from your thermostat that’s going to engage agage pull in your contactor which lets that 240 volts through

so obviously we know here is your one leg of 120 the other leg of 120 has to be on the other side of the contactor which is where your run goes on your motor again I’ve seen different colors but the most common color I see is black so since we know the run is simply your other leg of 120 and it’s by itself it doesn’t go between the start winding or the fan on our capacitor and it doesn’t have the C connected to it without the words line between them this one has to go back to Power now the Run always goes on the opposite leg of the contactor so if whatever color wire that is you’re left with and

you’re going oh no where does this go keep in mind process of elimination the C the common on the motor goes to the C on your dual run capacitor and again we know this because the capacitance symbol is between that one wire and the start wire up here which branches off of our common that C wire has a jumper that goes over to the contactor we know that the Run cannot be on the same side of the contactor you can’t put those two on there it’s going to cause a problem with your motor this wire that’s off by itself in our diagram again has to be by itself on your contactor just keep in mind the most

important thing is that since both legs of your motor need a total of 240 volts to kick the motor on we have to have our C jumped over to power and we have to have our R connected on the other leg of the contactor so common sense right we know in line is our capacitor which once is energized from the contactor that 240 you know it boosts you know it gets that higher voltage it kicks everything on it’s higher than 200 40 volts once it gets charged so always make sure to exercise caution when putting in your new motor make sure your disconnect box is pulled make sure that if you want to be extra

careful you can turn off your indoor panel and just make sure there’s no power going out there always use a rubberized screwdriver something that’s non-conductive on the handle but metal on the tip touch it on your capacitor and that should discharge it if it’s holding a charge at all so remember when you’re putting in your new fan motor that wire colors do not mean anything now unfortunately if you don’t have a wiring diagram on your fan motor there is a way to figure out what your common your start and your run is and I can show you how to do that we’ve actually done that in other videos but

for now on the wiring diagram we know what these are and what they mean and where they go it’s always more simple on a OEM motor but as I showed you before a universal motor is simple to read it’s just understanding what all that mumbo jumbo is on there so to compare once we know what these mean on here we can now have competence to compare it to our Universal wiring diagram we went over right the brown and white stripe on a universal motor and again don’t focus on colors when it gets to some Universal Motors they do actually have two solid Browns and I have even seen two purples before so just

keep that in mind when looking at the wiring diagram again we know the one that branches off here and the Caps coming off of it the symbol for capacitance is here so if you’re using a three wire setup with your dual run capacitor with our three poles here and obviously one will be c one will be fan and one will be Herm we know that the start no matter what color that is is going to go over to our fan just like our OEM motor our black is going to have that symbol between these two line and again these wiring diagrams can look different you guys this could be moved down here I have seen that before

between all of this you know reversing leads here and remember we don’t pay attention to that for right now and an easy easy way to deal with reversing leads is to just plug everything up get your fan blade on there and if the air is not coming out of your unit then you know it’s not going the correct rotation and you’re simply going to swap these wires so instead of going say yellow to Yellow you would go yellow to Orange and that’s going to reverse the polarity on the motor and it’ll go in the opposite direction the black and the white in this case are going to be your 120 and 120 being that

this is going to be off by itself we know that it’s going to be on our contactor and the most common contactor I see are single pole or pull and a half they call them so we know our run is going to go by itself on one leg and then our C our common the one that has the brown branched off of it with its capacitance or whatever color yours is that one is going to go over to the C on our capacitor so again just like your OEM 120 120 and then here is our start um this one goes over to the fan and that is your compressor wire so if you have no idea which one of these is your start winding or if you’re

the unfortunate victim of having two solid wires what you can do is test with your meter the continuity on the motor and that will tell you which one of these will be your start winding because they are on different windings in the motor because this wire is the same as this wire obviously if you’re touching your meter between these two what’s going to happen it’s going to have a very low resistance because it’s the same winding so now that we know if we’re touching this one to whichever one of those wires it has two of if it has a low resistance then you know for your three wire setup on your

dual run capacitor if it has low resistance boop boop you don’t use that wire cap it off and for the love of peak zip tie that thing out of the way I have seen two fan motors come in this year that they didn’t zip tie this up and inevitably their fan blade hit it so please zip tie be friendly to your motor okay so since we have that knowledge we know that this is the same winding as this one process of elimination right then you know if you touch this WI and your common wire and you have a higher resistance you know that is the one that goes on your fan because it’s not the same winding so now

that you’re armed with that knowledge you know which one of these would be the correct one to use on your dual run capacitor again zip tie these wires out out of the way cuz more often than not they do not fit in those uh tubes whether yours is Conduit or re has metal usually what I do because I do not like seeing wires tied up on the grill personally I think it looks kind of tacky and also I am paranoid about wires so me personally I like to zip tie these up against the tube so just make sure you get the wires you’re not using on three wire set up out of the way now that we’ve thoroughly gone

over this and we can understand and we have that knowledge okay Crystal well what do we do if we have a little small fan capacitor well we’re actually going to use both of these at that point so here’s what we’re going to do we’re going to have these right here we’re going to have our reversing leads you know whatever color those might be this is again just example colors plugs that go down here we’ve got these it go down here little boxy boys brown and white stripe okay most common again you can have two solid Browns well these two wires are conveniently placed here specifically for technicians

to use that little little small capacitor with two poles here with these smaller fan caps since there’s only two poles there’s no polarity on that what do I mean by that I mean it’s okay if you can put this wire here and this wire here or you can swap it you could put this wire here or this wire here meaning it doesn’t matter so I have some worried homeowners sometimes that ask that and know you don’t have to worry that’s only on a dual run a dual run capacitor you have three pulls and it very much matters now when you get this small capacitor that does not replace your larger dual run okay little

crdy guy here but you get the point it doesn’t replace this what this translates to is you’re no longer going to use your solid Brown your one wire on the fan terminal this is going here and it’s replacing the start from your large dual capacitor now that we know we don’t put that wire here we just take that wire off okay leave the other wire is here this you know should be C this should be Herm your compressor still needs power so that compressor wire needs to stay on there and that power wire that’s jumping over to the contactor needs that power in order to make this super simple because there’s

a number of ways you can do this put your wire and again we’re just using placeholder colors here we know line in line well keep whatever color this was before keep that where it was before keep your other line on which side was it again the opposite side of where your jumper wire comes off your C so then that wire goes back to the other side of the contactor now again there is another way to wire this and then we’re going to take these two which is power to the contactor both of them straight to the contactor so we know now that we have our knowledge one side needs to be on the contactor here

and the other one needs to be on the opposite leg all right guys thank you so much for joining us today I hope that you have learned quite a bit and again if you have any questions just leave them in the comments below and you give us a like And subscribe so we can continue to make these for you have a wonderful rest of your week and thank you for joining us bye guys uh

foreign hey guys this is Crystal with open to public HVAC School and today we are going to learn about installing a blower motor now if it’s an original this can also be used as well what I’m installing is a universal motor so it’s going to have a additional belly band so here what we’re doing is we’re removing all of the wires from the housing because we’re going to have to pull it out from that side so obviously we can’t have anything attached make sure that you don’t harm any wires as I’m showing you here or obviously if you’ve got a control board on the side of that it’s probably better to

remove it before you’re removing the motor just in case there can be limit switches as well that might break so here we flip the motor over and I’m showing you a set screw you’re going to need to remove that before you can slide the motor out I’m putting on a glove for safety because blower Wheels can be extremely Sharp here I’m using something called a grit cloth what you want to do is sand off the rust and make sure that there’s none on there until you see silver we’re going to use a crescent wrench and just kind of work it down until Boop it pops right out now some of you might not be as lucky

you might have to either use a puller or sand it down more but make sure if you’re going to use a lubricant you sand it down completely and get rid of all the gunk first so now that we’ve removed our motor we’re turning it back over and there’s our belly band and within a lot of belly bands you’ll find the grommets and the spacers screwed in so you’re going to remove all of those and make sure you remove the spacers and set them somewhere where you’re going to remember magnet whatnot these can be a little tricky make sure that you place your grommets in the same spot as the original motor if you’re

using a universal belly band so just make sure you’re going to work them all in they’re in there nice and tight sometimes you have to use a flathead or something to get them in there make sure that you space it like the other one was spaced get the wires on the right side kind of try to match the spacing a little bit um just for Simplicity and for ease um I’m measuring because this motor is a slightly different size so I really want to make sure that it sits in the housing fairly centered we’re going to screw in the bolt and usually I find it easy to use a hex driver some of you Unfortunate Souls

have a Phillips screw head um or you know something that’s a little more annoying but uh for hex bolts I find it’s easier because you can just grab it with a crescent wrench and screw that guy in so make sure that you’ve got your bracket nice and tight um it obviously this is a flex Mount so it’s supposed to have a little bit of flex to it but just make sure it’s snug we’re going to place it in here try to get it as straight as possible when you’re lowering it into the housing otherwise you might cause a little bit of a you know a scratch in the metal inside and then you’re having to shave that

down for it to sit in there so we’ve got our capacitor here after we’ve set our motor down in that Groove this is a carrier model and they tend to do that style just make sure that the lip of the capacitor is in that Groove we’re going to connect this back up and in this case they had the ground wire actually connected to the bracket which as long as that ground has a good connection that’s the most important thing these are reversing leads and all that does is changes the rotation of the motor blower Wheels can go either way so if you’re noticing the air is not blowing not blowing out you’re going

to switch those wires to where the yellow goes with the orange or whatever colors they’ve put in there with capacitors they’re just a line through so it’s okay to put one wire on each and you are good to go now if your motor has a three wire setup this is going to be different and we’ll cover that later in another video but for now we’ve got the two brown wires that go to the capacitor and we’re starting to screw in in the bolts make sure that you have put the spacers in there so that your bolt is touching metal to metal and this also prevents your grommets from being squished flat you know this

is a really big help it was something that I had to learn the hard way when you tighten in the bracket don’t fully tighten it on the one side since these are a flex Mount they don’t always line up exactly just make sure that you tighten it just a little bit on each side so you have a little play and it’s okay if you have to move that bracket just a little bit to fit into a hole if you’re having to move it a lot you might want to adjust where you put that grommet on the leg so it might line up with a different hole now what we’re doing here is we’re going to line up the blower wheel and it needs

to be centered so that you’re not having any large bypass which can create the blower wheel to actually really wobble and not be centered and when that happens it can really cause the motor to go off balance which eventually will cause the motor to overheat now when we’re tightening it onto the Hub which is that big metal chunk there you see at the bottom you need to make sure that the set screw is screwing into the flat side of the motor shaft not the round and that’s very important because it’s going to shift now you can use Loctite in this and it’s it’s very useful definitely if you have the

option or you’ve got it available put it there on that male threaded and a little bit on the female threaded side we’re going to use a crescent wrench to really dig that set screw in now I’m tightening it both on the side and then I’m going to tighten it with the shaft up as well because this is going to get a good snug connection once we get it fairly tight what we’re going to do is back it up just a little bit like this and then we’re going to dig it back in and what that’s going to do is actually cause it to dig in just a little further be extremely careful with machine threaded bolts because

they can snap and I have had this happen to me before a double check to make sure again that your blower housing is straight um your blower wheel is straight rather zip ties are wonderful for wire management usually you kind of want to get it somewhere you can tie it to that leg there and just get them all neat and nice so you’re not having to worry about wires going down into the motor so there we have it an easy way to install your motor and hopefully this has been helpful for you if you have any questions or if you have any concerns feel free to comment below and I will be happy to answer them

so thank you so much for joining us today and I hope you have a great rest of your day and week

hey guys welcome to another episode of otp hvac school what we’re going to learn today is how to remove a condenser motor from the fan lid as you can see i have the motor attached so we can show you from start to finish how to remove this yourself all right let’s get started so what we’re doing here is you can use a ratchet like this one or you can use a crescent wrench whichever is easier to fit around the set screw and remove it after you remove the set screw what we’re doing here in the video is we’re sanding all of this down with some grit paper until we see silver make sure you get rid of any of the rust dust that falls down into the bottom before you start trying to remove the fan blade like i’m doing here first walk it up with the crescent wrench you’re going to move below so you can get enough leverage like i’m doing here to remove the fan blade it can be a little difficult sometimes and fun but you get it off you do a little dance as you can see here i’m telling you no do not wrap motors this way that’s what these four bolt holes are for i think what happened was they flipped the bolts for some reason this is what we call a train style mount so occasionally you have to use a train adapter since most motors are a 48 frame motor as you can see here bolts can be equally as hard to remove from the lid so just use another ratchet you can have the kind with the handle or the one like i have and just give it a little pull and should come off these are great for leverage if you have a stuck bolt that’s really rusted on there so once you get this loose enough you’re going to use your nut driver and remove all of those off of there and then you got your motor moved so what i’m showing you here is to check the bolt pattern on your motor that they should be 5 and 5 8 which is what we call a 48 frame that’s going to be the spacing of the bolts that you fit down in there i’m removing the ground wire i don’t like them sticking there and the motor is going metal to metal with this style though perfectly fine to not have a ground wire you can hook it up underneath one of the legs or something if you want but i just don’t like extra things on there i am attaching one of the nuts onto the bolts so that i can actually lift the lid and make it easier to screw those in i’m gonna go ahead and tighten up all of these bolts and just get them hand tight and then once you get it hand tight on there what you’re going to do is take it just a quarter inch turn more you don’t want to over tighten these because there’s a good chance you’re gonna snap the bolt don’t do that i’ve had one snap on me before and had to go through the entire process again so you can see i’ve got the wires secured with zip ties just to kind of get them out of the way and pull them through the tube that tube is going to go along that divot that kind of wider divot in the lid that’s something called a raceway some of you are gonna have conduit instead of this big kind of rectangular piece and i’m zip tying all of this out of the way instead of using gobs of tape i just think it looks better it also gives the wires a little more room to breathe you want them snug but not too tight and what we’re doing here is we’re going to get out the remaining rust dirt crud from out of the hub knock it loose and then i’m going to take a shop towel or if you’ve got a paper towel and then just run it through after you’ve got it run through there we can slide it on the shaft even after doing all that just go ahead and remove any rust when you push the hub or the fan blade back down because there still might be a little bit there the set screw as i’m pointing out is going to go against the flat so the hole on your hub there you’re going to put the set screw in and you’re going to tighten it on the flat once we’ve placed that on there we’re gonna slide the hub down again we’re gonna get it close to the bottom after we’ve removed all the rust and everything uh what i’m showing you here is we want to get the fan blade as close as possible to the motor a lot of customers get super uncomfortable when i do this because they think that the fan blade needs to go towards the middle of the shaft get it really close what that’s going to do is prevent bypass so we’ve got this down low ish i could even go lower if i wanted to which was me testing to make sure a minute ago that it wasn’t going to hit any of the wires or any part of the motor as it spins and then we’re going to put our connectors on here if you’ve got a universal motor a lot of them don’t come with these female quick connects which you’re going to use to plug in to your capacitor the reason why they don’t do that is there’s a lot of different mounting styles for motors and some of them just kind of wire nut in yours are probably going to hook to a capacitor and we’ll get to wiring here in the next episode but for now just know i’m connecting them up where they need to go and we’re gonna turn it on one last spin and 240.

there we go what matt is doing here is he’s measuring to make sure that the fan blade is relatively even if you’re going to adjust your fan blade like this you’re going to need to measure do not bend at the flimsy blade it will cause that to break as you can see he was pulling up on the metal part which is the more sturdy part of the fan blade to bend it this is just kind of a thing that we do at open a public if someone were to purchase a motor through us to install the motor onto the condenser lid so i hope that this has been helpful to you and if you thank you for joining us today and i hope you enjoyed it for more like these just subscribe to our channel and give us a like if you learned a lot have a great day guys

all right guys today we’re going to do just something really simple we’re going to show you how to replace the capacitor and everything you need to do before then so here we go all right so obviously I’m going to be on the side of our building so at your home it’s going to look a little different when you’re looking at your AC unit but you know it’s going to be the same for what you’re going to be doing some of you are going to have a pull out disconnect or some of you are going to have something that looks like a breaker kind of like this here and yours might have something that looks like a little Tab and ours is going to have a breaker what we’re going to do is if you have one of these you’re going to just turn it to off you can hear our AC unit turning off there if you have a pull out disconnect you’re going to have a tab that you’re going to pull out so once we have our disconnect shut off we can work on our unit so we don’t electrocute ourselves so let’s get over to the electrical panel for the most part many units you’re going to need either a 5 16 nut driver or a quarter I’ve noticed a lot of reams or quarter inch but you know there can be 5 16 or quarter so you’re going to need those and then obviously you’re going to need your capacitor you just bought it’s going to be wise to have a meter again you don’t have to have something as fancy as this these can usually be over a hundred dollars just because of all the things it can do while you’re in the field it’s magnetic it has a clamp it has a non-contact voltage you can find some of these at places like Harbor Freight or I think around 40 50 bucks for the ones that do a lot of what these can but it’s it’s really good to have one of these just to make sure that you are going to get electrocuted or if you need to make sure that you have 24 volts 240 coming into your unit uh just while you’re in there and replacing your capacitor okay the capacitors that you have in your unit they can look like this can size on these dual run capacitors can differ they can be tall and skinny like this they can be short and fat um but a dual run capacitor is going to have three poles on the top of it like this one is going to be for your fan motor the Herm is going to be for your compressor and the C is going to be your common where you’re going to have a jumper wire that goes back to your contactor to pull power through the capacitor and give that charge to both your fan motor and your compressor you know many of you have this the Dual run to run both now there are a lot of train units I’ve seen for a while that they do two capacitors if you have something like a two-stage where you have two compressors outside you would have two of close to this size with only two poles on top of it and that is just for your compressors and then you’ll have a smaller one in there like this that is just a run capacitor with two poles on top of it this type of run capacitor usually has a lower number I’ve brought an odd one out here most people have a five or a 7.5 or I’ve seen Linux they do tens so it depends on the company but just make sure that you do get that number correct for your fan motor uh just replace back what was in there and it will have MFD it will have UF like this which is the symbol for microfarad but just make sure they match now if you have one or the other not coming on in your unit make sure you know if you have two of them which one is for uh the part you’re buying it so the one with the smaller number that’s out there just by itself is going to solely be for your fan motor it is a fan capacitor if you have this and your fan motor is not coming on this is going to be the one you replace if nothing is coming on and you just have your dual run capacitor in there some of you might have a hard start which we might get to later if I have one here in the unit I’ll show you but hard start kits are only going to be for startup on your compressor so it’s only for your compressor so now that we know what they look like and you need to make sure those numbers match just on the microfarad side I have a lot of people ask me that plus or minus five percent and that is just what they say their product should be within range of so they’re saying this one needs to be within five percent of both of these numbers now the voltage is important if your dual run capacitor has a 370 on it it is okay to use a 440 or a 370.

if your capacitor has a 440 on it you must match the new capacitor to 440 so you can go from down to up but you cannot put a smaller one on a larger number if that makes sense Tongue Tied but anyway now that we know what these are for again you might only have a couple of these connected and you’ll have a smaller one in there like this for your fan motor or you might have one of these that only have two on top in which that is just for your compressor so if your compressor is not coming on it could be the culprit that looks similar to this with only two poles on top now an important thing to note here is when you are actually going back behind your unit a lot of times installers can actually put the unit extremely close to the wall and they’re hard to get to so make sure when you are actually getting around to the unit we do not step on things like this this is your refrigerant lion and you can step on that and cause a lot of damage to that copper uh get a kink in it cause high pressures you know Bend or harm the pipe in a way that could restrict the flow so just make sure you don’t step on any copper lines like this all right so where do we find our electrical panel where our capacitor is well what you’re looking for is your bundle of electrical wires that come out and again this will be a lot easier for a residential because you’re not going to have a whole bunch of these pipes running through like this so you’ll only have the one on your unit that’s going to go back to your disconnect box which I just showed you so knowing that electrical bundle is coming into this part of the unit you know that this is going to be the panel here that we remove once you go to pull this off after you’ve removed your screws which some of these just have a couple really depends on your service guy and how many you left in there you can see there’s a few here you’re going to have to remove when you go to take the electrical panel off it’s going to be under a lip here you can see it’s going to tuck in like that you’re going to have to pull it down like that once we’re in our unit here now this this unit is pretty old so there’s gonna be a lot of dust and all kinds of fun stuff here now we’re gonna look and we’re gonna see okay where’s our capacitor well as you saw before here’s our capacitor here with the three poles on top and a bunch of wires so make sure you take a picture of where these wires go before you remove them for obvious reasons and then you can start removing them now this isn’t something a lot of technicians do and they should and in all honesty I’ve never had one electrocute me or does that mean while working at a unit I have had a few zap me in the office before but just to be safe you know Safety First use a rubberized a handle screwdriver and just touch it on the top metal metal you know that should discharge if your capacitor has you know it’s still holding a charge honestly most of them within like as a couple of seconds you know it’s it’s done now that we’ve been safe and we’ve discharged and we know our disconnect has been pulled to cut the high side power now we can remove our capacitor uh after we take pictures of the wires here on top so we know where everything goes all right now here we’ve kind of just sort of looped it in on this uh yours should probably look much neater but now we know where all the wires are going here and you know this is our relay that’s over here on our hard start which is what I was talking about before uh hard starts are only for your compressor and it sends the simplest way to put it is it sends a boost on Startup solely for your compressor it’s to ease the load on Startup for the compressor and there’s so you know they do call them compressor Savers at hard start that sort of thing so when you see that in there that’s not your main capacitor for the unit these are only in play for a couple of seconds just to give that compressor a boost all right so once we’ve removed all of the wires from there we have our capacitor removed now we’re going to install our new capacitor so remember you know obviously this isn’t super secure Edge make sure yours is secured back in its bracket you’ve screwed it in all that good stuff we’re going to replace wire for wire what you pulled off before so we’re gonna you know go ahead and set them on here as they were so we’re going to go ahead and set them on here as they were and uh that’ll pretty much be it so wire for wire I know where each one of these went because I was smart and I took a picture right so Brian so brown wire from the fan motor compressor wire hard start kit harbster kids and since it’s on the same terminal I’ve had people ask me before does it matter which one they go on no it does not as long as it’s on the same terminal so you can put it pretty much anywhere it’s going to fit on there just make sure it is on the one that it was on before and there we go so we’re all connected up now we know where everything goes we put everything back in the correct spot now we’re just going to make sure everything’s tight and secure in our units we’re going to put our electrical panel back on and then walk over and turn on our power to the unit and make sure that everything is working great all right guys well thanks so much for joining me today if you have any questions just leave them in the comments below and I will get to them as soon as possible have a great day and enjoy the rest of your week bye guys thank you

hello again this is crystal from open to public hvac parts and today we’re going to learn how to test some limits and figure out how we’re going to check and see if they’re good if they’re bad or maybe some other potential things that could be going wrong and they might actually be doing their job so let’s check it out for a lot of you you probably have some sort of volt meter obviously this is a clamp meter and i have some other nifty things on here i can use but you probably have a continuity on there on your somewhere the easiest way to check and make sure that these limits are good and you can have several different kinds of limits that might look the same or a little different this one is what we call a rollout switch which as you can see it’s got that manual reset button right there um these are near your burners and the job of that is if you get flame roll out which is you know indication of a crack in your heat exchanger no bueno when that happens it’s going to cause this to overheat and that button is going to pop but right now what it should be doing is it should be getting continuity with little to no resistance we’re going to put our leads on each side of these and try to make sure when you’re checking with leads you want to get these edges to get a good reading so that beep that’s a good thing and we’re reading 0.2 which is basically little to no resistance that’s great and anything under one is good i mean some of the older ones might read a little higher but a point at 0.3.4 totally fine uh same with these so every single one of these they’re gonna go in line to let your furnace know hey everything’s cool keep running they all should be closed and there’s a few exceptions when you get into air handlers and electric heating and whatnot but with these they should always have continuity so what is a good way to tell when a limit is bad and this doesn’t work for all limits um we’ll get to this special guy in a minute your rollout switch kind of answer a few questions about why this is different but for now if you obviously if you don’t have this little handy jumper like i do which has a double-sided connection um you know male male connection with a joint metal piece in the center fantastic so if you don’t have these you know you can put a jumper here maybe some gator clips between your female quick connects and uh figure out if that limit is the culprit check your automatic ones first which these can be on your blower housing some of the older models have them on a plate that’s kind of above the burners and there’s these kind that are on your either on your blower housing or again somewhere inside but instead of having that reset button is what we call an automatic limit so it’s not going to have that reset button on it because it’s a secondary safety switch instead of your primary but you do have one more limit that we call a high limit switch now some high limit switches they can look similar to this some of them have maybe a longer butt yeah big booty duties a little longer you know i’ve seen some linux models that have some similar ones like this or they have a little wonky base that’s similar to this but the legs kind of go longer but yeah there are some similarities let’s take a look at the high limit switch now a high limit switch you’re not going to see this back part of it here right away um because this is actually the probe that goes back into your heat exchanger what you’re going to see is from the front some of yours you know might be flipped this way but it’s going to have two prongs here and it’s going to be mounted on your heat exchanger usually back behind the gas valve somewhere on the metal wall you’ll see these two prongs these like the other limit switches are going to be closed right away so again when you’re testing your limit switches this one should be closed right right some of these uh i’ve seen some york uh really bizarre where they’re five inch um that’s not very common usually most of them i’ve seen are a three inch pro and there’s your your disc limit right here which causes the connection to open if it overheats some of them are seven inches i’ve even seen some that are 11 inches some older goodmans have those amana once you’ve tested all these for continuity if you’re not getting continuity with some of them they could be bad and normally they are it’s good to check just to make sure that maybe your meter’s not broken or something like that also especially with these types of limits if you’re able to get continuity after thumping them they’re bad it’s time to get a new one so if you’re testing it you don’t get continuity and you thump it and all of a sudden it’s getting continuity go ahead and replace that because that again is no bueno testing limit switches can be frustrating at times because sometimes they can test good and then the same problem happens where your furnace cuts off um after it stays on for say a couple hours or maybe you’re having some sort of intermittent functionality where it’ll come on for a few days or a week and then it’ll all of a sudden do it again where it causes the machine to cut off so there’s other ways to test around that a common way that techs do this is these are going to be normally closed which means voltage is going to go through it’s going to have no resistance so it’s going to go through all the lines to the board and tell the board all systems go a way to get around that just to see what’s going on if you’re testing it you know boop and you’re getting continuity but you’re still getting say the board blinking and telling you open limit switch fortunately there’s some models i know of a few linuxes that will just say open limit switch but it won’t tell you which one because you can use these little gator clip guys to jump around it or in a minute i’ll show you how to heat test it and see what it does pull your wires off because you know they’re going to be connected here on either side great so you’re going to remove those wires and what this is doing is closing the circuit yourself here we can just kind of hook our gator clips on there and these the next ones are super annoying because they’ve got these little insulated taps on it which is super fun to try to hook anything on and now we’ve effectively closed our circuit so it’s going to bypass your limit switch while you’re testing do not leave it like this it’s a safety hazard so we can do it this way or if you do have one of these or you’re a tech or you just bought these for funsies um that’s what this does and it makes it super easy to connect them on either side unless of course you have these plastic ones in which case you’re not going to be able to fit their big booties in there now that we know how to jump around these there’s an important thing you need to note before you go ahead and run it through the cycle most units on the blower housing have a safety switch you need to make sure that that safety switch is depressed whether you tape it whether you have someone hold it down before you turn the thermostat to heat or for some of you guys that are comfortable with jumping r to w for your heat at the board you can do that after you have it jumped around unfortunately the only way to see which limit is bad is to bypass each and every one bypass this one you know bypass your limit switch usually this is secondary but some primaries can look like this bypass your high limit and do what you need to do systematically one by one to find that bad limit switch once you kind of think you found the culprit you can take it one step further just to double check that it is actually that limit switch and i’m gonna show you how and bonus you get to play with fire and just before we forget make sure that before you start testing you completely reset your power before you take down your door switch and all that okay now kids obligatory don’t play with fire don’t burn yourself it’s good to have something like this to kind of hold it out so you don’t burn yourself so basically what’s in here is a thermal disc with a pin um when this gets overheated what happens is that disc pops up kind of bubbles and what that does is it causes the pin to go up through here which opens the circuit no longer allowing your electricity to come through and it’s not going to reset until it cools down every single one of these has a different temperature and usually you can tell what temperature it is like this one here is l 49.

um if it’s a really low number like that it almost always means celsius especially with limit switches so just kind of go into google and pop in what 49 celsius is to fahrenheit and there you go so if you need to purchase one you know what temperature your sits at some of them have it along the lip here and it can be a little hard to read some of them on these little small guys we’ll have it printed here on the side which makes it easier on the black part but a lot of them they put on this little ring right here and it is super hard to read so that’s funsies in any case what we’re gonna do here and don’t don’t do what i’m doing here like a little mini torch just use a little hand lighter one of those ones that you use for lighting candles or cigarettes or whatever and we’re going to heat it up until that thermal disc causes it to open so just exercise caution here and we’re gonna light it with this one i don’t think we’re able to hear it here let’s just see what we got going on yeah it’s open okay so you should not be reading continuity here when you put your leads on the metal if you are reading continuity after you’ve you are 100 sure that you’ve put enough fire on it just like that where we started to get some blue ring around there um then you know it’s bad that’s another good way of telling if it’s getting stuck so after we have let that cool down a little bit you should hear the pin let go which means the disc is going to go flat again closing that circuit and there you go you got continuity it’s going to be the same thing with these roll out switches they’re going to have a higher temperature tolerance for those we go as you can see right there this is why it’s called a manual rollout switch it’s a manual reset out switch um these are put into place um for a very important reason if it detects roll out it’s going to pop which means you or the technician has to go up to the furnace and manually reset it we’re gonna give it a minute to cool down and then i’ll show you what i’m talking about okay so now that we’ve taken a minute to kind of let it cool down you should be able to depress it and you hear that click you should be able to push that in and hear and feel a click if these are bad which they don’t go out very often unless your machine’s pretty old they’re going to keep popping like constantly and that means it’s just not able to stay secure and it’s letting go um but more often than not and when i mean that i mean like 90 of cases that i’ve seen it’s usually doing its job and we’ll get to that in just a minute also important to note a high limit switch can also be doing its job so when the board gives you a code for high limit just like the other limits you’re going to take the wires off and jump them together if it does work just fine again do not leave the wires like that it’s important that you don’t it’s a safety hazard uh it’s a fire hazard so don’t burn your house down if your high limit switch is bad a pretty good indicator is even when you reset the power on your unit and let it sit for a little while if you cut it back on and immediately both your main blower motor and your inducer motor come on this is usually the culprit also the board will kind of let you know hey a bad high limit switch so just to review the two wires coming off of your high limit whether it be your high limit your roll out when it’s your disc limits you’re going to remove those obviously make sure the power is off before you do this please you’re going to connect these two bypassing the need for your limit switch to already have it closed in the unit there we go now we’ve closed the line see if it works just like normal now this doesn’t always work for diagnosis and we’ll get to why so a lot of people are going to have an upflow application which means your blower is going to be here it’s going to go up through here past your heat exchanger it’s going to hit your coils which are up here your evaporator coils now this is in your closet if you’re in a closet application um if you’re down flow you’re going to take this and flip it which means the air is going to blow under your home through floor vents instead of up through to your attic or wherever your ductwork is running for the supply and here you can see pretty typically um your high limit switch which obviously looks like a normal disc limit there which high limit switches can look like that um it’s usually going to be and as you can see your heat exchanger here okay that high limit is going to be along that wall usually behind your gas valve this will be your inducer motor which should be the very first thing that comes on when you start your machine your pressure switch and then your rollout switches should be along your burners and depending on how many burners you have will be how many rollout switches you’re going to have and again you can have you know disc limits on your blower whether it’s secondary i’ve even seen some primary on here which is really bizarre but ah engineers so say you are getting a code for open high limit switch you jump around it everything seems to be working boom you’re like all right it’s this part and again you’re gonna look for that temperature on there this is a pretty high um temperature high limit switch it’s 240.

most of them are kind of lower around the 130 to 180 range but if you do jump around that seems to work everyone’s happy you buy a new one you put it in there and then a few hours later to a day or two later it does it again boom high limit switch open probably if we think statistically that’s not going to be the case which what does that mean okay really frustrating when again this thing is opening and your board is saying that it’s opening but it doesn’t mean your board is bad it means that the high limit is doing its job and your furnace cabin is overheating what that means is you probably have low airflow here and the most common reason for low air flow is your evaporator coils which we can’t see on this page it’s going to be in a separate encased box up here some of you a lot of you have a shape coils some in and maybe a slant depending on if you’ve got a wall unit something like that um what that means is you need to clean your evaporator coils and 99.99 percent of the time the people that come in here need to clean their evaporator coils and i can’t stress this enough because i get a lot of people that come in and they purchase one of these and lo and behold it wasn’t that begin with you might not see them back right away it might be a little bit but they’re having the same problem and their go-to is always the circuit board i can’t tell you how many times circuit boards i’ve seen come in here and tested that were not bad um that’s always someone’s first thought and after about 15 years you know really after about 10 years that’s you know kind of a valid thing to think but it’s usually not right and you’ll know some indications we’ll go over those in a different video the point of it is if there’s low airflow it means well nothing can breathe in there your motor can’t breathe your blower it’s not pulling enough air through there to cool everything down enough to keep your machine on yeah those are your machines going morning morning when that happens it’s the obvious here you’re gonna need to get into your evaporator coils and clean them and a lot of coils they’re going to be in that separate box whether you’re at a horizontal um application you know something like that depending on which way your ductwork goes right and it’ll be in a separate box so sometimes there’s going to be screws and whatnot you’re going to have to take out of that housing um and we’ll we’ll go over this later i can kind of show you what an evaporator coil looks like and how to clean them and all that fun stuff but uh needless to say what you’re gonna do is clean those and there’s some awesome youtube tutorials on there it’s a little bit of a pain in the butt if you think you’re not up for it just call a technician have them come out and clean it up but i can guarantee you your machine is going to function a thousand times better so if you’re kind of puzzled over something like that you’re having the same issues that’s probably your problem so i mean honestly it’s really wise to keep your evaporator coils clean somewhere around every two to three years give or take and a really good way to check that out is check your blower housing um which is gonna be that guy down there you’re seeing a lot of crud in your motor kind of around you got some some smooch dirt hair relent gross stuff or in the blower wheel or here then that’s a really good indication you need to clean it also on your filters if you’re noticing you’re having to replace your filters more often than usual or if they’re getting dirty much faster than you think they should be it’s probably time to check on those evaporator coils so unlike your outdoor coils your indoor coils can be cleaned once every few years that kind of gives you an idea of things you need to look for the functionality of these these uh limits and how they work and these little guys here your rollout switches when they pop like that if you do replace them and guess what the new one does the same thing then again that’s probably indication that they are doing their job and it’s overheating whether that be flame roll out which is bad means it’s time to get a new heat exchanger and without having a combustion analyzer which is a tool to just measure carbon monoxide and whatnot see if it’s got safe levels because everybody has a little bit of carbon monoxide in their home whether they like to think about it or not um if you’re not going to bring someone out there to do that it’s really good to get a carbon monoxide detector preferably one that has a low parts per million detector and really under 10 would be awesome they’re not too expensive and it’s kind of peace of mind but i mean just getting one is a good idea kind of keep those near your return air vents in your home that kind of summarizes a few things on these guys don’t always assume that they’re bad if it is popping but not like i said jump around them it seems to be functioning there’s a chance this is bad but it can also be doing its job so if you do replace them and you’re noticing that it’s still doing the same thing probably need to look into that further so here we go limit switches for videos like these and any more just subscribe to our channel and check out some more of these bye guys

hey everyone this is Crystal from open to public HVAC school and today we’re going to talk about gas valves how they work in the order of operations in your furnace and how you can test them to see if this is your problem so sorry we are here at the furnace as you can see this gas valve looks different than the one that we looked at earlier also this gas valve has a secondary wire here that goes to ground so yours can have that as well and as you can see even though it has all of these and what look like different letters as you can see you’re only using two wires here which is just a normal single stage gas valve so when you’re testing a gas valve I know it sounds really dumb but follow your gas line over here there’s your Flex and you’re gonna go up see if I can get a good angle here that is your gas stop uh some people call it a gas [ __ ] as well um but for the most part I just say gas stop um make sure that that is open that’s your open and close that’s basically your shut off valve so make sure that is open and that it is on also again sounds dumb but make sure that your switch is on sometimes if you have someone service it they might forget to do that or might not be getting gas to your unit and it’s not on so let’s knock the dumb stuff out first now when we’re testing this which we’ll do in just a second it’s better to test it with the wires off of the gas valve so that way you don’t get any strange readings so we’re going to remove these we’re going to connect them to our volt meter and again we’re going to set this to volts ac I’m going to check and make sure we are getting our 24 volts to the gas valve so first thing we’re going to check to make sure it is actually getting the correct voltage from the board should getting voltage to the gas valve and just a moment there we go there’s our 26 volts to the gas valve or 24.

and a cut because we don’t have gas in the unit right now so you should be getting continuous 24 volts to your unit if you’re not there’s something going on there with the board not sending signal like it should be right now I’m just bypassing the thermostat here because the thermostat is kind of far for me to have to go over to but there’s our second try there which it’ll try one more time and then it’ll go into a lockout but that’s what you should be seeing and that way you know that the board is sending power to the gas valve and that the gas valve might possibly not be opening like it should always keep in mind that anything you tape down or jump together or jump around bypass like I did with the thermostat always make sure that you remove those and you untape because that is a safety and those need to function as normal otherwise it’s a big fire safety hazard so make sure after we’re done testing we remove the tape and we remove our jumper wires just to make sure that you or you and your family are safe remember just as a reminder before you can test your door is a safety make sure that you do have this taped or you’re holding this or someone is holding this and make sure that you or somebody is either pushing this in and remember this is 120 volts so be extremely cautious uh make sure it’s being taped in or you’re holding it in here on the plastic or someone else’s before the call from the thermostat you cannot be calling for heat when you push this in it will fail okay guys we’re gonna pull out our good old trusty meter here and again yours might not look like this like we’ve mentioned in the other videos but all we’re going to do is we’re going to set it to our bolts AC for this test now most at least somewhat newer gas valves look similar to this or there’s a Honeywell that has a plastic Dome to it but most single stage gas valves are going to have these two wires that go to it which is your 24 volt and your on off switch so there is no easy way to test and make sure that you are getting gas through as a homeowner to see if the solenoid is behaving like it should now if you know you are getting voltage here you know your control board is doing what it’s supposed to and should be sending a continuous 24 volts if you are getting that and it’s just going to go into its normal lockout like it was before you know you’ve got power at this point we’re going to have to check and see if the gas is going through the valve now the easiest way to do this is as you can see sometimes you’re going to have a lot of this putty this glue leak lock and stuff usually what they call it to make your life easier you’re going to need to remove your gas flex line here first no matter if you’ve got hard pipe that comes through which is code you should you should not have that flex line coming into your unit but once you unscrew this what you want to undo is come over here on either side of your manifold you’re going to have where it’s screwed in so you see where this goes all the way around here I want to take this whole thing off and that’s because you’re going to need leverage in order to remove this hard line from the gas valve because it’s going to be stuck on there really good if you have a vice that is wonderful to use to get this hard pipe out of your valve so once you remove all of this again unscrew the entire manifold section here and for testing it’s actually good to leave that on there so you can see if you are actually getting gas pressure through your orifices and you can’t see them here until you actually remove it but there’s going to be some little brass orifices there where the gas is going to come through into your in shot burners here to light and these cannot be clogged so that is something else we’re looking for when we’re testing or diagnosing a bad gas valve is making sure that yes one it is opening here fully opening for the gas to get through and two that you do not have a clog somewhere Within These orifices or essentially in this little bitty area right here between your plates you can see this little time area here okay always make sure that those are lined up as well even if this first orifice is clogged nothing else will come through here so remember even if it’s just this one that’s clogged these will not light because it has to go through this first section here in order to allow more gas through for these to light as well so keep that in mind these can also get clogged so you’re going to remove this you can take a paper clip or something in that little orifice that’s in there and you know move it around clean it out once you remove this whole thing here I’ll show you over at the um I’ll show you over at the parts counter how we’re gonna check that out but once you remove everything here you’re gonna blow into the area where your gas is going to go in if you don’t want to do that or you want someone else to do that because you are going to have to blow air into this to see if the gas is going to be going through all of this so your air should be traveling all the way through and you should feel the air coming out of these little small orifices here so if you’re not feeling that air coming out that means that your gas valve is not opening like it should Therefore your gas valve is bad so remember obviously remember you have your power shut off please remember to cut your 120 volt power um remove Flex first unscrew your manifold remove this whole entire thing here and then first blow into it and make sure that the airflow is coming out you’re going to keep that on there your 24 volts because you’re going to need to be able to have the 24 bolts on there in order to actually open the gas valve up so do make sure you are either jumping 24 volts into here or you have a way to go from here to jump it to where you’re testing it because you will have to have 24 volts in order for this to open like it should so also make sure you have 24 volts going here so that this solenoid may be necessary contacts to open after we do that and we remove the valve with the manifold we open it with the 24 volts and we blow into it if you do feel air coming out of each one of these orifices you’ve got something else going on so one more thing to mention that could be your gas valve is a short so if you have a shorted gas valve best way to check and see if it is your valve that’s actually popping your fuses if you can’t locate the short in your heating cycle what I would do is unplug your gas valve now remember this can only be happening in heat if you are getting a short and usually it will happen on your control board if you don’t have one in line to your gas valve but you’re popping the fuse on your control board you’ve tried everything you’ve tried removing the thermostat wires you’ve been going down the list to figure out where that short could be it could be on your gas valve so aside from this not opening like it should and you’re not getting air coming through and through those orifices like we talked about when we’re checking to make sure that our gas is actually getting into those burners if you’re also getting a short it could be this so if you do remove your wires and turn on the heat and voila there is no short and there you have it your gas valve has shorted so hopefully this has been helpful for all of you when diagnosing a gas valve when you do go to replace a gas valve if you’ve diagnosed it properly and you figure out that yes this is the problem make sure that you don’t put a lot of that leak lock because technically gas pipe should be sealed that black pipe you don’t necessarily need to use leak lock but you can just make sure you’re not using a ton of that because that stuff can actually get in your gas valve and Gunk it up and then think of how confusing that would be if you just replaced a new gas valve and all of a sudden it’s not working so just keep that in mind when you do get a new gas valve make sure you don’t put a lot of that on the threading you can put it on the male side and then I would avoid putting it on the female side if you do just put a nice little light layer there so when you go to install it also don’t over tighten it it’s tempting I know but trust me when I say this is low gas pressure so tighten it to where it’s secure but don’t over tighten it when you install it well there you have it that’s what we’re looking for when we’re checking for a bad gas valve just let me know down in the comments below if you have any other questions and as always thank you for joining me today and I hope that you have a wonderful weekend bye guys

hey guys this is Crystal with open to public HVAC school today we’re going to talk about pressure switches and how to test them as well as what else it could be if you have replaced your pressure switch and you’re still getting the same error it looks good we are here at our inducer motor and our pressure switch now your pressure switch can look a lot different and I will show you guys what those could look like this is one no not always they do have some viewer units that look like this but for the most part I’ve seen a lot of older unit pressure switches that have this big metal Style um make

sure first and foremost before we even test anything in here this is your hose here and that’s going to go back into the inducer motor section so again this is a much different design it is a carrier design for the most part you’re going to be able to see that connection where the hose hooks up to so make sure that one your connection is good back here on one end of your hose and that this connection is also snug if you’re noticing you’re able to remove the tube easily what you can do is either purchase a new tube and it doesn’t have to look exactly like the original as long as it’s designed for

an inducer motor you can either do that or if you have enough tube what you can do is cut it back a little bit and reattach it so that it becomes snug against this nipple here um just to ensure that it’s not a loose connection or you know maybe your hose is starting to go bad and uh just getting old so double check that and then with the most electrical electrical loves it really snug connection here so make sure that your two line through connections here are snug they’re pushed in and if there’s not any cattywampus Miss a new word in front of there and then from there we can start process of

elimination so a common mistake I see even technicians do is they jump around the pressure switch and all of a sudden everything works and they think that’s it so they replace the pressure switch and then they’re having that same error code which a lot of them are say three flashes um there I think one is 31 I’ve seen that’ll say pressure switch stuck open now what that means is it doesn’t mean the pressure switch is bad the pressure switch could actually be doing its job so just to give you an idea as we were talking about a pressure switch can look different and this probably looks familiar to

many of you because a lot of the modern day pressure switches look like this or some of you have Honeywell which are kind of larger you know more big boys but the important thing to do when you are purchasing one of these if you do discover it’s bad is to make sure that the negative pressure lines up this is a negative 0.6 pressure fall make sure that that matches and make sure that if it does say PR you get a pressure switch that says p r or pressure rise not pressure fall if you’re wanting to replace your tube like we were talking about a minute ago at the furnace you can buy these sort of things

and you have to make sure that it is rated for the correct pressures and obviously it needs to be a material that can withstand a little bit of heat so you can probably find a little smaller than what we’ve got in store here but we do carry these and it is something that you can buy to replace if you want to it’s placed there as a Direction for the technician to go knowing that what that is saying is it’s somewhere in your vent system or your pressure system so that’s why he would know to look at the pressure switch making sure all the connections are good the hose is not clogged which you can

remove these you can remove the whole thing here and you can just kind of blow through that tube double check there’s nothing in there obviously remove this before you blow into the tube because how are you going to be able to get it out of the other side um so make sure that’s good it’s snug you’ve blown it out it’s still doing the same thing that way we know okay it is either the pressure switch or something else going on so your inducer Motors can look different I have a common style here some of you might be saying oh yeah mine looks like that or something similar this pooling wheel could be

plastic on yours um see this this one here has a Goodman part number on it and this is a pretty common seller but as you can see on this style inducer the nipple here that can become clogged is actually on this part of the inducer motor instead of plugged into the other compartment for the carrier style design so just to let you know if you see this mounted up in there and which this one’s definitely seen some bad water damage come in here if you see something like this in there this is in fact your inducer motor and we’ll go over how to test these later but that could also be a culprit if you’re

getting the pressure switch stuck open code this just gives you an idea of how the same Parts can look so different anyway moving on so now that we know everything is connected correctly we’re going to turn on our unit and technicians my dual Port manometer with a pressure switch tester is on the front so we will do a separate episode with you on how to use or how to test a pressure switch with your dual Port manometer and pressure switch tester for now we’re going to do some simple things that homeowners can do to figure out if it is actually the pressure switch so let’s take a look now that we

are sure our door switch is suppressed properly before we turn on our heating to test we’re going to have our multimeter and yours does not have to have microfarad like mine just make sure you have it set to your ohms and your continuity here because what we’re going to be looking for is we’re going to make sure that we do have a line through so that the board knows that everything is hunky-dory and we can keep the heat on so we’re going to be placing our leads and uh double checking that we are on the correct setting before we do so okay very first thing that should be happening here is that inducer

motor should be coming on which it is so we now know the inducer motor is coming on now to do extended testing just to make sure it’s not the inducer motor um you’re going to need there we go now ours is going to fail out a couple of times because obviously it’s going to try to ignite and it’s not going to so when this comes on what it’s doing is it’s pulling a vacuum it’s a negative pressure that’s is going to essentially pull the contacts close um once that happens you should be able to read continuity because it is in fact making contact for that line through now ours is going to try to lie

the igniter is going to come on and normally that is a dead giveaway that the pressure switch is fine if your igniter is actually coming on so now what we’re going to do is put one lead here and then one lead here you can hear that be so you know there is continuity when we’re looking at our meter if it is in fact below point eight then there is little to no resistance and we know that those contact points are making a good connection therefore continuity now you could do a voltage I believe it’s called a voltage drop test but all that’s doing is that’s checking to see if your voltage is being

impeded um you know because the contact points are corroded and they’re not making a good connection so there’s our three tries that the system is essentially trying to do once it fails on that third try it’s going to go into a lockout phase or a purge any carbon monoxide or you know toxins that are in the air and once it does that it will go into a lockout mode um if you’re getting a lockout code what that means is you need to reset power so ours is a light switch yours might have something different now when this is off you should not read continuity it should be open just like this so if you

put your leads on here and you are still getting a beep you’re getting continuity your pressure switch is stuck close therefore it is bad now you’ll see a lot of videos that talk about jumping around the pressure switch and here’s the deal you could jump around your pressure switch and all you’d be doing is you’re taking these wires and you are jumping them together and we’ll show you what that looks like in just a moment all that’s doing is it is providing a line through telling the board that it is making connection or contact and everything is fine and should proceed to lighting the igniter

or rather turning the igniter on and then sending the signal to the gas valve to open the issue with doing that is it may or may not tell you if the pressure switch is bad and we’ll talk about that in just a moment but for now let me show you how you’re going to jump around these wires so we can test and see if possibly it could be the pressure switch that is bad so what we are doing here is we are essentially making a line through so since our two connectors are here what we want to do is remove those wires and since it’s aligned through the main thing we want to be concerned about is making sure

that this isn’t going to short somewhere so it’s really nice to have an insulated jumper like this when you’re testing but in certain situations obviously that’s not going to fit so what you could do is if you have some Gator Clips again this is not high voltage so it’s okay to put these thin gauge wires on here because it is a line through so what we’re going to do is connect to one line and then when we are jumping around the pressure switch here’s the important thing to remember this line is not closed on Startup meaning those contacts are not making a connection when the unit first starts and

see this is where our safety comes into play if the pressures are not correct then the pressure switch is going to stay open so that those contact points don’t in fact make connection and cause issues this is extremely important because no one wants to die from carbon monoxide poisoning so that being said this all has to be unrestricted this needs to be able to be closed based off of the pressures listed on the pressure switch now unfortunately there are some that do not list them and you have to go online and find out based off of the part number what those pressures could be and some of them

are extremely frustrating to find so that is what our water column pressure is and you will see pressure fall and pressure rise or PF and PR and I’ll explain a little more at the counter as to what that means as far as pressure switch goes just know that this is under negative pressure and that is what is going to pull that closed meaning your inducer motor has to be working properly in order to pull that vacuum it and make connection so when that happens the point we’re trying to get to here is that this cannot be connected on Startup for that reason you need to wait until this comes on let it

come on maybe a few seconds and then we’re going to jump here and once we jump here then it pulls the pressure switch closed otherwise known as it isn’t making a line through and that is what we call bypassing the pressure switch again this might not tell you if it is bad because often the pressure switch is not bad but for simplicity’s sake this is something we’re going to test to make sure by process of elimination it could in fact be the pressure switch or at least that we’re heading in the correct direction we’ve jumped around the pressure switch and everything comes on it works it’s good to

go that’s where we would actually check the continuity we would connect everything back up the same way and then we’re going to put our meter to continuity so once that is pulled closed we make sure that it is making a good connection and it does have low resistance so once we know that we have checked both of those we at least know we can rule out the fact that it is making a connection and even though we’ve jumped around it and it’s working it could possibly be something else so an easy way for that is to first check for continuity is making good connection and it is reading low resistance to

me even if you were to jump around it and it works there could be something else at play now if you do go ahead and think it’s old I’m going to replace it let’s just go ahead and do it anyway so if you do replace that and then you have the same issue you know that it’s either a restriction somewhere in the line so as I’ve said you want to take your hose off blow into that there is a connector here that is going to slide onto it’s called a nipple uh just make sure that is also free and clear if everything is free there’s no clog that you can think of the connections are good and you know the switch

it’s it’s a possibility but you know and you’re pretty sure that that’s not bad when you get it then you’re going to start looking to your inducer motor or potentially clog in your vent height maybe an elbow or something has become disjointed it can happen over the years or if you’ve recently had roof work your cap could have gotten crushed in an animal might have made its home a couple of the things that it could be if it’s not your pressure switch so for Simplicity sake what we’re doing here is we’re showing you what you could look for before deciding to purchase a pressure switch they don’t

go bad as often as you would think even with age I’ve tested many that were old that actually were functioning just fine now replacing older Parts you know I can definitely understand wanting to do that but this what we’re doing here is we’re diagnosing to make sure that we’re not purchasing parts that we don’t need once we’re fairly certain that this is making a good connection and we’re going to connect everything back up we’ve done our tests we suspect it might be something else we’re going to let it run its cycle during this point this inducer motor should never shut off if this is making a

lot of noise and you can’t physically turn it like this your bearings are probably locked up and it’s time for a new inducer motor we’ll get into checking inducer Motors later but for today this is a good start to see if it could be this or something else so if we arm ourselves with the knowledge of I need to make sure this is clear need to make sure there’s no clog and I need to make sure these connections are tight everything going in line like this limit switch here and not all units are going to have this this is something they’ve put in line extra here to cut the power to the pressure switch

and then we’ve also checked for low resistance and continuity basically then we know that this is potentially doing its job and it could be something to do with your pressure or your vent system as always thank you guys so much for joining me today I hope that I’ve helped all of you today in understanding how this works and what else the problem could be if you have replaced your pressure switch if you feel like I haven’t covered something or you have a question just leave it in the comments below and I will get to it as soon as possible thank you so much for joining us today and I hope you have

a wonderful day and a great rest of your week take care guys

there are a couple of different ways you can check and see if an igniter is good or bad uh for example if you know your pressure system is good um everything’s pulling closes like it should your inducer Motors coming on uh your pressure switch is pulling in and it gets up to the point of the igniter is supposed to glow and Jack crap happens well it might be this guy and I can tell a few things to check for okay so one way to test and see if an igniter is good is we’re going to check the ohms or the resistance on your meter so again make sure you have the settings set correctly uh for your ohms

and we’re going to put one lead on each this plug has male connectors so you might not get a super perfect reading but just make sure that each lead touching on the metal and we are getting 40 which is good you want it between 30 35 to 75 so that’s one way to check it and I’ll show you how to check it inside the unit the number one thing and I’ll repeat this in a lot of videos you’ll hear is checking for a fault code um so before we even jump to the igniter possibly being the issue um this one has a sight glass but uh it’ll have a fault code somewhere on the panel the unit uh some are inside some

are actually on the control board but here you can see that we have a bunch of different fault codes so if you’re getting something along the lines of uh proving failure fail to ignite if you’re getting this code then it could possibly be your igniter so we’ll take a look at how you can check and see if it’s the igniter by checking the voltage when you remove your panel from the furnace where your control board is uh there will be a door switch and this door switch before you can even test this has to be depressed um if it’s not it’s a safety issue and the unit will not turn on it will immediately

fail uh this has to be pushed in before you turn on the heat or the AC okay now that we’ve established that we needed on volts ac and how to change it over on your own meter if you need to let’s get to it turn on the heat and I’ll show you what we’re looking for as you can see I have unplugged um the igniter connector from the power cord uh this might not be as easy for you because this one had female connectors that I could just go ahead and put my leads into as you can see we still have it 2 volts AC C and uh we’re going to go ahead and turn it on go through the cycle and make sure that we have

120 volts uh this line is going to be your neutral and this line is going to be your 120 uh they need to touch both to get an accurate reading do not test it against ground it needs to be touching both of those cables okay we’ve got the heat turned on now and once everything’s gone through this cycle boom 122 volts so we know that the cord is sending power to the igniter in a minute it’s going to fail because it’s going to fail to ignite but this is an easy way there’s our fail so this is an easy way to check and make sure that you are actually getting voltage to your igniter once you see that

you do have voltage going to your igniter Safety First always make sure that you untape the door switch do not leave it depressed like that it is a safety issue your house could burn down oh it sounds so dramatic but true make sure that you keep that untaped ah he

foreign ERS and HVAC technicians today what we’re going to learn about is how to test a capacitor run capacitor and a dual capacitor to find out if it’s bad now what we’re looking at is we’re actually going to test these under load so we can figure out and narrow it down more simply that way we can roll out a bunch of different factors that it could be especially when your system is not coming on so let’s take a look and find out everything you need to do and what you will need okay now remember and this goes for technicians as well especially since you get out there and you’re kind of working on someone’s unit by yourself for the first time we tend to forget about basics just as a side note to homeowners make sure that you have your volt meter now you’re going to need a clamp meter for this test because we’re going to need to take an amp draw you don’t have to have this more expensive meter you can get some I think Harbor Freight has them for around 15 at something that’s simple that’s going to do an amp draw and your volt reading this has the capability of also reading microfarad but since we’re learning how to do this without the microfarad setting on your meter we’re going to ignore that for today so back to the basics when you get there and you do put your meter to check the capacitor always make sure that you do have power it sounds ridiculous but you need to check you should have something out there like this and remember not all units are the same but you need to make sure that you have both your 24 volts on your low side voltage your contactor is in fact engaging or pulling in and that you do have 240 volts coming in and 240 volts coming out just to show you what an Engaged contactor looks like let me pull my power over here on your contactor you’re going to have two Thin wires these are your 24 volts or your low voltage that sends the control voltage or low voltage out to the unit to let it know it needs to come on so there’s one side and remember your contactor might not look like this it could have just the one hole and one that has a solid leg or a shunt leg here you can also have your 24 volts just on one side so remember this might not look exactly like yours when it is receiving the signal for the 24 volts this will pull in and as you can hear it makes a fairly loud click it’s an audible clip if that is not pulling in on your unit you do not have your low side power coming out to the contactor so as homeowners where do you put your leads in order to check for power from your disconnect going into your unit there should be 230 volts here to 40 volts already so when that 24 volts is sent out to the unit that is when this actually engages and those contact points connect it arcs and burns and then the 240 comes through into the unit to turn on your compressor and your fan motor so this has to engage for anything will come on so if absolutely nothing is coming on always check power first before moving on to the capacitor this will save you a lot of time when you’re checking for power you not only need to check for power coming in to your contactor you need to also make sure that there is power coming out because even if these are pulling in and these are engaged it doesn’t mean it’s making a good connection to allow that entire 240 volts to come out so you need to make sure that you are checking for this and here’s how for this test um these are going to be color coded on most meters you’re going to turn your meter over to volts ac now some meters have a bunch of different numbers just look for the volts ac symbol and just crank it up to whatever the highest number is that’s on there we’re going to turn on our power and what we’re going to do when we’re testing with our leads is we need to have one on each one of these poles okay we’re not checking like this for this to find out if we’re getting power in and power out we’re going to do one here and one here and know if you’re asking about color here that doesn’t matter uh just one here and one here and then we’re going to turn on our power now remember if you have pulled your disconnect box you know you’ve pulled it out or if yours is kind of like a breaker where you turn it on and off this isn’t going to work you need to make sure the power is on before you do this test so put that back in there obviously Safety First make sure you’re not actually touching any part of this or any part that is the live voltage so just be safe one lead on each and there we go should be around 240 to 45 volts ac so now as I mentioned before if this is not pulling in you can stop right there you don’t even need to check just yet until you fix what’s going on here and that is this has got to engage in order for your system to come on and function normally this is your thermostat saying hey it’s you know we’re calling for air conditioning so let’s go ahead and turn the unit on so if you see this is not pulled in you’ve got a break somewhere in your 24 volt line or your thermostat is not calling for cooling like it should okay so we apply are 24 volts now if you just want to check and you are checking for 24 volts on our system remember again yours might be just on one side it might look different that’s fine but we’re just checking 27 bolts perfect somewhere between 26 to 28.

okay so now that we know we are getting our 24 volts ac we know we are getting our 230 or 240 volts in now we need to see if the contactor is allowing the 240 volts out so we’re going to put our leads again one on each side doesn’t matter which side you do it as long as one touches each side you can also put them down here on these poles I’m just doing this because it’s easier for me to do this so while I’m pushing the power button okay so now we’re going to hit our power perfect 245 volts we are good to go on that end so now we can rule this out and I know this this is a we’re testing our capacitor video but it’s important to touch on these sort of things just so we don’t waste your time when you’re diagnosing hey guys remember math we’re going to have to use that today because if you do not have the convenience of a volt meter that can read microfarads we’re going to have to do a simple math formula and an amp draw so our formula to figure out microfarad now remember this is kind of an ish it’s not perfect but we’ll definitely know if your capacitor is bad it’s going to be our amps you know let’s just say something like 7.8 you know amps we’re going to multiply whatever you’ve got here from your amp draw times two thousand 652.

once you’ve got that number we’re going to divide all this by the voltage that you get across your capacitor between your start and your run so whatever this number may be and whatever your amp draw is that is what we’re going to first multiply and then divide so let’s take a look at what that looks like in real life because on paper it looks a little intimidating all right let’s take note first thing we need to get all of our information before we can find out what it is you know we’re even looking for on capacitors what is very important here is we need to know what our compressor is going to take which is a 65 microfarad according to this capacitor and the motor would be taking a 10.

and that’s what these numbers are it’s the amount of microfarad which is also this UF is the symbol for microfarad and so we’re trying to find out if this is within spec so we first need to know what are microfarads are then we need to know plus or minus so if this is within tolerance once we do our formula this specifically this brand is saying theirs is six percent it’s whatever the manufacturer decides that that capacitor should be within most of the time I see plus or minus 5 or plus or minus 6. so we need to know that it’s a plus or minus six percent that the capacitor no matter what numbers you have here you could have a 45 plus five some of them actually write it this way a 545 which is fine it just means the lower numbers for your motor and the higher numbers for your compressor now even though it says say 370 or 440 volts ac this is not the AC that we’re checking for when we’re going to check our voltage across the capacitor here so when I say we’re checking voltage we’re not checking the voltage based off of what the capacitor is saying this is the threshold which the capacitor would pop if it reached Above This voltage so that’s what that number means just FYI so once we get our information here and we know what it is we’re looking for we write that down all right so this one trade Pro they like to put this cover over here so it’s kind of hard to make out what we’re looking at on this label so if you can kind of tilt it a little bit here you can see Herm or hermetically sealed compressor I know a lot of people get confused here because you would think C would actually be compressor but no this actually means common and then fan which is the start winding of your fan motor now if you’ve got a three wire setup again colors of wires do not mean anything your motor wire can be purple that goes to C it can be red it can be orange it’s whatever color the manufacturer decided to make their common wire or their line so you’ll have one on your fan and one on your C and those both go the motor on here is your compressor wire so when we are checking voltage depending on what we’re checking voltage to that’s what we’re going to go across we’re checking from voltage to the start winding on our motor and voltage to the start winding on our compressor so what we’re wanting to do here is let’s go ahead and get our amp draw first and then we can go ahead and check our voltage while we are doing this this is going to be our amp draw as we mentioned you’re going to take our clamp meter and we’re going to make sure that it is on amp draw this is stands for amps AC so that’s what our clamp meter is for and why you need to have a clamp meter in order to test this even for your capacitance so this is the start winding of the motor uh this is the one that’s going to be labeled fan on your capacitor so you checked everything for power you know you’ve got power power coming in and when we check for voltage in which you can do this in either order it doesn’t have to be one way or the other because it’s what we’re doing is we’re just testing you’re going to be able to get more of an accurate reading because you’re going to be able to float this more towards the center than I can on this table but once we have our start winding through the center of our clamp meter we’re looking for our amp draw now on the side of your motor labels it will actually list an amp draw so you can also see if your motor is over amping because that’s usually kind of a good sign that something’s going on with the motor or the capacitor so we’re going to turn this on here and remember when a motor is under a load like the a fan is on there it’s attached to the cover it’s going to read a little differently this one currently is reading 1.58 amps and you’re going to let that run for a little bit just so you do actually get an accurate amp draw so once we know we’re going to write that down 1.5 amps now some of you might have your motor because there are some train units American standard units that do this carrier where you’re on a three-wire setup with a two-pole capacitor or you have two going to this style capacitor and you’re not sure which one is going to be your start winding don’t worry I’ve got you we’ll talk about that in just a moment this is not all capacitors are the same so now that we know our amp draw and again checking for voltage or checking the amp draw there’s no order to either one you can do that you know either way you’d like so once we know our amp draw and we know what the capacitor is supposed to be we know we have power now we’re going to check the voltage across the capacitor to make sure that it is boosting like it should it will not read 240 volts because a capacitor’s job is to boost it’s going to boost the voltage now when we’re checking voltage what we’re going to do is we’re going to turn our settings over to volts ac yours could have a V with the alternating current symbol next to it and like we’d mentioned before just turn it up to the highest number that’s on there you know 2000 whatever it goes up to just turn it to that setting and that’s what we’re going to check so Crystal where do we put our leads to figure out the voltage okay and now let’s get the last part of our equation we have our amps we know how much we’re going to multiply it by and we’re going to place our leads here so one here uncommon one here on fan now remember this is going to be high voltage so be cautious and make sure you’re not touching any of the high voltage wires so now we’re going to get our voltage here and there we are it’s 387 volts ac so now we’re going to fill the last part of that equation we know that it’s 387 volts after our boost so let’s plug that in and see if our capacitor is within spec so keep in mind that you can do the same formula when you’re checking your compressor you start winding on your compressor is the one that’s on your Herm terminal so when you’re checking your compressor you’re going to check between your C and obviously I don’t have a compressor hooked up here it’s a little impractical for our office I can go out to the unit outside but just for simplicity’s sake you know how to check fan so now you’re going to apply that same knowledge to checking your harm so you’d put your one lead on term and your one lead uncommon and apply that to the same formula so remember again it’s going to be your amp draw times 2652 and then you’re going to divide that by the voltage across your capacitor which is going to be from your common to your fan and then from your common to your Herm once you plug this in now even though most manufacturers say plus or minus 5 or 6 percent honestly you can go with 10 and it’s going to be in spec so make sure that it is adding up the numbers are adding up and this is perfectly within spec even though it’s a little over that’s completely fine for it to be a little overcharged now for those of you that don’t want to have to go through you know figuring out how to multiply six percent five percent ten percent um actually had to kind of think about this for a second because it’s been a bit but the one that you’re going to multiply it by uh we’ll just round it and say it’s supposed to be 10 right for you know again Simplicity rounding it out you can do it by 11 whatever you’d like to do but that one when you’re multiplying it by the microfarad reading you got that’s your unit your one unit of 10 and then that second number is going to be what that percentage is so six percent decimal form 0 6 5 decimal form you know that’s your percent within 10 percent 1.10 you get the picture so if you’re wanting to multiply that on your calculator to figure out if it is in Spec that’s what you’re going to multiply it by what if you don’t have a dual run capacitor like this one well it’s going to make your life a little more difficult but something you need to know before you start testing these and before you start trying to test both of them is one or the other part of your machine not coming on for example if your motor isn’t coming on but your compressor is what we’re going to do is we can do the same reading for the run capacitor and then if it’s say your compressor not coming on and some of the older units instead of having just this one capacitor in there it will have two it’ll have this one for your fan motor and instead of three poles on top like this one a compressor just one for your compressor is going to be a larger it could be oval shaped it could be circular but it’ll just have the two on the top that you’re going to check but how do you know what your start winding is on a two-wire setup like that well here’s how so what do you do if you have two solid color wires going to the capacitor they’ve actually made this simple for you so you know which one is the same wire there that white stripe lets us know that’s where the line of Power is coming through it’s the same as this wire but what happens if these are both solid blue solid purple or solid Brown you’re not going to be able to know which one it is so you’ll have one on each like this what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to check each of these wires for resistance against the winding on the motor that would be C here on your common and you can also check it against your other leg of power and find the resistance between these two to find out which one is actually your start versus your power so we’ve got our clamp meter set to the find out the resistance your ohms here and what we’re going to do is test against these windings to find out which is your start so just to kind of show you how these two wires are the same wire if you were to test them against each other just for fun here you can see there is little to no resistance between these two because it is the same wire so because of that you know that these are the same wire so if you take this off of that capacitor and it has that really low resistance like that you now know that this has to be your start winding and so we place one lead on each between these wires and we can see that it has a higher resistance so which one of these is going to be your common when you’re checking it well interestingly enough you check here between your start and your other leg of power your other power winding here you can see although it’s not the same it’s still going to read a fairly High Resistance it’s going to be different because this is a different winding for the power but it’s still going to read High versus again if you were reading something like your C you’re common to the same wire which is 0.08 so as you can see you now know that your start winding is always going to read higher when you’re checking it against the C wire on your capacitor or when you’re pulling one of these two wires off of here against the wire either going to a c if you have a three wire set up or if one of these wires that is your other leg of power is going back to your contactor so you could essentially test both of these wires against your legs of power from the motor and not all motor wires get this darn thing on here um go to the same spot if it’s got a capacitor off to the side for the motor it could be that this is just a universal motor if you have both this style beside your dual capacitor so if you don’t have one of your motor wires going to the capacitor that’s okay you can check it out against the wires that go to the contactor because a lot of times it’s easy to just put those two wires here that makes your 240 and then two wires here that you’re lying through it’s a more simplified way to get power to the motor and then just two here simple but like I said there are some that will look like this so just check the wires that are going back to the motor and you’re going to check both of these against that wire that goes to the C or the wires that go into your contactor if it has a higher resistance that is going to be your start winding so what happens if you test your capacitor and it’s within spec and you know again we have checked for our power and we know we’re getting power in power out and that this is pulling in and engaging we know we are getting power here by testing against our sea and our fan and our C and our Herm we know we are getting voltage there that is now going to be something else now is it one or the other is it your compressor that’s not coming on okay so check the amp draw on your compressor when your system is on is it open is there no reading that’s your answer there’s an open winding on your compressor same goes for your motor wire if you place your amp reader here your clamp meter and it’s open you’re not getting an amp draw from it and it is definitely getting power and we now know that the capacitor is good well there’s an open winding on your motor and your motor is bad well guys I hope this has been helpful for you and as always if you have any questions or something wasn’t covered just leave a comment below and I will get to them as soon as possible thank you so much and have a wonderful rest of your week thank you foreign

hello everyone this is Crystal uh with open to public HVAC school and today we’re going to talk about float switches um basically how to find out if you’re tripping a float switch and the float switch is doing its job or if potentially your float switch is bad the most common one I notice is the outside unit is short cycling that’s just a fancy way of saying it keeps coming on and then shutting off prematurely as in say your indoor temperature isn’t reaching what you want it to and your unit just keeps shutting off maybe even running as little as 5-10 minutes before again shutting off and then

sporadically coming back on again just stating the obvious here your float switch is only going to trip in your cooling cycle so this is only going to happen when you’ve turned your thermostat to cool so while short cycling often indicates that it has something to do with your drain line and tripping a floor switch it does not mean it’s always your float switch short cycling can happen for a number of reasons but we’ll get to that in another video for now let’s just focus on flute switch so for right now and you can look in here and see it’s really nice to have these sort because you can see right

through here whether it’s backed up or not and it’s going to be coming off of the auxiliary drain on your primary pan not the one that’s your emergency but your primary now yours might be all white with a red cap that has the elbow or it might be in line on the PVC like this one how can we check once we get to the float switch really quickly whether it’s bad or good well just like many things it’s important to check the continuity on your float switches just like you’re checking continuity on your contactor so on and so forth if there is no continuity when you put your leads one on each wire then

you know it’s bad unless of course your float switch is tripped and you have to reset it now once you know that you’re having to reset that obviously and it’s not wet here then you’re probably on to the right diagnosis if the float switch is bad um not always the case but in this instance if you know you haven’t had to reset it and it’s still not reading continuity it’s in the proper place you know it’s the float switch easy peasy so again we’re going to take these two wires that are in your unit we’re going to put one lead here and one lead here if you hear that beep it means you have great continuity

you know as long as it’s under one ohm and something else is going on here okay so here we are out here in the warehouse and this setup is for something called a slab coil um when you are installing a drain pan float switch which in my opinion and in some places it’s code it’s a good idea to put both a primary float switch and a secondary drain pan float switch if you’re up in the attic so this is a simple drain pan float switch that most people use when they’re using a secondary and the most important thing when you’re installing it say as a installer or a homeowner is it needs to be on the side

that’s going to be serviced so for example where the drain line is going to come out you would want to put it on that section most units this is a slab coil setup so it’s different most units that that port for your drain line is going to be on the long side and when you’re installing it just make sure the side that has your fitting is going to be the side that you attach your emergency float switch these little guys right here are super simple they’re going to tie in on your 24 volt line and many of them actually have an instruction manual on how to use them as far as just putting them on your

drain pan here again make sure it’s on the serviceable side that the technician can get to it if need be this is your float and it’s just a simple float device that’s going to cut the 24 volt to your AC outside so that the air conditioning doesn’t continue to run and overflow into your home so you can see it’s just a real simple clip style you’re going to clip onto your pan just to make sure that it is you know snug here around the edges and it’s going to have these catches this is going to be connected up to that low voltage side and this is facing this way because as the water rises it’s going

to push that up to disconnect the 24 volts we’ll show you here in a moment what I mean by breaking the 24 volts you’re outside but for now that would be one version you would see a more fancier version that most installers don’t use because they’re a little more pricey and most guys they’re going to try to cut their costs as much as possible you would see something like this and like we were mentioning earlier uh this actually has an LED in it when it is tripped and it’s going to Glow a pretty bright red you’re going to be able to tell right away that it has tripped and you can kind of make out

right here that diode and your LED here up top if I can get it to focus a little bit here there we go um that’s our LED that’s going to warn you that hey it’s tripped again I like these see-through because you can see for yourself when that backup is there and these are just like the other ones they’re gonna tie in on your 24 volt line there and they’re going to clip on to the side with this more fancy looking guy here so again you’re going to put the side with the flotation on the correct side and then you’re going to be able to screw this in to hold it in place and what’s also great about these

sort is it actually gives you instructions here which uh is fantastic so you can see exactly how it should be sitting in your pan a lot of emergency drain pan floats which is now have it where it’ll give you a QR code or you know a website or something you can go to with detailed instructions so they don’t have to print it all on this paper so just to review here when we talk about you know after we have installed and we’ve got our thumb clamp here to tighten we’ve installed it correctly we know it’s correct or say you were tripping a float switch before and you’ve replaced it once you put that

in there and replaced it with this tie obviously it’s got a test button here you can check it and make sure it’s functioning like it should but a big indicator is if you see when you come up to your unit to check because now we know right that it could be the float switch that’s causing short cycling outside or it is actually doing its job and your drain your emergency drain pan is filling up and cutting this circuit um if you go to your unit and you’re noticing that it’s dry like this I mean bone dry there’s no wetness no water because you’ve immediately gone up there to check and make sure that

you aren’t retaining some sort of water and it is indeed tripped if you move that or move it up and everything kicks back on again you know that your float switch has issues um now what I don’t like is when someone talks about just jump around the float switch and see if it works well if you jump around the float switch before you go through this step of diagnostic of course it’s going to work because you’ve you’ve basically wire nutted around your safety device so make sure that you have reset it and if you plug it in and everything’s still not coming on even after you’ve reset the power now remember

there are some units that have soft lockouts in place to where you have to actually reset the power I’ve come come across a few Daikin units that are like that make sure you reset the power and make sure that everything’s connected you’re getting continuity between your two wires here and everything seems good so if you do in fact turn it back on you know there’s no water it’s reset but it’s still not coming on and your power is reset then you know that your float switch is in fact bad in which case that does kind of you know get around having to jump around the float switch if you know you move

it and there’s no water and everything comes on and uh especially if you’re not getting continuity here between your two wires it’s a pretty good indication it’s bad you’re not needing to jump around your flotation um usually I would do that if say it is actually you know it has good continuity here but when you connect it or you’ve reset it this one doesn’t have a reset it’s just a simple one but if you have um done all of that and you know you have continuity but then you connect it and it’s still not coming on and you bypass that and everything all of a sudden comes on then that’s when you’re

going to apply bypassing your safety switch and at that point you know it’s a malfunction foreign we’re at a gas unit here and our PVC drain line is coming off of our evaporator coil here you can see we’ve got our vent comes before our heat wrap and since this is a closet unit it’s going to go down like that into the line when and this is probably the one you’re used to versus the other that I was showing you earlier with the clear this is one of the more common ones here plugged in that should be installed on the connection that is higher you can tell from this angle but the screw in connection

that’s higher on the coil than the lower one which is going to be your primary drain when we’re venting the way we are that vent needs to be taller then the connections that are coming out of the coil so just make sure that you have it screwed into the correct location on the evaporator coil when you install it your two wires are going to come off here and tie into your 24 volt line which I’ll show you where that is in just a moment okay now when we’re following our 24 volts from the float switch whether it’s the one off the primary like this one or off of your drain pan if you are in a horizontal

application this is an upflow in a closet and this one’s going to come all the way down so we’re going to follow our wires and they’re going to come into the unit here through the hole bundle of wires track it all the way through our secondary hole here and you can see our thermostat wires and now this isn’t a gas application so we’re going to have a control board now you can either tie it in on your r or why in this instance you can see the one leg from the float switch on the r on our control board and then through our thermostat wire here you can see where the second leg ties in to the wire

nut with the r or red wire going back to our thermostat so it’s designed to cut the cooling or the power to the cooling cycle that way the AC will not continue to run and overflow always make sure when you remove your wires take pictures of where they’re going and make sure your power is cut to the unit make sure your power is turned off before you remove any wires especially if you think you might want to remove them completely to check the continuity so in this case what we would do is we’d remove one one from this wire nut bundle here and the other one from your r on your board and you’re going

to put one lead on each of the exposed wire and make sure that there is in fact continuity next time we do the video um what I’ll go ahead and cover is how to install your drain line here and this is a gas application like we mentioned a moment ago learning how to properly drain your unit to where it’s not going to cause issues with your float switch or condensation issues or you know that could be why you are tripping a float switch is it is not properly vented or the right amount of tilt in order to get the water out or push the water out depending on whether your unit is under positive or negative

pressure so we’ll do that in this uh next video and I will talk about how you want to properly vent and install your drain line so I hope this has been helpful to all of you if there’s anything I missed or if you have any questions or concerns just leave them in the comments below and I will get to them as soon as possible thank you so much for joining me this week at open to public HVAC school and I hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your week and a great beginning to your summer foreign

foreign this is Crystal with open to public HVAC School today we’re going to go over how to test Heat sequencers and how they work so today I thought we’d have a little fun and actually pull one of these apart so you can see what’s going on in here how this all looks inside because it’s actually really cool I took one apart today and just kind of studied it first we’ll get into how to test these and then we’ll get to the fun part these are a time delay relay and they have in here two metal plates now these are thermal and there’s two metals which means it’s a bi-metal disc so here this is a residential

sequencer for your air handling unit here we apply our control voltage which is our 24 volts that is then going to heat up and cause this metal plate or this bi-metal plate rather to flex which pushes a pin up here to cause contact the contact’s Too Close essentially and allow the 240 volts into your unit some of you can have one you can have two you can have two on one plate and some even have three now what’s important to pay attention to is the time delay and that’s what these numbers stand for this is going to be your delay on Heat or the 24 volts going here and that’s the amount of time it’s

going to need for that thermal disc to heat up and flex and then your cool down is going to be how long it’s going to take for that disc to cool down and go back into the original shape thus opening the circuit not allowing any of your voltage through so let’s get to it how do you test Heat sequencers so what I’m using today is the sc260 a lot of beginner tags and honestly I love this thing so I mean these are really awesome to use they’re simple I really like it because they’re slim and they’re easy to fit in my hand but on just a normal meter you should have this symbol which means continuity

so make sure your meter is set on that symbol before you begin because we’re wanting to make sure right off the bat if this is open or closed this is a two stack so when we place our leads on the sequencer where we’re going is since this is all one pole we’re going from end to end and this is correct because we are not reading we’re not getting continuity so on Startup these should be open so from here to here we’re going to test and from here to here we’re going to test now this bottom is for your 24 volts so you don’t need to check that unless you’re just checking to make sure that you’re getting

your 24 Folds always make sure you have your low side voltage before assuming a part is bad you could just have something as simple as not having power now that we know it is open don’t assume that it’s good what we’re going to do is now turn the thermostat on to Heating and we’re going to check this again remember there is a delay so you won’t hear the relay the contact points close on some that have a longer delay this one has a 1 to 22nd delay so we’ll give it just a moment for those contact points to line up there’s our clothes and now both of these should be reading continuity perfect now

we’re going to go ahead and remove our 24 volts just make sure you remember where the wires go we’re going to let that disc go back to its original shape and the delay on this is going to be between 40 to 110 seconds some of them can be longer like this yeah there’s our pop so now this should be open and here to here open perfect so you can do a few cycles of this if you would like um if you’re wanting to test this at your unit you can if you’re wanting to say jump your R to w for the heat to come on um now heat pumps they’re a little different because you’d have to jump a few things together in

order for your emergency heat to come on before simplicity’s sake what we’re going to do for our normal single stage um or just sorry normal air handlers is checking for continuity on each Pole and making sure that the relay or rather this disc is not sticking and that it’s bad so that’s why we want to at least check whether it’s open or closed before the 24 volts are applied and if it is sticking once the cooldown has gone past and they’re still not open again so that’s how we’re going to check and make sure that is doing what it should be doing some of you that do even have a three stack whether

you have a single stack like this guy here or a double stack like this one and there are some with three uh those are all going to be connected to that same timing so whether it’s single a double a triple they’re all going to connect or close the circuit with the same delay so keep that in mind when you’re checking it and I have noticed with some of the Three Stacks it is just a nanosecond difference but they should all open very very similar at the same time really quick so let’s get to the fun part what does a sequencer look like on the inside and obviously you can see you had to kind of get

rough with it these suckers are really put together well and you can see I had to remove those clips here to get it off of there here at the top that’s our pull and just to kind of show you what’s underneath there I had to pry this guy under here because there’s a whole lot of glue but just to show you what’s underneath that part you can see it’s got that little indention and it’s got this pole here and there is a pin that pushes this up here to make that connection and close it so that we have that continuity all the way through and that voltage can just got a line straight into heat strings so

here on the bottom of this you see these little Hollow guys here and that PIN is what goes into it little tiny pin that is pushed up and it’s just the tiniest little movement here that you can see contact so what’s under this well here is purify metal thermal disc come apart just like this really cool and I can show you what this actually looks like um there is where your 24 volts goes through you can see this little guy right here that’s going to push that up and flex so let’s put that down here and I’ll see if we can zoom in a little bit you can kind of make out what’s going on when I apply those

24 volts all right we’re gonna add our 24 volts this is really fun I was having fun hooking it up earlier just a second you’re gonna see that pop I’m always curious oh there it goes that is awesome and you can actually see it just pop like that I’m always curious about how things work so when we’re at the store I like to pull things apart and just see what’s going on inside of them you don’t see how they function because obviously if you’re going to talk to other people about it how can you explain what you’re looking for if you don’t know how it works yourself so let’s remove our 24 volts and

then as this cools down that thermal disc is going to go like this just back in place and the reason for these delays is you don’t really want to have all of your coils come on at once so there’s that delay there so they don’t come on exactly the same time and it’s the same on cooldown hopefully here in the next few seconds we can see that guy up back there we go beautiful so that is how and by the way don’t touch this if you ever pull in a part that you know is bad don’t touch that right away it’s really hot Now you kind of understand and you know what’s going on in here and what could be some

reasons for failure but this is a mechanical connection with that thermal plate thermal biometal plate don’t ask me what kind of metal that is because I haven’t looked into it but anyway I hope this has been helpful for all of you thank you so much for joining me guys and I hope that you have a wonderful weekend and a great rest of your day take care

hello everyone this is Crystal with open to public HVAC School today we’re going to be talking about heat kits and how we can test them what you’re looking for and also if they can be repaired now I know a lot of service techs they don’t like to repair these because they are you know they can be a little bit much much like these this is a carrier unit they’ve got these relays with rectifier boards on them we’ve got a regular relay is here limit switches your sequencer so it can be a bit daunting if you’re wanting to replace the parts and let’s face it you don’t want to take the time out to do it so what we can do if you’re a homeowner is if you can’t afford to replace the whole kit you can repair it but you need to be extremely careful when you do this and we’ll get into how to test it first and then we’ll talk about your options if you want to repair it all right first thing is first we’re going to set our meters here to continuity not all meters are the same and obviously mine has a few you know settings yours might not but we’re going to test it all the same so the very first thing we do is we’re going to go around and we’re going to check continuity on our strings here we’re going to check them on our limits and our sequencers just to make sure right away if we locate something going on where there’s no continuity in the coils or the strings if you will that way it’s an easy diagnosis so let’s go ahead and try that first now for a simplicity’s sake what I’m doing here is I’m going to get an easier heat kit so uh it’s a little easier to check this out with you because the other one’s gonna have a whole lot of things that most people do not have on their heat kits so when we are checking continuity as you can see you’ve got three strings here you can correspond those to the limits that are on the other side so as you can see you can follow these strings back from one side to the other and so we’re going to be checking this and just make sure you follow so you know you’re checking the right thing so you don’t get a false reading on your meter from here to here there’s one string here to here there’s your second so on and so forth so this is a limit and this one’s kind of unique uh most people’s limits or disk limits are those round ones that sit here and they have two connectors that are coming out I can show you what that looks like in just a moment this looks really similar to a high limit switch that you would see in a furnace so let’s check our continuity and make sure that our wires are not broken or our coils heating elements whatever you’d like to call it okay so we’re going to systematically check from one end to the other with both of our leads to make sure that they are connected so on our meter here all of our strings and it depends on some of them okay this one’s reading about 11 and they’ll usually read somewhere between 9 and 11.

okay that one’s close as well and then we’re going to go down to our last string Perfect all of them are reading correctly you’re hearing the beep to confirm that your strings are whole um and you know that’s not your problem if your heating elements are not coming on now if you have limits that you are actually testing on the heat kit here make sure before you test it and with any of these limits you really want to remove the wires and the reason for that and of course brand new they’re going to be a bit tough to come off of there or a first time that you’re testing it make sure you’ve taken a picture of which wire goes where because obviously this is extremely important so we’re going to go from here to here and all your thermal limits should be normally closed yes you know that one is good again if these are not beeping as long as you don’t have wires connected just rule out the factor that you might be getting feedback somewhere make sure that they are normally closed and you are getting continuity between these two now some of the older units will actually have these and they are fuse links they are the same thing kind of whereas this has a disc this is going to be that mechanical one we were talking about that heats that plate makes a mechanical connection which then opens this circuit uh to cut the heating off if you will so that your coils your elements they’re not overheating and causing issues um you know such as fires that sort of thing but what happens with fuse links is this actually pops therefore opening the circuit uh kind of like a fuse where this pops and that is no longer creating a line to go through so you can see here that you would have those two wires just like you would with a disk limit and you’re going to read your continuity between here and here to make sure that it is not one of your problems so just like disk limits we check from here to here okay that’s good and then from here to here whether you go here how much I’m not getting a good connection there but you should read below one ohm there you go just make sure on this other side it’s usually easier to do it to check on the side of the plate where they’re going to stick out obviously um and it’s a good idea to do that so that you can make sure that maybe there’s not some sort of poor connection between these quick connects that’s just causing them not to come on or partially come on so double check your fuse links make sure that they are uh make sure that they do have continuity and if they don’t boom you know that these are bad and it’s just something as simple as replacing this guy especially if all of your elements have continuity why buy the entire heat kit if it’s just something as simple as that now we do sell these in our store um and you can purchase them here uh these parts are fairly simple to replace but if it’s something a little more in depth we also have those here too and they can be a little harder to find well what is that it’s going to be these heating elements now with some of these Ceramics we do sell some of them but these are a little harder to find so if you are going to replace a heating element be extremely careful with these Ceramics because they are delicate again if you’re not comfortable with restringing go ahead and call a technician or if you can find someone that’s willing to go ahead and restring this for you this style is definitely going to be easier to restring I’ve done several myself and this is much easier than those ones that kind of twist around and bend down and they’ve almost got a box like shape to them you can purchase these strings here at our store we’re located in Dallas if you’re wondering and a lot of these pits will come with new Ceramics but you do have to pay attention to the KW there are some brands that don’t use just basic 5kw per string make sure it doesn’t say that it’s a 7.5 some of them are 7.5 with a three I’ve seen some first company units that do that as well as the strings gonna have to stretch across so there’s a little more um of an annoyance having to restring those and I can completely understand why someone would uh just opt to buy the entire heat kit with first company now these are what you would be replacing it with and this is called a restring kit so here is your heating elements uh we also offer to restring these in store if you’re not comfortable with that if you’re actually local here in the Dallas um area and as you can see these are definitely more spaced and then these are so we can do a video over this later right now we’re just learning how to test for issues in the heat kit and uh what that could possibly be so uh we’ll do a video over restringing later and I can show you some tips and some tricks to make your life a lot easier just know that’s an option if your heat kit is so old that they don’t even make it anymore you can purchase components and replace them now there are some other relays that are in there um I see these often in some carrier units I see them in Nordyne a bunch of different units and this is a relay there’s a simple way to test these um before you even turn anything on and then once you do turn it on you can check it out some people even use contactors in theirs but you’re what you’re going to do is you’re going to check between common and you should have a normally open and a normally closed so let’s see how we test that now when you’re at your heat kit and you’re going to be checking to make sure everything else is functioning like it should be a lot of you’ll see something like this we call this a fan relay which all of these are going to be relays sequencers a relay with a time delay most things with air handlers are mechanical so according to this diagram the bottom two legs should be normally closed and the top two should be normally open with our meter on continuity we’re going to check this out with our two leads okay so this is reading normally open which is what it should be doing and then the bottom is reading normally closed so perfect this is how it should be so once we put our meter on here the bottom two should now be open and the top two should be closed they’re going to switch you need to make sure you’re getting your 24 volts here otherwise the relay will not close and switch to the other legs closing so let’s go ahead and check it out and make sure that it is opening and closing like it should so now that we know this is good we can go ahead and move on to another relay or switch to make sure that it is also good and not the culprit behind the heat kit coming on so now how do we test these relays we’re looking at whether it is reading again like the other one normally open and normally closed when it should be against common we’re going to add our 24 volts here on the left and make sure again that you’re checking for that 24 volts when you test this I’m simulating the voltage here so this would be in your unit while you’re checking it so now we’ve checked our 24 volts and we know we do indeed have our 26 to 28 volts we’re going to come in and check the relay like we did on the other relay earlier we’re going to go from common to normally open as you can see with the 24 volts now are normally open is closed and are normally closed is open we’re going to remove our 24 volts and then we’re going to go ahead and check and make sure that it is Switched like it should so here we’re checking our normally open and then our normally closed and it’s working like it should so now we would move on to test our next component all right now we’re going to check our sequencer and if you watched our video before we talked about how these work whether you have a single stack or a double stack and then your 24 would be on the bottom so we’re going to test across the top of our poles with our leads to make sure that we are not getting continuity on Startup before the delay it takes effect once we’ve checked for our 24 volts and we know we do in fact have it we’re going to take a look at what your sequencer’s timings are and this is important when you’re checking it out we need to make sure that the timings are closing and opening like they should for example the startup heating cycle is 1 to 20 seconds on this one and the cooldown is 40 to 110.

so when you’re putting your leads on the sequencer make sure that you know what your delays are now that we’ve had an idea of what this should be doing we’re going to test across the top poles in the middle and we can see that there’s no continuity which is exactly what it should be doing I’m going to put our 24 volts on the bottom so that the thermal disc can heat up now remember there’s going to be a delay so keep that in mind when you’re testing with your leads so that way you give the thermal disc a chance to open the circuit and you are in fact getting the correct readings and now that we know the relay has closed and we’re going to hear that relay closed we’re going to put our leads on here and we see that we now have continuity so in fact the sequencer is doing what it should be at this point now we’re going to check and make sure that the relays are not sticking closed now remember again there is a time delay so you’re going to want to listen for that relay to close and it’s going to to open and it’s going to make a noise when it does that so we’re going to remove our 24 volts then we’re going to give it the amount of time that it needs on cooldown so that that thermal disc can flatten out again to open the circuit this one’s cool down is going to be between 40 to 110.

so now that we’re checking but when we put our leads back on it once we hear that click it should be open again now the reason why I wanted to show you these relays pulled off of the heat kit is because normally that’s going to be pushed back into the unit the entire elements so you’re not going to be able to see all of that and that’s why we pulled it out here on the table so you can see what you’re looking for and looking at that needs to be replaced it also helps when you’re looking at it and you’re putting your leads on there to know what it is you’re doing and what each part of that heat kit does I hope this has been helpful for you and feel free to ask a question or leave comments below and I will try to answer them as soon as I can as always thank you so much for joining us and have a wonderful day thank you

Hey guys, this is Crystal from OTP HBAC school and today we’re going to talk about step down transformers and how to test them. So, what is one basic way we know if a transformer is bad or not? Does anything come on in your unit? anything at all inside furnace or electric air handler or your outdoor unit. Do either of those come on a light on the board? Anything? It’s fine. Let’s get started today and see some simple things you can do to find out if it is indeed the culprit or what else it could be. For this, you’ll need a volt meter. It doesn’t have to be a clamp meter. As long as it reads volt AC,

you are good to go. First and foremost, you’re going to need to know where your transformer is. Now, your transformer is going to be located near your blower housing. And this is going to be whether you have gas heating or electric heating. For obvious reasons, electrical components need to be in a cooler area. Not all transformers are going to look the same. Some of them are going to have the quick connectors or spades, if you’d like to call them. Some of them have the wires, but all of them are going to have this telltale iron core uh right here. This is what’s known as a step down transformer.

Uh this is a residential step down transformer. So, how can you tell if your transformer is bad? Well, we’ll get to that in just a moment. Okay, today we are taking a look at the step down transformer. This is going to be a residential transformer. In this case, this one is going to be going from 120 volts here on your line down to your 24 vols, which is your load. Um, we are going to be going in the simplest terms possible. What it’s doing is it’s taking your high voltage and it’s doing a step down, which means it’s transferring the energy via this electromagnetic core to 24 volts. And we’ll kind of get into the science of that later,

but essentially that is what it does. So, how do we know if it’s good or bad? Well, with one of these, a lot of times, uh, if you can just remove this from out of the unit and you see a big dark spot right here, normally it’s on your low side voltage, which is the 24V side. Uh, and if you’re smelling something really chemically burned, um, we all know that smell, it’s usually bad. Another uh common indicator that the transformer is bad is if your indoor uh heating unit and your outdoor air conditioning unit is not coming on. Nothing. No lights on your control board. Uh blower doesn’t come on. Any of that.

This can be a culprit. So, how do you test if this is actually good or bad within the unit? Here I have simulated your neutral and your 120. And this is going to be your high-side power or your line. And what we’re doing is we’re going to take this 120 here and put our meter on the load side or the 24 vol AC. And we should be able to tell with our voltmeter whether it’s sending out the proper voltage. In most cases, a transformer is either working or it’s not. Let’s make sure that you have the correct voltage coming into the unit just to narrow it down. So, I’ve attached my leads here, one on each terminal.

And now I’m going to simulate the machine coming on. Now remember in 99.9% of gas furnaces it will have a door switch usually centralized between the gas burners um your gas valve all of those or the uh blower housing. And more often than not it’s going to be where the blower housing is. So, make sure before you turn your heat on that door switch is either taped down or someone is there to tape it down for you. And then turn on the heat. So, we should be reading somewhere between 121 to roughly about 123 volts AC. And there we go. So, we got 122. Perfect. So, we know we have the correct voltage.

Now that we know we’re getting our high side voltage, we now want to check and make sure that we have our low side voltage coming out of the transformer. Okay. Again, we’re going to repeat the same cycle. Um, I’ve hooked my leads on here cuz I’m hooking it up with my test box. And it’s kind of hard to do two things at once, but you need to have one lead on each one of these terminals. Uh, do not test against ground. You will not get an accurate reading, especially since a lot of units do not have properly grounded wires. So, here we’re going to simulate our 120 And as you can see since it’s alternating current we are reading between 26 to 28 to 29 vol AC.

So we are good to go and that is doing what it should be. So, why is it good to know how to identify whether it’s a transformer uh issue or uh something potentially going wrong in your unit? Well, one reason is that often when this side goes bad on your transformer, your 24V side, it usually means you have a short somewhere. And so you’re going to need to be able to identify where that short is coming from. So usually when we are trying to locate these shorts, especially technicians, it’s not really super practical when you’re a homeowner, unless you’re going to be doing this quite often. But having something with a resettable fuse in um especially in residential,

you want a 3 amp or a 5 amp um resettable fuse. And all that means is if there’s a short somewhere, uh this is going to catch it and pop and you’ll be able and you’ll be able to uh find out where it’s coming from. So, these little guys are going to go down into the board, which I’m just using this little bitty guy for simplicity and easiness. Uh, this is your fuse. Just take that out. A lot of times when it’s bad, it’ll be charred right there or that little Z will be cut in half. Uh, and then you’re going to take these and plug them in here. And different control boards are going to look differently.

If it’s an older control board, it might not actually have a fuse in it, in which case you’re going to put a fuse in line um, for testing purposes. So, you could do something like this here. And uh it’s harder to do it this way because you’re going to have to actually splice and wire nut in something like that. But we’re checking to see if it is popping the fuse. And you really need one of these in your home. Um make sure that it’s no higher than a 5 amp fuse in residential. Don’t use auto parts because they’re amps are going to be much higher. So, when we’re testing for this, you can use one of these and it’s going to catch that short and pop this.

Do not leave this in there. It’s not meant to be a permanent solution, uh, especially for safety. Make sure you remove this once you’re finished. So, this is really great at just sort of tracking down where that short’s coming from. If it’s coming from, say, ground, bad ground, uh if it’s coming from a wire touching somewhere, bad thermostat. Um, and we can get into that later with the wiring and what could also be causing the short, but in this one, we’re just covering, you know, whether you’ve got a bad transformer or not. But when you do, just be aware um that there’s probably something else going on in that unit.

Hopefully, it was just a one-time deal and you just popped your transformer cuz something touched or some sort of power surge and that’s it. So, as I mentioned before, if you do have one of those units that are super old and on your control board, you actually don’t have one of these fuses, I would suggest actually putting one in line from your transformer. Uh, and you’ll have wires coming back from your 24V line that you could actually put one in line on one of these legs of 24 volt. It doesn’t need to be on both, just one. Uh you can wire nut this in line and keep that there to pop in case you do have a short.

Um we actually have these here. They’re pretty handy and nice and they just look cool, professional, uh and completely insulated. Yeah, just something simple like this that you can make where you just take the female terminals and crimp them onto it. Doesn’t need to be anything crazy like maybe a 14 gauge wire to 16 gauge. Totally fine. And just clip those on there and wire it in. So hopefully this helps give you guys an idea of what you’re looking for when a transformer goes bad and how it functions within your unit. Thank you so much for joining us today. Um, and I hope you have a great rest of your week.

all right here we are guys at our one of our condensing units at the office and as you can see we’re here at our electrical panel and uh some of the common joys of being a technician as you can see I have to be extremely careful with our copper lines going here uh and I’ve got about a foot of space so yeah installers don’t really think about technicians a lot when this happens but uh what we’re looking at here is we’re looking at our electrical in the unit and our contactor now some units they’re not going to have these because it’s going to be um have a control board like uh this Rheem unit next to me actually does not have a contactor because of the board that’s in it this is typically what you will find in most AC units single stage so we have our hard start capacitor there with its relay and then our contactor now I have the power on so I’m gonna make sure I don’t electrocute myself here but uh this is our contactor right here some of you you’ll see an exposed button or buttons in the center as this is a two pole so there is a two-pole break in the center where the switch is so when we’re testing this to see if it’s good once I get my meter on here I can show you exactly what we’re looking for on Startup and what it’s going to do when it is off but we’re going to be checking the very first thing is we want to make sure it is not connected on Startup now when it’s a relay like this it should not be closed on Startup you should not have continuity between this pole to this poll so it should be open when we check it so we’re going to flip our meter here to the continuity symbol foreign and we should not hear that beat when the thermostat is not calling for cooling so as we can see we are going to get a kind of beeping when the power is on because you’re going to get some kind of uh interference which is why when you’re first checking for it you know make sure that you uh pull the disconnect when you’re checking for continuity okay there we go so now while we’re checking between these poles they are not closed okay so when you go to turn on the unit you push your disconnect back in or you turn your toggle on use Extreme Caution when you’re testing to make sure that you are getting your 240 volts in here at the bottom where the power is coming in from your disconnect to the unit and also make sure that you are getting your 240 volts here which is going into your unit so once you’ve established that you do in fact have 240 volts coming into your contactor and you are not getting 240 volts out one of two things is happening here so you’re either not getting your call from the thermostat so here on each side is your 24 volts that is the control voltage or the low voltage low side voltage rather coming in from the thermostat to tell your unit to come on so that control voltage what it’s going to do is it’s going to is pull that in so that you make a mechanical connection and the 240 volts now can go through into the unit so now that we know we’re getting power here we check to make sure that we are in fact getting 24 volts here and here to make sure that you know that 24 volt is actually being sent out to the unit so at that point you’re going to change your meter here to volts ac since in this application it is using ac voltage and again you’re going to put one lead on each side and which I’ll show you in the bench but I can show you in detail what it is we’re going to look for when we pull this out or when we’re testing it at the unit if you are in fact not getting your 24 volts to your contactor here and again do not test against grounds now that our unit is on we’re going to check for voltage here and again use Extreme Caution when touching any electrical okay yes we are now currently reading 26.3 volts which is perfectly normal do not test against ground always make sure you have one lead on each terminal when you are checking as I mentioned before when we want to check for our 240 volts in you need to make sure that power is getting to the unit it’s hard to hear over the unit here here there’s our 242 holes so our 240 in and then if it is making the correct connection you should be getting 240 volts if you know that you are in fact getting 240 in if you are able to push your contactor in here at the switch which again will show more in detail at the the bench then you know that your contactor is making contact like it should and you probably don’t have your 24 volts coming out to the unit once we’ve established at least that much knowing that we are getting power to the unit at 240 to 244 volts we know that it has something to do with the contactor itself where it has to do with the control voltage coming in to the contactor now the reason why we’re going to check for voltage first is there’s a chance that you just might not be getting your high side power coming in from your disconnect what you would do at that point is you would trace it back to your disconnect and you’ll know where your disconnect is you’re gonna have a piece of conduit coming in where your electrical wire is going to be bundled into and then that’s going to be going back to your disconnect which you’ll have a disconnect box but you know I just wanted to show you guys what it is you’re looking at because it’s hard to understand just from seeing it at a bench uh at the testing Parts bench because they’re all not going to look the same right so let’s go back inside and I can go ahead and show you we’re going to be exactly testing for that voltage contactor all right so some of you might have a disconnect that looks kind of like a breaker a lot of disconnects are going to look similar to this and as you can see this one has an on off switch here kind of like a breaker so you might have one of those or yours might have a pull out style connection make sure I turned both of those back on so when you are going to test it at first make sure you do turn the power off before going ahead and checking and making sure that you do have your 240 volts so the reason that you want to pull the power first is just so you can check across on continuity and make sure that the lines are not actually closed or the relay is stuck because if your relay is stuck obviously it shouldn’t be doing that it should be open and you should not have continuity when you’re not calling for cooling on the unit so if you do have continuity on the contactor before you’ve even turned the contactor on not making that connection you know that the relay is stuck and therefore your contactor is bad but for everything else you’re going to make sure that you do have your disconnect turned on pushed in if you have one of those pull outs pull out style connectors and then that’s we’re going to cautiously check for power anyway let’s go back inside and let’s bench test our contactor so we can see what I’m talking about okay so just so you can see how this functions and all up this up on the screen here in just a moment what we’re looking at here is how your contactor works when you energize coil here which you can’t see it’s actually here this is your 24 volt coil inside of this all these meat little things here this design and this is called an electromagnetic mechanism just like a Transformer if you watch that video we kind of broke it down how a Transformer functions and also how a normal permanent split capacitor or PSC Motor Works this one has the same mechanism as far as the electromagnetic mechanism these are your contact points and with a two pole contactor it means both of these circuits are normally open this means there is not a constant contact like you would have with a single pull contactor and let me show you what that looks like okay and this is our single pole contactor so if we assume in just a little bit here you can see that it has a solid leg or a solid pole and what that means is there’s going to be a constant 120.

120 coming through here underneath this protective plate like the two pole it’s going to have this normally open hole under here so with single pole contactors you will always have that 120 here active and this needs to close in order to make the contacts connect once it’s got energized and that allows the 240 volts through to turn on your AC so how does all this work well here what we’re calling our control voltage is our 24 volts ac which we’ll get into in a moment but this sort of breaks it down for you what it looks like what we’re looking at here something tangible you know so here is our control voltage and control means this is the voltage needed to energize the magnet in order to make contact that mechanical connection to allow all of that voltage through so here these are called Contact points and they’re kind of hard to see um let me see if I can grab a screwdriver here see if I can pull these back just a little bit before am get one of my little guys and just under here there is contact point and since this is a new one I can kind of barely see it right there since this is a new one it’s not going to be pitted because it hasn’t had enough time to Arc and burn so there is an arc here which as this ages these are going to become more and more pitted on those points which is why they end up going bad so I recommend replacing these once really every five years just as preventative maintenance so you’re not having to go out you know rush out last minute and you know nothing’s coming on outside and this guy’s your culprit so I’d recommend once every you know five years ish just take a look at your contact points under there and definitely have a good idea technicians this is something to look at and as we’ll get into in a moment you need to make sure you are getting low resistance across your pole once it does connect so this spring is going to pull in close because of this electromagnetic mechanism here which the coil energizes that is wrapped around this iron core now here’s your moving iron core up here these are actually separated so when this becomes energized it’s going to pull that in that spring is going to be pulled down and these contact points are going to make a solid connection across so your voltage coming in from your home from your main breaker in the home that’s going to come in this is going to close and then you should get that voltage out this is a 24 volt coil meaning it’s going to operate and energize on 24 volts ac as we’ll get into in a moment you know just trying to repeat this knowledge really work it in this is what we call control voltage it comes in from your thermostat to pull and make this connection so the unit comes on when you are calling for cooling so this gives you an idea of exactly what this is doing when it does receive that 24 volts coming in and how it functions now a lot of people have an exposed coil here so underneath this plastic is this copper winding this coil if you see if this is exposed you’re going to see burning here and once that coil Burns it’s definitely bad you see obvious signs of burning here or obvious signs of burning here where your quick connects are going to come in or your lugs I would definitely replace that just so you’re being safe for you and your family so now let’s get over to the other part of the video where we’re going to connect the power up and we get a little more in depth on this this is more than likely closer to what you’re seeing out there with these exposed connections like this again since these are not pushed in they’re not closing that circuit across you should not have continuity when going across here as you can see it is not beeping and it should not be beeping until we get that control voltage closing the circuit here and as you can hear that when you’re out there you should see that this pulls in when the thermostat is calling for cooling the 24 volts should be coming out now remember a lot of times there’s a delay it depends on the thermostat if it’s programmed there are certain smart thermostats that have a built-in delay um but just keep in mind it might not kick on right away there might be a bit of delay however you should see this pull in so if you are seeing that this is pulling in like that um you do have your 24 volts if this is not pulling in you do not have your 24 volts now there is some exception here it’s really hard to see but right in here in this area there’s a tiny tiny coil that copper coil there and if that gets burned or severed something like that uh then if you are getting 24 volts and it’s not pulling in your contactor might actually be bad or one of the copper connections um came loose so that’s also why it’s important when you’re out there to check for your volts and make sure that you are in fact getting your 24 volts this way we know 100 percent you are getting voltage so if you are getting 24 volts here and this is not pulling in we know it has something to do with the contactor whether it be the coil you know something along those lines because you know that you are getting bolts your voltage here you can rule that this bad you are seeing that this is pulling in and nothing is still coming on at that point we need to know if we are getting our 240 volts so you would check across here on this side coming in remember one lead on each pole we’re not checking like this we are checking like this okay to make sure so here with our 24 volts that has pulled this in we can check and make sure that we are getting our continuity across help if I had it on the right setting there okay we’re getting low resistance and it is making connection so you can do it this way just to check and make sure you are getting low resistance on your contact points and it’s good to check that anyway because every time this pulls in it’s going to Arc and burn which means just under here those plates are going to get pitted and eventually they’re not going to make good connection so now that we know we’ve got our 24 volts this is pulling in and we do have continuity we need to make sure that you have high side power so you’re going to have high side power coming in from your home through the disconnect box that comes in from that conduit and that you should see some metal pipe and so this is simulating that high side power that’s going to be coming in here we are calling for cooling so we’re going to check for 240 volts coming in our power and again it would help if I switch the settings over here all right there it is we know we’re getting 240 in and then on the other side of those poles there you’re getting 240 volts out now you can check here if you want for here I just like to check here at the direct connection coming in if you are getting 240 volts in but not out your contactor is bad keep it in mind however you do have to have those 24 volts and that’s the first thing to check for when you come out to your contactor make sure that you are getting 24 volts your thermostat has to be turned to Cooling in order for you to check for your low side power so once you’ve established you do have 24 volts at that point it’s finding out if you do have your 240 in it is making a good solid connection and you have 240 out if you have both of those things of those things at that point I would move on to your capacitor or for those that have defrost boards um you might want to look at that as far as your heat pump is concerned some single stage um straight cool condensers do have pressure switches out there so that could be something else going on but we’ll get into that later for now this is how you’re going to check your contactor and what a contactor does so now you know and you know how to check that now for instances like these you don’t have to have a clamp meter like this you can just have a multimeter but as a homeowner it’s a really good idea to have something if you’re wanting to fix or repair your own units you want to make sure that you have something that could read amps you can check your amp draw if anything else goes wrong in your home it’s just a good thing to have and as I was mentioning before with our capacitor videos when we were testing those you don’t have to have a fancy meter like this that also reads microfarad and even those you can find less expensive at places like Harbor Freight Home Depot carries some lows carry some just something that is a multimeter that can read you know all your basic stuff let’s say C volts DC amp draw continuity ohms this one right here is diode and then of course your temp and so once you hit that point of home ownership where you’re needing to repair your own things or if you’re also a property owner or multi-family uh management or owner these are really good things to know or things for your guys to know and understand because it’s going to save a lot of money so I highly recommend getting at least a multimeter even better if you can get a clamp meter this is definitely going to save you a lot of time and a lot of money so thank you so much for joining once again thank you so much for joining me today and if you have any questions just leave them in the comments below and I will get to them as soon as possible if you want to watch more videos like these just hit the Subscribe and do us a favor and give us a like so we can get more information out there to homeowners and technicians like you thank you so much again and have a wonderful day thank you

Hey guys, this is Crystal with Open to Public HVAC School and today we’re going to take a look at the order of operations in our systems and these failproof methods to help diagnose the problems. Number one, pay attention to the original problem. What is happening? Does your heat work, but your AC doesn’t come on? If you have gas heating, gas can be slightly more complicated than air handlers or electric systems, unless, of course, you have a heat pump. With gas, it’s especially important to know what the order of operations are before your heat turns on. I recommend checking out our video on our main page that tells you the order of operations on a gas system before you start diagnosing or trying to do your own repairs before you have no idea what could actually be happening.

And the reason why I say that is you’re going to be getting frustrating error codes that are just basically telling you your system’s locked out because you have the door or panel to your unit open while you are calling for heat, which will cause it to automatically fail. Let’s say, for example, your fan motor or your blower motor on your inside unit is not coming on. Have you tried testing this in all settings on your thermostat? I find when dealing with a blower motor that is simply not coming on, go ahead and just turn fan on on your thermostat to see if it even works at all. Number two, does your thermostat come on?

If your thermostat isn’t coming on at all, that points you to you need to be looking for power coming into the thermostat. You might just need to replace batteries or possibly one of the wires. The power wires have become severed or your thermostat’s just bad. When dealing with something like that, make sure that you are actually getting power to your thermostat if your thermostat is not working. Which leads us to number three. Trace your power. So, it’s extremely important to trace your power. Are you 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt sure that you have power? and not just your high-side power.

You need to make sure that you also have your low side power. On that note, do you have power from your disconnect box outside to your outside condensing unit? The number one thing people do wrong with checking for power is they’re not using things correctly when testing for power. Number four, check your breakers. Make sure that they have not tripped. not your disconnect outside or if you have an air handler, the breakers inside, but the actual breakers from your main panel. This is especially important when diagnosing a unit that simply will not come on outside. This can point to other issues,

including your compressor over amping, pressure issues, or a weak breaker. If we simply can knock out the fact that it might not be something tripping the power, we know that we can then move on to something else. So, make sure that the breakers you are checking are the actual ones that provide power to your outdoor unit or the one that is in your main panel. You will also need to do this in case nothing works on your indoor air handler, but more often than not, this is tripping due to something going on with amp draw, pressure issues, or your compressor outside. Number five, use your tools correctly and have the right tools for the job.

In a few of our videos, we show how to properly use your leads from your multimemeter to check that you are doing this correctly. Make sure that your meter is on the correct setting. And while some technicians will do quick checks to make sure something isn’t hot before working on it, when we are doing diagnostics on the power on your unit, do not use those cheap touch sticks. just to realize that it’s hot. When your condenser is on load and there might be power coming through, you don’t know how much power is coming through. So, without knowing that, how can you know if you’re having power issues without knowing the exact voltage that’s coming into your unit?

I hear a lot of older gentlemen coming into my store and saying, “I have power.” What I’ve learned over the years is to actually ask them, “How much power are you getting to the outside unit? How much power are you getting to your indoor unit?” When you check at your relays, you should have a certain amount of current depending on the type of voltage it uses. AC will always alternate in a range since it is alternating current which means you should not be reading an exact 24 volt or 240 volt. It should range somewhere between 240 to 244 just as your 24 volt should be reading somewhere between 26 to 28 vol.

If you are in fact reading lower voltage coming out to your unit or going into your air handler or gas furnace, you know there is a power issue. This will save you a lot of heartache. Trust me. And number six, the most important thing you can do for yourself as a homeowner or as a new technician, stop taking the lazy way out and just changing parts. One of the largest offenders I have of this mentality are apartment maintenance men. And this might not be their fault alone. often they’re overworked and they don’t have a lot of time to sit at each apartment to try and figure out what’s going on.

So the logic to them states just change it out. And while that might work with somebody else’s money, it’s not going to help you if you own many properties or if you’re trying to repair something in your own home or if you’re trying to repair your customer’s home. I can guarantee you that they or you are not going to be happy with those results. It can get extremely costly. As a prime example, I once had a gentleman spend over $600 because he refused to believe that all he had going on was low airflow in his indoor unit when all he needed to do was change his filters and clean his evaporator coils.

Now, how stubborn is that? If you’re going to get yourself into DIY and repairing your own things, you need to be open to the idea that it might not be what you originally thought it was and push down that pride to really pay attention to what your unit is telling you. Preventative maintenance is the number one thing to keep your unit running strong for many years to come and also keeping your customers, your tenants or you as the homeowner happy. Thank you so much for joining me today and I hope that these tips help you to properly diagnose or at least lead you in the correct direction on what you need to do to find the problem.

As always, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and I will answer them as soon as possible. Thank you so much again and have a wonderful day. If you did enjoy this, please make sure to hit the like button or subscribe as this will help us as a channel grow and help you more. Take care everyone and we’ll see you again soon in our next video.

okay so what we are going over today is going to be a bit of an umbrella uh statement and the reason why I say that is there’s a lot of things that can go wrong with your unit that will keep it from coming on so what we’re talking about here are some common issues that it can be and what you’re looking for now we’ll get into shorts a little bit but that’s going to be covered in another video on how you can systematically search for and possibly find some shorts within your unit um we’re going to cover Gas and Electric a lot of people that come into our store want answers right away as to why their unit isn’t coming on and the deal is a technician’s going to have to go through the same thing that you are so let’s look at it this way you go to the doctor and you give the doctor symptoms he’s not going to know right away without running some tests some Diagnostics some blood work what is going on and even then they can kind of surmise what might be going on but they’re not going to know exactly and this is what we’re going to be doing we’re going to take a look at your symptoms and we’re going to diagnose based off of what you know and what you look for so if you handle the situation smartly instead of making it hard on yourself and just Parts changing trying to figure it out what we’re gonna do here is we’re going to take a look at some common things and then on some later videos we’ll go into some uncommon things so let’s look into some possible issues that can be causing your unit not to come on common thing I see that many people do homeowners um apartment maintenance uh you know handyman come over guys that work out of their trucks they always want to jump to the control board and a lot of times this is not the issue so instead of jumping just to the board straight away let’s look into first and I know again this always sounds really dumb when you’re trying to tell people this but look for and make sure that you are getting power to your unit also if you have a gas unit um there is something called a door switch between your main furnace area where all of your burners your inducer motor limit switches and then where your blower compartment is that is a safety switch and that has to be working correctly in order to allow that 120 volts to come into your unit so that it works uh the other thing is to make sure that your Transformer is putting out those 24 volts and remember these are step down Transformers so first when placing our meter on the Transformer make sure you are getting in fact 120 volts to your unit and then make sure that it is outputting the 24 volts now with AC current it’s alternating which means you should not get exactly 120 volts you should be sitting somewhere around 122 and then on the 24 volt side you should be sitting somewhere around 26 to 28 volts so first make sure that from your door switch to your unit which just check at the Transformer it’s easier at first make sure you are in fact getting power if you are not getting power at that point what you’re looking at is either the door switch a week breaker um could be a power surge so if you have something like a high side voltage short on your Transformer it could be a power surge that come through and took that out so make sure you do have your 120.

if you are in fact getting the 122 your Transformer you know you have power the other thing to make sure with power and I know it sounds really dumb sometimes people forget to either plug the unit back in or flip the light switch so I know I know I filmed them but just make sure that you do actually have power going to the unit uh the next thing is to make sure that your Transformer is sending the 24 volts into your unit to your board also let’s go ahead and take a look at what you can check for on your board to make sure that we can also roll out your thermostat and potentially your control board as well as a few other things so let’s go take a look at the workbench and see what else we need to look at okay there’s a few easy things that we can look for once we know where to look so when you’re inside your unit as we were speaking about earlier we want to make sure that we are actually getting our 120 volts here or if you are on an electric system you’re 240 here this is a universal Transformer so yours might look a little different it might have all the legs on one side like this it could be angled in there different um but this is where your main power your high voltage is going to be coming through so your high side here what you’re doing is you’re going to put your volt meter on one of each of these legs again make sure you are not testing against ground because you can get some feedback so here we’re going to simulate our power and you’ll know it’s a Transformer because you’ll see this magnetic core here your electromagnetic core you can’t see it in these but there is in fact a coil in here you might be able to see yours but really that’s not super common with a lot of the newer ones you can kind of see a little bit of that shiny plastic in there but it’s going to look mostly like this we’re going to simulate our power here I’m going to use our 120 so we’ve got our neutral and our 120.

so with our meter set to volts ac we are then going to turn the call for heat or cool on depending on which you’re trying to attempt here because this is the power for everything on your inside unit and your outside unit unless of course some of you do have a Transformer on outside units or package units can be on a rooftop and it’s going to be a little different so now we’re going to check and make sure we are getting our voltage first and foremost just so you don’t waste your time having to go through checking everything without realizing that you might not have power all right let me get my guys here there we go like we mentioned earlier we should be getting somewhere between 122 to 123 volts ac so now you know you’re getting power or you’re not getting power so if you’re not reading that 120 volts you now know what the issue could be at least one of those so once you know you are getting your high side power we then need to know if your Transformer is putting out your 24 volts to low side power oh let’s see here because if that doesn’t send out your 24 folds of course nothing is going to come on all of that’s going to run off of that 24 volts ac so now that we know we’ve got high side and again you’re 24 volts can also say just load on there you can see 24 in common or have both like this one um this is where again we’re going to put one lead on each we’re going to turn on our power and there you go should be between 26 28 volts so always make sure you’ve got power coming into your unit before assuming that something could be going on with your control board and a lot of people like to jump to the control board as being the culprit so now that we know this is okay or we’ve stopped there and we know that hey I’m not getting power or my Transformer is not working how do we check and make sure that it’s not our board and one of the things it’s also good to check for is on your control board some of the older units might not have these but you should have somewhere on your board this guy which this is a three amp fuse some of the trains and yeah a few other models this unit pretty sure some Amana did some five amp for a little bit as well um you’ll see five amp fuses like this um if you see a higher fuse in there than a five or three that is not going to catch that low voltage short and it will take out your board and your Transformer Automotive fuses are higher and they’re not suitable for your HVAC units so always make sure that you have no more than a 5 amp fuse in there and most units their control boards use a three okay now so what are we looking for with these little guys well as you can see if I can get this guy to focus on there a little bit better there we go as you can see there’s this little connection here and that has to be solid if there’s a break or a small charring there you know you’ve popped a fuse and if you’ve popped your fuse nothing will come on SO double check that your fuse is okay when you’re going through to diagnose and make sure that your control board is not the culprit and of course checking your fuses to make sure that those are still good most of you are going to have single stage furnaces um two stage can be a little different but what we’ve got here is your basic setup for your thermostat wires now when you’re wanting to see if there is actually a call for heat on your control board we need to find out if you’re getting the 24 volts or the call from the thermostat here where your wires go you’re going to check between R and W and this is your call for heat R being your hot w to get your heat to come on um I have seen some where the G has to also be in circuit for either one but for the most part your call for heating is always going to come in right here so you’re going to check with your meter and make sure that you are getting your 24 volts ac for the call from the thermostat on the r and the w if you are in fact getting your 24 volts here you know again your thermostat is calling for heat and you can also check on the r and Y if you’re checking for cooling to rule out the thermostat you need to know the thermostat is actually sending the signal for the Heat or the cool to come on now the difference between Heating and Cooling is something we’ll go into with this control board because there’s a difference when calling for cooling versus Heat we’ll get into that when we start getting into our AC series but for now know that R and W should have a call from the thermostat for heat so let’s break that down a little bit we know from our Transformer that it is sending the 24 volts we know that’s good we can rule that out and then we know that our thermostat is sending voltage called The Heat at the unit but there is no light on this board and the newer boards you can’t see the lights on these because they’re itty-bitty LED lights in here but yeah and the older ones you can actually see those bulbs sticking out but when your heating fails it should blink a fault code and these are generally below your wiring diagrams as we’ve shown in other videos and it will tell you what’s going on now if that light does not come on board is not getting power or it is bad but going back to what we were talking about earlier just make sure you do have your 120 or 240 going into the unit make sure it’s not something like a power surge that happened that took out your high side power if you have gas heating your door switch possibly you know as we spoke about a breaker just kind of take all those boxes off so you’re not having to get more and more frustrated because you’ve replaced parts and none of it is working so always first and foremost make sure you do have power and make sure that your Transformer is sending that 24 volts and that your door switch is actually functioning like it should because if you know you’re getting power to the unit but there’s no power getting into the unit it’s going to be the door switch on your gas furnaces more than likely now with air handlers while you know the newer ones are going to have those those fan control at those boards that’ll connect and whatnot just like here obviously it’s going to be different because it’s going to go directly to the unit instead of being on this board you’ll see all your thermostat wires coming up to the unit that doesn’t change you need to check between your R and your W and make sure that you are getting the call from the thermostat and that there is power coming into your unit as well as checking your Transformer between your 240 and your common and then of course making sure that you are getting that’s 24 volts out so now that you know you are getting all of your power it is sending the call but still nothing is coming on and your fuse is good what you’ll want to do is pull the board out of the unit of course make sure that you have taken pictures of where all your wires go make sure that you don’t forget to put those wires back because obviously it’s not going to work anyway even if you replace it with a new control board so a lot of times you can see for sure if you turn this over and you notice a really dark spot charred black really really dark now keep in mind on older boards which can be tan or lighter green diodes get hot and because they get hot with time age is gonna yellow this right here it’s going to turn like a light brown kind of a yellowy color but as long as you can see all of our trails are good they’re not split and there’s no Char marks where these relays are here on the back then you know at least by looking at it you can kind of tell that there are no breaks in any of these Trails where the solders are going to um or that your relays have burned and it’s very noticeable some of you might have old enough units that you actually do not have a fuse on your control board a lot of times if a technician comes out to work on a unit they can put one of these inline fuse holders in there which are really great to have to catch any low voltage shorts I’d recommend putting one of these and then would go from your Transformer on your 24 volt side now these would basically be cut stripped back and then wire nutted or however you want to do it if you want to do um the heat shrink which that’s really what I prefer to do it’s a lot more safe just tie them in to one of these legs do not put this one on both okay it only needs to go on one side and this will prevent a short on your low voltage and this guy just goes in here like that make sure it’s all the way in there and snug and then closes right over there and that’ll catch a low voltage short now we’ll go into diagnosing shorts and what you need to do for that um also if you wanted to you could wire nut something like this in with your terminals yeah you can just make it cheaper version of that obviously you wouldn’t have these email connectors here you could just strip these back as well and wire nut them in on the one leg that you spoke about so that’s another way so once we’ve kind of ruled all of this out and we’ve caught hopefully what’s been going on with our gas units it’s gonna really help to know all of these things so that way you’re not replacing your control board you know your Transformer and in a previous video I had spoken about knowing whether a Transformer is good or bad because if it’s bad nothing’s going to come on heat cool either one if something comes on in your unit you see a light on your control board if your cooling comes on but not your heat your Transformer is doing its job and it is fine just as a side note technicians if you do find a popped fuse or you do find a low voltage short and this can go for homeowners but you know honestly don’t buy something if it’s just a matter of replacing a few fuses but these are extremely helpful to have when testing you do not leave this in a unit this is not a permanent fuse what this does is it’s a resettable fuse so if this pops it’s just a matter of pushing a button in to reset it and then from there you can locate where that short is coming from if you do in fact replace everything and you’re still popping fuses now again we’ll get into shorts and what you need to do to look for them but for now just know this is a good thing to have when diagnosing why the unit might not be coming on left my drill at home I’m gonna have to do this by hand oh my God now this might look different than what you’ve got uh remember every piece of equipment is unique brand of brand they’ve got their own design and then of course the age of the unit comes into Factor so as you can see we’ve got our Transformer here and it will be labeled on one of your sides this one’s got a sticker over here that you can’t see yours could look different but they’re all going to have this core here with the two high side power wires coming in and then of course the 24 volt side coming out now this is going to have a fan control relay at this board right here this is going to be your breaker here um some of you might have a bunch of Breakers in a room you’re going to have your sequencers and yours can look different they can be mounted on its side you can have three stacks you can have two and we do have a video over sequencers and testing them bottom line is if your blower motor isn’t even coming on on any setting whether it’s heat cool fan on the place to go for that first is to make sure again that you have power coming in now your thermostat wires are going to be coming in it’s those little tiny small wires really really thin small gauge wire like this um that’s going to be the call from the thermostat coming in like we spoke about that’s going to connect to the power of the unit that’s basically sending the 24 volts in on your low side power on your sequencers you can see your low side voltage here on the bottom this is your 24 volts here see if I can get a little more light on that are these bottom legs here are your 24 volts now there’s going to be a delay on Startup depending on your timing for your sequencer which again if you reference my sequencers video it talks about what all these timings mean of course what’s inside of the sequencers that makes them function now this is something you need to check for when nothing is coming on you’re going to need to test those which we did break that down in the video on how to test it to make sure that that might not be working always check your breaker and make sure and obviously do not electrocute yourself um when you turn this on but what you’re checking for is you’re wanting to make sure that you are getting your 240 volts coming in and that your breaker is actually making and completing the circuit to allow the 240 out so that the unit can power on if you are hearing clicks from relays when you come out here to check your heating and make sure that it is in fact at least making some sort of sound some sort of relay pulling in so that it can make contacts in order to turn the heating on then the next thing would go to if you’re hearing that click but your motor is not coming on you’re not seeing spinning you’re not hearing the motor come on and this is an x13 motor which is a constant torque this one’s going to have where it goes directly to for the most part go directly to power because it’s always going to have a constant 240 volts on it and then it’s going to call on that fan relay which in case this one that’s going to go in here and call for your fan motor to come on now if it’s a normal PSC motor it can be a little different but know that if it is not getting the 24 volts or if you’re not getting the high side power that will not come on the other option is that if you are hearing the relays you’ve tested your sequencers it’s at least making some sort of noise you know potentially your motor might be bad or you’re bored is not sending the 24 volts to your motor so what you’re needing to find out here is back to the basics making sure you do have power that all of your relays are closing like they should that your sequencer is closing and it is allowing that high side voltage through and that there are no breaks in your wires look for any burned or shorted wires and making sure that if you are not getting that 24 volts into the unit from your Transformer it’s a matter of finding out if either the Transformer is bad whether there’s no high side power coming in or it’s not allowing like we said a moment ago the 24 out or if you are not getting the call from the thermostat for your heating so always save yourself a lot of Heartache by going through these steps always always always check power check continuity on your breaker um and of course you can check continuity here if you’re just wanting to make sure it’s making good contacts here in the center and of course once you flip your machine on in order to call for heating or Cooling and you’re going to flip these on to make sure that you are in fact getting your 240 volts in and out rolling power out ruling relays out sequencers of course our Transformer which would be the more obvious one and if you are hearing clicking and you are getting your power coming through your sequencers and your fan relay and that’s for people that have what’s called a PSC motor this is a constant torque so it’s going to have high side power on it ear and then the 24 volts is what is going to actually tell the motor to come on so with PSC Motors wiring is going to be a little different and you’re going to have a fan relay in here if you don’t have that type of fan relay up here or some sort of fan control that turns the motor on you might also have an issue with your board so what we’re doing here when we are diagnosing what could cause your unit not to come on is power first so if you’re wanting to know how to test sequencers again there is a video which I can link it below that we talk about how to test sequencers and relays all right everyone that concludes our video for this week if you have any questions or concerns or if you can think of something I might have forgotten about I feel free to leave them in the comments below I will get to them as soon as possible and hopefully you’ve learned something from this and I was able to help you in some way figuring out what is going on with your unit and why it might not be coming on all right everyone well have a great rest of your week and we’ll see you soon bye guys

hello everyone this is Crystal from open to public HVAC parts and today we’re going to talk about the basic order of operations for a residential gas furnace now why would this be important to learn before you work on a unit well for obvious reasons you would need to know how it functions before you can start diagnosing the issue this can be extremely helpful when you are trying to go through and figure out what is wrong what could be eluding you and so for this purpose in the store what I do is I create a diagnostic checklist so let’s go over how a furnace functions and then we can start looking

at our checklist for what could possibly be wrong now this is just a generalized operations list we’re going to touch on what happens here um before we get through our one through six steps but we’ll kind of gloss over that we can get more in depth later but for now this will just give you an idea of what you’re looking for and where the issue could be as it say stops working so the very first thing that should happen is your vent motor or your inducer motor should come on your blower motor and your inducer motor should not come on at the same time so as that inducer motor comes on obviously it’s

going to be a safety thing because we’re dealing with gas so noxious fumes any sort of combustion that needs to be vented out of your unit up through the roof once that comes on your pressure switch in most cases are going to be under negative pressure so when this comes on it’s going to pull that negative pressure through this tube and it’s going to close the line that’s going through the pressure switch once that pulls through obviously path of least resistance that low voltage is going to go through that line and it’s going to go through a series of switches your height limit your limit switch

sometimes they’ll be on your blower you have roll out limit switches on your burners that are manual and once it goes and most people their limit switches are in line so it has to go through all of these limit switches before it gets to the point of your control board sending voltage before it gets to the point of your control board sending power to your gas valve so the very first thing as we mentioned inducer motor the second thing is your pressure system which is your pressure switch and hose your inducer motor and your flue pipe that goes up to the roof next in line we’ve got your igniter or

sparker if you’ve got one of those on your board here like this one and once that comes on it’s going to stay on for a little bit until it shuts off and once it shuts off the board sends the voltage to your gas valve to open and allow the gas through Yes you heard me correctly the igniter shuts off before the gas valve goes through and that igniter is burning hot so it’s going to still be extremely hot once that gas goes through to ignite so from there as we said after the igniter lights the gas valve comes on stays open and lights next we go over to it’s going to light up go all the way across

those burners to your flame sensor and there’s some really cool science behind flame sensors but we’ll get into that later just know that the flame sensor is going to send the tiniest tiniest millivolt back to the board and that board knows that everything is good and we’re going to keep it on so from there it’s done all of these things before it signals the blower motor and blower wheel to come on so once that blower motor comes on we’ve completed the stage of everything’s good to go and now we’re going to blow air into your home with that being said now we can start to look at these problems

and this checklist to know what could be going wrong what was the initial problem say for example my igniter isn’t coming on right it’s not glowing so okay igniter well what happens before the igniter comes on well the inducer motor has to come on the pressure switch hasn’t you know has to pull closed before the board can send the signal to the igniter to come on SO somewhere between steps one and steps three something’s off you can stop right there because you know it has something to do with one of these items and that’s exactly why we need to learn how these work and I know it sounds annoying

but if why not if you’re putting the work into doing this why wouldn’t you learn how it worked it would make your life so much easier so another really great question to ask yourself is when was the system your indoor your outdoor your thermostat when was it last work done has it functioned in all settings since it was worked on or since the thermostat was replaced if a technician diagnosed the problem did he give you a written diagnosis and this is something a technician won’t offer up to you on his own you need to ask for that request it if they’ve already been out because legally when you request

a written diagnostic from a technician that’s come out to your home they have to give it to you so make sure you get that if you’re planning on repairing the issue yourself really important thing that a lot of people fail to check even if they know what they’re doing and they’ve worked on a unit before is what is the blinking light on your control board telling you because it will blink a code when it fails if it doesn’t blink a code when it fails we can go to the fact that it’s the control board now it’s a whole different story if you’ve popped a fuse on the control board and it’s not working

correctly or if the light doesn’t come on at all if nothing comes on at all you know it’s probably something to do with power or a popped fuse at which point you’re going to start looking at other things when that happens so is there a blinking light and what is it telling you so if you did self-diagnose with say YouTube or something like that go back to see what you did really make sure you know what you did in order to reverse what you could have possibly done when you repaired or replaced a part did you replace your thermostat if you did you test it in all functions was it working on fan on

was it working in heat was it working and cool make sure that you check all of this before you immediately go to the system and a lot of people like to blame the control board when they haven’t properly done this checklist to make sure so make sure that your thermostat is sending signal for fan on heat or cool and see if it works in any of these functions did you change the battery in your thermostat and these are I know they sound dumb and basic but it that’s what we’re doing we’re going back to figure out what the root of the problem was to begin with this is a very important one does anything

come on in your indoor unit if it does anything come on in your outdoor unit does your thermostat come on so first and foremost make sure that anything is coming on at all nothing is coming on at all you want to check your power or you want to check your Transformer and just see if any of those for causing a problem so here’s our checklist for what should be coming on inducer motor comes on first check okay control board lights come on check the igniter or sparker comes on check so on and so forth list it out for yourself to figure out again where that problem is stemming from and right here we’ve

said in what order do these parts come on so again if your inducer motor and your blower motor come on at the same time is that within our order of operations no no it is not so clearly it’s got something going on here does your furnace light make sure that you’re actually seeing a flame because if you’re not seeing a flame a flame sensor is not going to be your problem so does your igniter glow Etc it all goes back to our rule of Basics here save yourself the problem really look at this um as I’ve said before does your outdoor unit come on check your cooling make sure that’s happening so another

and this sounds so dumb but it is incredible how many times I’ve had people have this issue is well I’ve already reset the power do I need to reset the power again yes absolutely 100 put everything back together the way it was after you think you’ve fixed the problem or if you’re still trying to diagnose it make sure you reset the power and the reason behind that is it could still be in a lockout or Purge mode so say you put everything back together and immediately your blower motor and your inducer motor come on it’s still in a purge cycle so make sure you reset the power even if you think you’ve

done it a million times just do it so once you’ve done that did anything change has the code changed on your board and this is something very important to pay attention to um was there a popped view so say you’ve put everything back and then all of a sudden you turn it back on and pop another popped fuse obviously we’ve got a short somewhere does your breaker trip as soon as you turn on your heat or as soon as your indoor unit comes on these are all very important things that a technician is looking for so you as the homeowner can protect yourself by knowing the basic order of operations so make

sure you pay attention to this and I sincerely hope this has been helpful for you if there’s something you feel like I haven’t covered or something you’d like to know more about just leave a question in the comments below and I will get to them as soon as possible thank you for joining us again today and I hope you have a wonderful day

foreign so unfortunately not all wiring is as cut and dry as you would think and then this in this instance you have to actually look at how this is labeled on your Legend which most of you should have and you can see there’s also pin harness here in which you have to follow where your limit switch wires actually go to and you’re gonna have to follow them down all the way to the board which you can follow those two red wires I’ve already traced them back and you can see that they are in pin seven and in one so you’ve already replaced your high limit switch some of yours might look different it

could have this rectangular plate back here I could have a square plate and there’s even some that look like a disc limit they’re round and you’ve seen them in the other videos I’ve talked about before even though it looks like a normal disc limit they can be your high limit switch now the purpose of the high limit switch is that it has a temperature sensor on it with a thermal plate uh it’s set usually at a higher temperature not as high as a rollout switch but it’s meant to open the circuit if it becomes too hot in your furnace now if you’ve already tried jumping around the high limit with say

a jumper kind of like this or if you have even this or if you’ve even got some good old gear clips and when you do that everything comes on and it’s great but then it does it again so what now well if your furnace is telling you and uh by furnace I mean your control board is blinking the fault code again for high limit switch it could be a number of things I can tell you that the most common issues I’ve run across with the high limit switch error code is either a bad high limit which if you’ve replaced it you already know or hopefully the part is good that it’s not the high limit switch the other

possibility is a bad control board misdiagnosis of control boards happen quite often um a lot of times I’ll have people come in the store and they’ll say I think it’s a bad control board we hook it up we test it everything works just fine we’re not noticing any obvious marks burn Trails obviously a blown relay anything like that um it is more than likely not always because obviously this is a circuit board we can’t see what all is going on internally but more often than not when it’s setting off that high limit error code it’s either the high limit is actually bad or it’s going to be low air flow

in which case again this is doing its job um normally it’s a good idea to reset the power uh and go ahead and try to run it again and see if it’s throwing the same error code even after all the parts have been replaced uh your coils are clean your filters are changed out so if all of that happens and this guy’s still giving you that code it’s more than likely going to be your control board but I would do those less expensive options first before just jumping to the control board the number one issue I run across is the no good very bad filthy dirty evaporator coils if you’re wondering right now

in this moment what evaporator coils are unless you have a brand new system it is time to clean those my friend if there is a low air flow in that furnace it’s going to trip the high limit switch because it’s going to get hot in there and this bad boy is doing what it’s supposed to be doing also change your filters a lot of people are confused about Services every year performed and they do clean your coils but it is not your evaporator coils and you can tell where your evaporator coils are based off of the drain line that’s going to come out because this will be your primary drain line from your

evaporator coils as you can see it’s going to be a little tedious to get to those and there is a lot of good videos out there to show you how to remove the panel usually you’re going to have to remove some screws maybe some tape but it is not part of your normal yearly services or your every six month services to actually clean evaporator coils

basically what we’re going to do here is I’ve already unclipped it but your should have some sort of clip like this that you’re going to be able to pull off some of them have like a squeeze tab you squeeze and you pull but for the most part they’ll clip in just like this and you can pull it out um if yours has batteries like this try changing out the batteries first sometimes it can just be as simple as that but what we’re doing in this case is we’re trying to see if between the thermostat and the unit it is either not receiving power or there could potentially be a bad therat not calling for cooling

or Heating and it can work on one setting but not on the other so say if it works on heating but not on cooling or reverse it once we have removed that we’ve tested and seen if it’s potentially the batteries and it’s not what we’re then going to do is bypass the thermostat by jumping these wires together now you’re going to have to be very careful not to touch wires to short them out now before we begin uh this is something that I try to point out in my videos for a reason a lot of people ask me what color wire and the thing is most of the time when you see y here it is a yellow wire but clearly

you can see that is not a yellow wire so remember wire colors mean nothing and this is the reason why we Trace our wires back to the source now R is red which in most cases is correct G is green and of course W kind of hard to see but it’s behind this wire here W is white but again we cannot trust that so when we are going to our unit and we’re looking at the wire color the wire color could change at the unit where it’s wire nutted to go back to the thermostat so keep that in mind anytime you’re tracing back wires to the thermostat or wires from the thermostat to the inside unit what we’re going

to need when we begin to pull the thermostat wires out it’s just a little small Flathead um some of you have the larger handle smaller flatheads as well and we’re just going to unscrew these lugs here and pull the wires out that we are going to bypass to test and see if the thermostat is bad now as we’re here you might notice there’s a jumper between R and RC totally normal there’s a few different applications where you won’t see that jumper and when you purchase your thermostats to replace them it will tell you to remove the jumper so just keep that in mind even though you see the r and the r

C you can see there’s a jumper here so that wire is going to go to R which R is your hot so since we’re trying to bypass at the thermostat we’re going to first remove R and then we’re going to go to maybe if our fan isn’t coming on at all we would jump R to G and all that does is just tell the fan motor to come on in your indoor unit uh we call that a blower motor so if your blower motor isn’t coming on at all and you jump R to G and it does come on then you know that the thermostat is not sending the signal for the fan motor to come on same with R2 Y which is the call for cooling or R2 W which

is the call for heat what we’re doing here is we’re essentially bypassing the thermostat sending the call or the signal to turn on your cooling you’re heating or if you’re just wanting to circulate air in your home the fan so I’m going to remove this and we’re going to say call for heat so I’m going to jump the r to the W and should tell me right away if the unit comes on like it should or if nothing happens process of elimination if I jump these wires together and nothing happens at the unit then two things are happening um obviously there could be more than that but the two most common would

be that there’s either a broken wire from the thermostat to the unit or something is going on at the unit itself that is keeping it from coming on now obviously while you’re doing this you don’t want to touch the wires so keep that in mind when you are pulling the wires out it’s good to cut the power and then remove the wires and you know make sure that you’re kind of keep keeping them separated insulated you can put tape if you’d like so that way there’s no chance of you actually shorting several things control board shorting the thermostat um that protects it from shorting out you know something

at the unit or you know fusing wires or something like that happening to where now your unit won’t come on popping a fuse on the control board Etc so always practice safety with any electrical and make sure that you’re cutting the power to this before you remove the wires so we’re going to remove this make sure we don’t touch it to any other wires except the one that we’re wanting to actually call for heating or Cooling and then carefully turn on the power make sure nothing else is touching to see if indeed it does turn the unit on so now we’ve pulled the W which is the call for heat and we’ve

pulled R which is hot we’re going to jump those two together and see if our unit turns on now you can take these off you can wire nut them together you can use Gator Clips uh just as long as they’re not going to short out against anything it’s fine again it’s not going to hurt too bad if you get shocked by 24 volts but you know don’t play with electricity kids just make sure that everything is insulated like it should be and it’s not going to short out against it so now what we’ve done is we have jumped and bypassed the thermostat with the call for heating now keep in mind a lot of units have a

delay and you know depending on what kind of motor you have it could be upwards of I’ve seen some for 60 seconds 30 seconds even a minute and a half so you know give it a little bit before jumping to conclusions and that’s because a lot of times on boards there’s also a delay so keep that in mind when you’re testing give it some time don’t automatically assume it’s bad because it’s not coming on so give it a little it check the unit or if someone is actually at the thermostat doing this and you’re at the unit again just give it time if it does come on and it stays on and it functions exactly like

it should your thermostat is bad this should be a duh moment but when you do replace these thermostat wires and put them back in there just make sure you do push them down in there good tighten your connection a good snug connection and once you believe or feel like it is tightened exactly like it should be see wies kind of moving a little a little bit as we get it snug in there and then we can pull on it and make sure it is not going to come out so once we know those are nice and snug back where they should be we would continue with our troubleshooting if we have jumped around the thermostat and

the problem still continues okay a note to make for electric heating systems so if you have a single stage uh electric heat unit meaning you don’t use gas for your heat when you’re jumping these together at the thermostat and not at the unit itself you have to have the fan on on with it so you would be jumping your G your W and your R for your heating if you were jumping together for cooling you would jump R Y and G electric heat systems have to have the call for fan as well when jumping the wires together if you don’t do that for electric systems you’re going to get a false diagnostic because

you’re not jumping all the wires together that you need to okay now we’ve talked about the unit and how to test at the thermostat to make sure that we can rule out the thermostat for the reason why you’re not getting the call for heat or cool it’s important to note in any situation years can look like a light switch like this uh it could have a plug just make sure you go to the main source of power for your unit and you have turned it off very important do not electrocute yourself now obviously every unit’s going to be different yours could be up in the attic with a horizontal application uh this

is in a closet you can see that we have our drain line kind of coming over here which is in front of the door and with furnaces we are going to have to first remove the furnace section panel and then remove the blower section panel to get to our thermostat wires and if your unit has a control board uh the control board is going to be where your blower motor housing is in this case below unless of course you have a downflow in which it would switch because your air is going to go down under your home and through the floor so what I’m going to do now is I’m first going to remove this top panel which

should be on a lip you might have to undo some screws more often than not I haven’t a lot of times they’ll have this little handy lift here that you can lift up like this and then just carefully carefully pull this out so now we’re here we’re going to go ahead and remove this and for the most part units are going to look very similar to this now if you’ve got an older unit it could look different or you might not have a control board Al together so here where we have these big bundle of wires this is going to be where we’re going to jump around our thermostat once we’ve jumped the wires together

at the thermostat and still nothing comes on so at that point we can you know possibly chalk that up to a broken wire from the thermostat to the unit or something within the unit itself always make sure first and foremost our power is turned off at the unit itself and then we’re going to check the two power wires coming from the door switch with our meter to make sure that that is not sending highside power as well both for safety when we’re there at the unit and bypassing as we diagnose a potential bad thermostat all right so as we’re at the unit safety first make sure whether you have a plug

or a light switch that it is turned to off here um what we’re going to do just to make sure you double sure that our unit is off is we’re going to come down to the door switch where your 120 comes to here plugged in now some of yours are wires and you’re going to have to follow them back to a wire nut to make sure that the power is off uh if your meter can do non- contct voltage like this one it’s an easy way to figure out if you are actually getting power to it you can flip it over to non- contct voltage set it here if it doesn’t go off obviously you don’t have power now in a second I’ll show

you what happens when we do turn the power on and I need to get those plugged in so they’re not just chilling okay now that we know those are attached and secured I’m going to turn the power back on uh you have a non- cont voltage setting just do that and there you go now you know and that’s a lot easier you can see nothing now if you don’t have that you’re just going to flip your meter over to volts ac and okay power is off right then we’re going to remove our wires here safely for obvious reasons once these are secure they’re not touching anything we’re going to take our leads here and put them

in each wire turn our meter to volts ac and make sure there is not voltage all right we have our meter on volts ac or the V with the squiggly line above it and obviously it would be beeping right now if there were 120 but I’m going to flip mine on just to show you what it would do if you do still have voltage sending to it so there we are and we know okay boys and girls now that we know our high side power is not coming through and we are not yet calling for heating or cooling we’re going to take a look here at our thermostat wires now remember before where we talked about making sure the colors

add up here if anyone has say come and worked on your unit and messed with the thermostat WI sometimes they just put the wires back in the wrong spot and your unit Now is not working so remember if this color matches the color that’s coming from the thermostat then you know potentially it is wired correctly so we see okay yes the wires match colors here great now let’s see if we can rule out the thermostat or the board or the unit itself so let’s get ourselves all set up with our meters um you’re again you don’t have to have this meter just make sure you have one that can read volts ac and uh you

know continuity and whatnot so we’re going to have our meters here we’re going to turn them to volts ac and we’re going to see what’s happening when we bypass the thermostat at the board and see if everything comes on okay now so once again we know where all these wires are going we’re making sure that they are pushed out in a way that they’re insulated they’re not going to touch anything you can wrap them with electrical tape just make sure you know put wire nuts just make sure they are out of the way for this test now again what we’re doing here is we are bypassing the thermostat to see if that

could be the issue or in this case it can also be that one of these wires have broken in which case you’re going to have to follow them back and see if one of them has been chewed or broken or shorted any number of things um make sure that you do check your fuse at your control board some fuses are not on the control board themselves sometimes they can go from the Transformer here to one of these 24v wires here so if you see something like this but it is on a wire instead that can be your fuse so we’re going to pull this fuse out and make sure that it has not popped just to rule that out all right

well now that we have all of our thermostat wires removed we can put jumpers uh Gator clips paper clips pretty much anything you’d like to bypass the thermostat on here and uh make sure that you tighten everything down first so I’m going to go ahead and tighten these down so we make a good connection before we jump our other side too if we want to check the call for heat on W or the call for cool on y we need to make sure our door switch is actually pushed in before we do that so our unit doesn’t fault out okay now we’re going to carefully turn our power back on and obviously we’ve got this all

open so we’re going to have to push our door switch in first before we put the clip on there so just go ahead and tape that down um you can have someone hold it you can hold it just make sure that is secure in place before you put your gator clip on the call for heat cool or fan on all right what I’m going to do here because our gas is actually cut off we’re only using electric heat now so I’m just going to call for fan on so I’m going to to come over here and push in my door switch and you can see our LED is on letting us know hey I have high side power R is going to be R hot for 24 volt and now

we’re going to come over and jump it to G which is just fan on we’re going to hear that click and there we go you can hear that our fan is coming on if you’re unit is not coming on at all and you have done this test and it does come on and you know you have power and your board light comes on so you know the fuse is good and you are getting power to the board at that Point we’d be looking at a broken wire from the unit to the thermostat or a bad therat and of course last once you’re done with your testing and everything just make sure everything is back snug and secure exactly as it should be

hello everyone and welcome to this week’s episode of open to public HVAC School uh this is Crystal and today we’re going to cover the topic of if you are having a short in your low voltage line but only in cooling now these are common symptoms of a shorted coil in your contactor so we’re going to go over a few things you can do to do a simple diagnosis and what that looks like you’re going to need some sort of meter for this test you actually do not need a clamp meter you can have a simple ohm meter so before we get into diagnosis I’ve covered this in another video on exactly what’s inside of your contactor but I went ahead and printed that out here for us it’s a good idea to understand how this works in order to properly diagnose the fact that it is potentially your contactor on your indoor unit you would have and this depends on you know if you have a gas system or Electric System but you will have a tie-in where all your thermostat wires go uh air handlers normally have them on the outside where you’ll see all your small thermostat wires and you’ll have a you know a g w y c and on that y you should have two wires which goes out to your condenser or rather it ties in the 24 volts to call for AC if this short is only happening in Cooling normally has to do with this guy right here when the thermostat calls for cooling it’s going to send a signal out to this guy right here or if you have a heat pump it would go to something called a defrost board and that defrost board when then send the 24 volts to your contactor inside your contactor this is what we’re looking at here get it centered a little more for you guys now you’re going to have your contacts which are these guys right here and one of the things to do that is good while you’re out there is you’re going to check in which we did go over that check your contact points for pitting and it’s really hard to see that in here but under there you have points right here as it’s showing you have points in there that make contact if these are pitted which over time they do because they’re going to have an arc an electrical Arc that comes through here each and every time your unit fires up so you’re going to get pitting here it’s going to happen and I recommend changing these really at the very least every five years because you know just wear and tear part it’s a really good idea to keep these points clean so that you don’t have to worry about future issues now these are not or should not be closed until the 24 volts the low side voltage I want your thermostat is turned to cool it should be sending that control voltage or low side voltage in order to pull your contactor in so that it makes contact like so so we’re simulating the call for cooling from your thermostat you should see when you’re out there and your electrical panel is removed if you turn it on from your thermostat and you do see this pulling in it means you are getting your 24 volts therefore the thermostat is doing what it should be doing if it pulls in like this and nothing comes on you know you have a bad contactor now as we were speaking before about a shorted coil so inside of this guy is a coil and it’s hard to see in there because this one has a fully covered coil now those coils you’re going to see if I can get a decent angle here you can see that little small copper coil coil and since this operates under electromagnetism this is actually a loose or separated Armature meaning it’s not going to pull closed and it’s not going to energize these coils until the 24 volt line comes in it’ll pull that spring down it’ll make contact and then the 240 volts are going to come in through without resistance here and fire that guy up so if you have corroded or bad contacts if you’re hearing a loud buzzing or what we call chattering like this right here that means you’re dealing with a bad contactor so a good way to test while you’re out at the unit for your low voltage short and what I mean by a low voltage short is inside your indoor unit at your Transformer most people either have an inline fuse a three amp fuse or a 5 amp fuse if you don’t have a fuse in line and your thermostat is no longer displaying then that means you’ve probably shorted your thermostat now of course there’s other things we can do to check that but most people these days do have an inline fuse whether it’s on your control board or in line on your Transformer so if you are only hopping a fuse on your indoor unit during Cooling you know it has something to do in the cooling cycle whether that is a short from the thermostat or from the contactor so as always we’re going to make sure that our meter is set to ohms for continuity this guy right here and we’re going to connect our leads across your contactor to First make sure that your coil is good and then we’re going to check and make sure that there is not any pitting going on in here so with our ohm meter set to continuity we’re going to go ahead and hook our leads up to the 24 volt side first so that we can check our coil now they do make leads with Clips on the end like these and they’re really handy to get especially for diagnosing and if you are a technician highly recommend getting some weeds with the clips on the end as we are diagnosing the contactor we first need to make sure that our equipment is working like it should be so with it on the continuity setting check and make sure between your two leads it’s reading little to no resistance obviously there is no resistance so therefore we are good to go I’m going to use these Gator Clips here just so it’s easier I don’t have to clip it onto the terminals here I can just go ahead and connect them up on either side so again we are putting them on the coil side here is we’re checking to make sure that our ohm reading is good with the coil so now that we know our meter is good we’re going to go ahead and connect this up here now on our coil or contactors what we’re looking for as far as ohms we’re going to be looking somewhere between 10 to 20 ohms square around there if you’re reading less than one ohm here then that is not good that’s a sign that there is a problem so make sure that you have somewhere between 10 to 20.

so we’re going to connect here and there we have it we’re reading somewhere around 21.8 perfectly fine now we know the coil is good on this one if yours is reading less than one you know you have an issue you need to replace your contactor so that’s going to be a test number one let’s check across our poles here on connection now if your unit is say staying on all the time you would notice that this would be pulled in and would be stuck there should not be continuity without the switch being pulled in so what we’re checking for here is we’re checking to make sure that there is in fact no continuity from metal to metal just for simplicity’s sake and there is no difference here when we are checking across as to where you’re going to put your leads because in this case we’re not worried about positive and negative all right so when I connect my lead here it should not be if it does that contactor all right there we go it’s showing that it is open which is exactly what it should be reading now on these polls okay these are separate from your coil so we’re not looking at the readings from the coil like we did with the ohms what we’re doing here on ohms is we are looking for less resistance so the lower the better because obviously we need to be making good contact for your unit to be working efficiently so when we simulate the 24 volts here and we push it in we should be reading less than one ohm which we are so perfect just as an important side note um obviously when you’re doing your visual inspection make sure you don’t see any evidence of melting burning especially if you have an exposed coil if you see melting and you’ll know because it’s going to be all dark on one line it’s going to be melted if you see a melted coil in there you for sure know that it is going to be a shorted or bad coil and therefore you need to replace it so what are some other potential reasons that your unit could be shorting in a c only well your thermostat could actually either be shorted itself normally what I see is a wire somewhere has been nicked and it’s touching and it will short out both the thermostat and your low voltage um you know you’ll see your fuse popped and whatnot but if that’s the case more often than not your thermostat will not be coming on at all and make sure as we’ve mentioned in other videos that your thermostat is on make sure the batteries don’t need to be changed and when trying to locate a short this is why it’s very important to know if it’s only happening in one setting or the other if you are popping a fuse no matter what setting you’re putting that in that’s going to be a different set of diagnosis because we’re trying to look for where that short is occurring so a shorted coil in a contactor can only be happening in residential straight cooling systems from the contactor so if it’s only happening in cooling you are popping fuses or popping anything along that low voltage line when calling for cooling this is more than likely your culprit keep in mind when you are diagnosing sometimes you do need to go in a case-by-case situation more often than not if you diagnose correctly with the isolation diagnosis it’s going to rule out a lot of other things and so that’s why very first thing when you go out to your unit you should of course visually inspect the part and make sure that there are no melted wires melted coil obvious signs of short whereas then you’re seeing charring melted you know insulation on your wires that sort of thing because that kind of nips it in the bud you know hey it’s definitely something going on out here and I can visually see that the other thing as we were talking about just check that with your meter make sure everything is oming out correctly if your contactor is actually testing good then we’re going to be working our way into other possibilities within your system okay so as far as heat pump systems for those of you that have another potential that it could be I’ll get a photo up here for you but this can also cause a short in your system which is the solenoid valve on your reversing valve for your solenoid coil rather on your reversing valve we’re going to test this the same way we would with the contactor just carefully remove it and then we’re gonna place our meter and again make sure that your meter is good and you have it on the correct setting and we should be reading somewhere between 10 to 20 ohms and there we go so we know in fact that that is good or if it’s reading less than 1 ohm just like our contactor then we know that it is the valve the solenoid if your contactor is reading as good so for those of you with heat pumps that can be another option that you can test in your outdoor unit hypothetically the only thing else we could be experiencing if you are only getting a short on your cooling cycle is potentially you could have wires that have shorted together on your C and your y or your thermostat could actually be bad and can cause a short so these are just food for thought on what it could be again if it’s only occurring in your cooling cycle and it is not your contactor more often than not it is now we did all take a vote earlier and rest assured we are going to do a heat pump video on how a heat pump functions and some common issues with heat pumps however for now we’re just going to do this short video for people that are having shorts in their Cooling so again don’t worry that video is coming we are making it right now so hopefully this has been helpful for you and as always if you have any questions ask in the comments below and I will get to them as soon as possible thank you so much guys and I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day

all right guys we’re once again venturing off over here and today we’re going to talk about um how to figure out if your compressor is bad shorted to ground if it could possibly be a few other things but uh in this video we’re going to cover why you might be tripping your indoor breaker so let’s get to it and uh go over some possibilities all right now safety first now this is going to look a little different because it’s part of our main building here but in residential applications you’re still going to have something similar to this guy right here uh I’m going to work on this unit here that

we’re not using right now in our other Suite so always make sure that you first cut the power this is your discount neck we’re just kind of going to go under here you can see that ours is already off but uh just make sure you know when you’re flipping the switch here that you do flip it all the way down make sure it clicks and we’re not always going to trust that right so we’re going to go over to our unit and we’re going to first check power before we even get into touching the compressor all right so what we’re working on here it’s an old style R it’s going to kind of pull off the side and most

of you are going to have a panel that’s going to look different than uh this this is kind of a re rude uh thing so a lot of these have these slide ends like this and what I like about this design is it actually keeps the electrical panel up here on the side with the compressor separate from the fan motor which is really great when you’re trying to work on a unit so this is just going to come off of here like this and as you can see they’ve got their electrical up here and they’re compressor is down here off to the side away from the motor all right so here we are we’re going to go ahead and lift

this now this re unit is a two-stage which means it’s going to have a control board here and it’s not going to have a contactor because the contactor is actually going to be all integrated here in in your main control for the outdoor unit you know we’ve got our capacitor our relay for our hard start our hard start and this is our uh control board with these um you’re not going to see a contactor um to check for power and I can show you here in a second what the uh main contactor would look like in a normal unit but for now we’re going to check power here and make sure that we do not have 240 so

we don’t electrocute ourselves to death cool so how do we do that well from our main disconnect we follow that whip all the way in to here and we can see we know the main power is coming in right here another Super obvious way to tell for those of you that have you know boards like this um is look at the gauge of wire see if we can get a good angle here you see at these terminals right here there’s two very large gauge copper stranded wire here okay and that is generally how you know I mean it’s going to be huge you know a lot of them are six8 eight gauge wire somewhere around there so you know

hey that’s definitely going to be where my disconnect main you know power coming in through the house or through the disconnect just a side note um from the friendly sun in Texas it is so hot that my phone is actually overheating quite a bit so that’s fun all right so we’re going to take our meter we’re going to turn it to volts ac and we’re going to take both of our leads here we’re going to put one on each of these terminals make sure it’s tighten down really well if you’re just going to you know check it this way or you’re just going to directly connect it make sure you are getting one on each

if you’re just not sure you want to be extra safe you can reach in there with some clips or just make sure you’re getting a real good connection when you’re checking for power meter is not reading anything which means we’re good to go all right now if your compressor is tripping the breaker there’s really simple steps we can take to figure out if this is the culprit and then once you do you don’t have to go you know hunting around inside um something in your indoor panel this will knock it out right away we’re not sure if it’s actually the compressor that’s tripping the breaker there’s an easy

way to fix that just take the compressor out of circuit so this big old plug on here this is a caland style plug there’s a few different swort plug types there’s copelan uh LG Bristol Dan I’ve seen a few um some of them you know they look different but the idea is the same somewhere in your unit you’re going to have something that looks like this or it’s going to be kind of a short Stumpy guy I’ll put up an image of that on here um it’s a pot what we call a pot compressor we want to take this out of circuit just to see if it is the culprit or at least one of the culprits uh we’re just going to

remove this off of here all right right off the bat just make sure that you did double check that the power is not on very very important so now we’re going to take this and we’re going to remove it okay and this will take the compressor out of circuit so we can see if it does in fact cause the breaker to trip right away so obviously don’t leave it that way don’t leave it on but if we’re not tripping a breaker we know 90% of the time it’s usually a shorted compress now there can be a few other things depending on the length uh but what we’re doing right now in this segment is if it is tripping

your breaker as soon as you turn cool on your thermostat so now boom we’ve taken it out of circuit it does not trip the breaker so how are we going to make double sure that this is in fact the culprit well let’s whip out our meters all right just make sure that your meter is turned over to continuity for this test right here this symbol because you want to hear the beat you want to know that it is in fact you know it does have continuity and there should not be continuity in any of your windings on the compressor so what we’re going to do is we’re going to test that against this copper pipe here

and so ours is kind of dirty you might have to kind of scratch or scrape like this I can see right here is the best point to test it against and I’m just going to you know scrape it make sure I can make a good connection and now what we’re going to do I’m going to show you the plug cuz the plug kind of has it labeled there but we’re not going to test it on the plug so see how it has S C and R which stands for common start run so those plugs those prongs that are stuck in there that is what we’re going to put one side of our lead on we put one here you know any one you can start doesn’t matter and

we test it against the copper line all right no continuity good okay so we’re going to check it against the next prong good no continuity perfect perfect and then we’re going to test Ted against the last line no continuity now if you do hear the beep and you need to check all three windings if you do hear a beep your compressor has shorted the ground therefore it is bad know the simple ways that could be tripping a breaker you know if we can just easily say all right uh well it’s no longer tripping a breaker so it’s got to be the compressor key fact that we need to know specifically is time frame

to trip the breaker so how long when you you know turn on your cooling how long does it take to trip the breaker it’s a key piece of information we need to know if it is tripping the breaker immediately that is when we come out here and we test this okay if it’s not immediately tripping the breaker now that that doesn’t rule out the compressor but it also complicates things if say it trips a breaker after 5 minutes 15 minutes a couple hours something like that normally that has something to do do with the line pressures in your unit and what I mean by that is the levels of refrigerant in your unit

now this unit has pressure switches that will cut the power to the unit but it should not be tripping a breaker now if it’s tripping a breaker unless you have a weak breaker that implies that that is a massive strain on your compressor and it’s going to over amp and boom it’s going to trip that breaker right so at this point we need to know what is causing that since now we can Ru out you know we’ve done the continuity test right you know we don’t just stop at removing the plug and assume it’s a bad breaker uh reason for that is you can can remove the plug which effectively takes the compressor

out of circuit but if you have line pressure issues and this is specifically for the people whose Breakers don’t trip right away it could be over 70% possibility here you’ve got a refrigerant leak if someone came in and charged the unit recently they could have overcharged it the refrigerant could just be running low there’s a few different factors there a good way to tell when your compressor is over amping um that’s going to require you to get something like this now you don’t have to get an expensive one like these but something that has an amp clamp because you’re going to measure the amp draw

of your compressor obviously if your compressor is going way above what it lists on the initial amp draw here then you know something’s going on with your line pressures and you need to have someone uh unless of course you’re a technician you need to have someone come out and check your refrigerant levels what you can do up until then is at least check the amp draw on the unit and it’ll tell you here how many amps it should be pulling should say something like fla like full load amp but mostly just be looking at the amp draw and make sure it’s not pulling over that amp draw with most compressors

unless you have a hard start or a soft start kit it’s going to kick on it’s going to pull a lot of amps up front and then you should see that number start to go down it should never over amp it should never over amp for any amount of you know somewhat extended period now it is always going to pull more on Startup especially if you do not have something like a compressor saber or you know a soft start kit so just keep that in mind that if you’re not tripping a breaker right away it could be some of these factors another thing that so many people fight me over and they don’t realize is that it is

so important to keep your indoor coils cleaned as well now obviously this is a unit we don’t have in use cuz you can see it’s pretty dirty here but people either don’t know or don’t want to go clean their indoor coils and here’s the thing you don’t have to clean indoor coils near as often as you do outdoor coils for obvious reasons we’re out in the elements all the time so they need to be cleaned twice a year at the very least once a year your indoor coils are equally important so you need to make sure at least once every 3 years to upwards of five it’s really going to help your compressor um because

it’s not having to push through all that that dust and you know nasty dirt hair all that so keep your filters Che changed regularly and every few years clean your indoor coils you will be like amazed at the difference of cooling in your home from also keeping your indoor coils maintenanced so keep that in mind that could be part of the reason why your compressor is having the issues that it is okay just make sure whenever you’re leaving to grab all your tools off the condenser cuz now we’ve done everything we can outside to check and see if it is the compressor if you are tripping a breaker right

away that’s going to be how you test your compressor see if that’s the culprit also lead both you and the technician in the correct direction to figure out what else could be causing this before you even get your happy ass outside start doing all this [ __ ] save yourself a lot of time and actually check over the wires you know check and make sure there’s not any obvious melted wires in your disconnect um or obvious Burns check and make sure the wires coming into the unit are not burned melted check your capacitor on the inside where we opened all of that make sure there’s no burned wires which

can also be an indication of your compressor over amping and literally getting so hot that it is melting the wire itself so those are often some signs when you say blow a capacitor if you notice you have melted wires on the capacitor or the contactor okay those are not going to be what’s causing your wires to melt unless your contactor uh and that’s the exception to the rule there unless your contactor actually is staying engaged and it’s not letting go then yes it will get hot it will melt wires so keep these things in mind your compressor shows a lot of different signs before it’s going to die

keeping things clean preventative maintenance that is the key to everything you know you you do it for your car so why wouldn’t you do it for your AC which is something extremely important especially here in the South when we get up to temperatur is like 110 so keep your unit maintained and she’s going to treat you good treat her good she’ll treat you good it’s good relationship advice all right well yall take care and we’ll see you in the next video hope this helps shed some light on why you might be Tri and Breakers

hey everyone welcome to open to public HVAC school today we’re going to do a quick video over what these symbols are on your multimeter or clamp meter like this one and what it is they do and what we use them for normally in HVAC there are some you’re not going to use as often and we’ll get to that in just a moment all right let’s take a look now what do these symbols mean and I’ll get to the different kinds of symbols and how it can be the same meaning also there’s some meters that go up higher than this one but I do have customers and technicians that will come in and have these really simple

meters you can get on places like Amazon they’re going to be different than what many people use in the field that are going to be doing this for a living however because of the fact that a lot of people get plant meters or multimeters that look similar to this I would take something familiar and show what all of these symbols mean okay so section number one you see how it has this symbol next to it this is the amp draw and this shows us exactly how many ants say your compressor or your fan motor or a load that you’re measuring off of any sort of power source this is going to tell you exactly how

many amps it’s pulling and then you’re going to look at that sticker on your motor or your compressor and you’re going to find out if it does line up now usually when you’re doing a lot of things in HVAC you’re going to go over 40 amps smaller things like Motors and whatnot they usually don’t go past somewhere between 11 uh all the way down to maybe 1.2 amps something like that you’re going to go larger you would turn it to this right here so this simply means it can measure amp draw off of larger amp draws here and then of course smaller amp draws you’re going to be using a meter that does have

a clamp like this when you’re measuring amps that wire should be centralized as much as possible within the meter so it does get a correct reading but for now we’re going to go ahead and take a look at what these other symbols are so on most clamp meters these symbols are fairly Universal right here and as you can see we have the V with the dash and then the straight line and then the V with the tilde or curved line uh the V is going to stand for voltage and above that is the symbol for DC or direct current and AC for alternating current here in the U.S most of the time you’re going to measure

volts AC and that just kind of symbolizes the alternating current there most of the time when we’re measuring such things as PSC Motors and compressors those are going to be ac voltage so we’re going to use our two leads here when we’re checking across our wires our contactors our capacitors when we’re checking that and in these instances with voltage there’s no polarity when using your leads on there as long as we’re touching one on each and I’ll show you what that looks like in just a moment but for now know that that symbol stands 4 volts ac and some of the meters now will have it as actually

v a c or you know capital v a c something like that and then you know V oops D Crystal not b which is volts DC so when you’re measuring current keep in mind that you need to know especially when you’re checking for voltage on you know certain ECM Motors those are all going to run off of DC voltage but normally that’s going to be through a rectifier board which in a lot of ECM Motors it’s actually on the inside where it has a module connected to a board or the board is the module and that’s going to use a rectifier within it to convert AC to DC voltage however just know that these can check both

and that’s what those symbols mean next in line usually these are grouped together that’s going to be your ohms your continuity and diode and that’s what these symbols stand for this is used for testing resistors or diodes that you see on top of capacitors and whatnot control boards and you have to have the correct lead on the diodes when you’re testing them so for right now we’re just going to leave it at that is diode and this is continuity which we’ve covered in other videos on what you’re looking for Which is less resistance cross your poles your limit switches what have you you’re testing

to make sure that there is low resistance on that continuity so that it is good or it’s making good contact like in the case of contactors it’s extremely helpful and technicians and homeowners use this a lot this symbol right here is represented in different ways so as you can see this is going to be your symbol for capacitance microfarad that symbol can be seen as a u f which is microfarad and then you can also see it as m f d which is also microfarad and then we have this symbol right here for capacitance which looks something similar to this so when you see this symbol it means you have a meter

that can read microfarad or has the ability to read capacitance if yours doesn’t have that you can refer to my other videos on how to test a capacitor without having a meter that reads microfarad but again these symbols all mean microfarad so if you see any of these on your reader your multimeter your clamp meter that’s what those stand for and that’s what they’re used for interesting fact I actually found out recently as I always wondered why they separated ohms and continuity because it is measuring resistance what it essentially boils down to is continuity makes a beep when you turn it to just

ohms it does not make that be in any case when you turn to a setting with your rotary style here once you know you’re on the correct setting it’s always better if you have a meter that has more than one symbol on it to hit your function button to cycle through so for example this is on ohms when I hit function again there’s our diode and I hit function again there’s our continuity symbol with the ohm symbol at the bottom so make sure that you do have it on the correct setting if you don’t want to hear that beep you just go back to this symbol being here with the ohms at the bottom uh personally

I like the beep because it lets me know that it does have a connection and that it is closed what you’re looking for here and this goes for anything that needs to have a low resistance connection because electricity likes the path of least resistance therefore we want the resistance to be low so on say disk limits that you would find in your furnace or your blower housing an HVAC you put it across here and as long as it is reading low like that and you can hear how that beep could be annoying for some people depending on how long you need to hold it there that’s you know I could see that but obviously

this is good it’s good it’s snug no loose bits the same when you’re testing your contactors you should get an ol symbol on there when testing before it makes connection because it should not have and this is why I like the beep it should not have a beep on these poles because contactors and most relays are in fact open on startup before it gets that control voltage to use that electromagnetic mechanism and pull this in so you should always be reading open on switches like this and in your wiring diagram which we can get into all that technical mumbo jumbo leader all it’s telling you is that these

should be open so if you were to go to my other video where we test contactors I can actually post the link below so you can check it out and see what it should be reading across when connected like we were just getting into it needs to be the path of yeast resistance here so obviously I’m holding those in it’s not going to get a perfect reading one other thing to note besides obviously being on the correct setting when you turn it on your meter let me get my other meter so I can show you common is black normally on just about every meter I’ve seen but you never know could be some strange ones

out there let me grab that for you honestly obviously you can tell in here it’s got more bills and whistles but this thing is pricey and not everyone wants to throw you know a hundred and some odd dollars towards a meter unless of course you’re going to be working in the industry but you can see what I like about this one is it actually points out common and then that positive symbol one of the things that is important because even I myself have done this when testing things you need to make sure that your connectors you need to clean the inside of that one a little bit I guess it’s been a while

but make sure your connectors are completely in there pushed all the way in so that it makes a good connection good solid connection um you can see they are quite a bit longer so bothered me when I saw that I could clean that up a little bit anyway just make sure depending on where they’re located on your meter for example this one’s here on the bottom they’re all going to have that standardized connection and they need to be pushed in completely you need to have that satisfying feeling of it pushing in now I know a lot of you don’t want to read manuals but I recommend to familiarize yourself with

the manual when you get meters especially because not every brand is the same they’re going to have like we’re showing you with these symbols here they’re going to use different types of symbols that all mean the same thing and it can get confusing just like with this one you know it lays lays all this stuff out what these symbols mean and whatnot but who the heck wants to read this so just to familiarize yourself with it understand these are the same thing it just goes up to a higher amp draw this one is going to be that straight line or direct current you get my camera to cooperate there but

anyway this is the direct current VC straight line and then of course alternating current volt AC these again remember when you turn your meter over to whatever setting if it has more than one setting here it’s just a good practice to switch it over to which one you need and it will always have a symbol somewhere on your screen of what it is you’re looking at so just make sure and some of these will have settings you know like there’s a backlit screen you know if you’re somewhere dark you need to be able to see or sometimes people just like having that light it’s comforting it’s nice and then of

course min max just like you see on this one that’s been abbreviated this min max what this is doing is when you’re going to clamp your meter around your wire when you’re doing an amp draw the Max setting when it’s turned to Max and you’re on your amp draw here what that’s going to do is it’s going to tell you what the highest amp draw is it detects so after it sits there for a while and you’re going to need to push your hold button in like that so that it’s going to tell you exactly see how it’s now on your screen it’s going to tell you what the highest amp draw is on load so that way you know

if it’s drawing more than it should and then of course if you’re on and you know what that highest spike is in amp draw and then of course Min is going to tell you what the lowest is as well as if it’s a dropping voltage so it’s really handy when you’re doing amp draws so you check it out you know for example like compressors and whatnot just seeing what it’s doing so whether you’re wanting to get something simple like this as I said if you’re a newer technician you’re just kind of getting this to go through school or starting off because let’s face it tolls are extremely expensive whether you

want to spend somewhere between 16 to say forty dollars for a cheaper clamp meter which honestly unless you’re just wanting to have this super duper fancy sort of thing and you know you’re going to use it often yeah sure you know you could validate maybe spending somewhere between 130 to 160 dollars on this but for most people something like this or similar to it it’s going to be a handy tool and something that can really help diagnose as you’re going through your troubleshooting steps obviously this lets you know what’s going on with things you can’t see armed with something like this you’d be

able to tell more about what’s going on and therefore getting to the bottom of what could be causing say if you’re getting burned wires often on your capacitor coming from your compressor you know this would let you know it’s overamping something’s going on there you would know if it’s not a consistent issue say for example putting your meter across here unload seeing if it is making a good contact or connection with the meter so that way you know if it is actually getting low resistance because what’s great with the meter especially one that can read microfarads like that which again we do have

a video that shows how to do that with a normal clamp multimeter versus having something that does read microfarads which this one does to you but you know yours might not it just lets us know that if it’s showing to be good even with a normal ohm meter or multimeter on specifically say a capacitor what this is going to tell you with the link below as well to show you just a simple formula to figure out if your capacitor is good and with intolerance this lets you know not only if it’s open but if it’s low so even if it were reading correctly with your ohm meter and your clamp meter doesn’t mean

that it’s not low which could really frustrate someone trying to diagnose their condensing unit when their capacitor might be too low of a boost on Startup to actually kick over your fan motor or your compressor or both um also equally frustrating can be the fact that you know voltage across these might not be correct the coil is slightly burned in there you know it’s a number of things so these are really handy as a homeowner to be able to have or your indoor and outdoor units anyway guys hope this has been helpful and hopefully if there’s you know I’ve covered most of everything if there’s anything

you want to know or something that you feel like I haven’t covered just leave a comment below and I will do my best to get back to you as soon as possible have a wonderful day and a great rest of your week

hi this is crystal with open to public hvac parts and today i’m going to explain to you the difference between using an analog meter to check out ohms and whatnot versus using a clamp meter like this field piece sc260 to check your capacitance the reason why a lot of people don’t catch when a capacitor is bad or not is they use analog meters which clearly this is a digital a analog meter is only going to be able to tell you because you’re going to be using ohms obviously to see if the capacitor is uh just open or as with you know an analog it’s gonna go up and then it’s gonna go down and that just shows that it is holding some sort of capacitance some sort of charge the problem with that is it’s not going to tell you if your capacitor is low so unfortunately say this one for example which i pulled off the shelf so of course it’ll be good um if it were reading say a 20 out of 40 it’s not going to show that on an analog meter it’s just going to let you know that it is holding capacitance but guess what it can still be causing the problem so that’s why we’re going to use something like this if you really want to know if this is the culprit for your motor not coming on or your compressor or both so that’s pretty much the reason why you want to use something that can read microfarad versus owning it out but as you can see when i’m checking with one of these meters we’re reading a 40 which lets me know not only is it good it’s perfect and then if we’re checking between c and fan 4.98 which is also perfect and there’s going to be a little variance oh there we go we just went up to 5.

but yeah so unfortunately as a homeowner it does kind of stink not having one of these clamp meters that can read capacitance or microfarads and reason being is yeah it might actually test like it is holding some sort of capacitance but it’s not going to tell you if it’s low and it can still be your problem so something to think about when you go to check a capacitor from your unit

foreign this is Crystal from OTP HVAC School and today we’re going to talk about why RPM is important on Motors and why you should not replace a different RPM for the one that is on your motor so let’s break it down and we’ll talk about why in just a moment okay so why get into any of this why is it important to understand RPM and how voters function and why it is so important that you get the correct RPM well here’s the deal the answer to all of this is like always it’s complicated because it can depend on what region you’re in whether you’re up in the north or the South why it’s more important

in general areas obviously if you’re in the South you’re going to be running your condenser more often unless of course you have a heat pump so obviously if you’re from up North both your blower motor and your condenser motor are going to be working hard year round so you have to think about that as well but it’s not just all about let’s just put it in there it’ll work it’s been working for four years it’s fine and if you have that sort of mentality if it’s just I’m going to put it in there it’s going to work for a while whatever the problem is it’s not working like it should you have shortened

the life of the motor and possibly your system more than likely this has taken a toll on your compressor and it’s not working as efficiently as it should so that being said let’s understand why it’s important especially with PSC Motors like we mentioned before in the other video when we were learning how to calculate our RPM of our motor based off of the poles what we’re trying to understand is why we would even need to learn that in the first place so how does this function first so that I can understand how it’s actually failing and what I should do to properly replace the part in my system all

of these look very similar if not the same now this is an evaporator motor condenser motor is going to be a sealed motor okay so now that we know that we know what these are we know how we calculate our RPM why is this important well in a PSC motor a beautiful penmanship here this is going to be a permanent split capacitor motor what that means is it has a separate capacitor a run capacitor which stays in line while your system is on and it’s energizing your fan motor it will look something like this on your blower housing in your two wires create that line through on your motor on your auxiliary

winding also known as your start winding now because a lot of new laws have passed for efficiency most units now will have a DC driven motor which will have some sort of either ECM or electronic communicating motor or it will have an x13 which is a constant torque motor it will have some sort of variable speed in there and those are going to be different from the PSC Motors a lot of homeowners in a traditional single phase residential or some Light commercial have PSC Motors outside now there are some I’ve seen trains especially and when you start getting up into the higher end series of a carrier

they’ll have those ECM but for simplicity’s sake we’re going to break it down as simply as possible this is going to be your rotor which is your rotating part this is your stator which is your stationary part these are what create your electromagnetic field now if you’re wondering when we talk about a start winding or an auxiliary winding yes this is to start the motor or start your rotor here so that it gets the force or the torque to begin moving in the correct rotation and to keep it going because remember this is a magnetic field and obviously we’re working with alternating current so unlike

a DC motor which does have windings as we’d spoke of before but it is different in our power supply comes through from our main breaker we got our our power here and here’s our we’ll just say it’s our electric current right okay so as that comes through we’ve got our our main it’s not the state it’s not the state Crystal we got our main winding here that gets energized first okay beautiful little curves and then we have our second which is our start winding and let’s see we’ll take that here I’m going to kind of obviously it’s not going to be perfect I’m gonna go here so on and so forth so this

has to coincide with the main winding because what it’s doing is that main winding first gets energized and then there’s just a short delay which is caused by the capacitor in the secondary or start winding and the difference between the two so between the main and the start it takes on the form of a phase difference so what that means is they’re slightly offset from each other and that’s what we’re we’re modeling here is they’re slightly offset from one another so then since they are slightly offset like this what that means is at the peak of each one of these magnetic fields it causes it to alternate

between these two windings uh which generates the torque needed to keep it all going you’re running smooth again we do have to account for slip or motor slip as we spoke about in our previous videos so again we’re only keep this in mind the reason why we’re going over this is you’re not using the full rotation so if you have a six pole motor and we’re dividing it by our 7200 to get our RPM like we mentioned before and you are again full capacity without load is a 1200 RPM what it actually equals out to or even just comes close to is somewhere between you know maybe 10.50 1075 RPM so we’re looking

at somewhere around a 60 efficiency okay so just keep this in mind this is for a 1200 RPM Motor so if your original motor was an 825 which actually equates to a 900 if we’re going based off of our original formula is 8 into 7200 right okay so keep in mind again when we’re only getting 60 percent which means if you’re replacing an 825 RPM Motor with a 1075 RPM Motor it’s moving too fast based off of what that engineer designed that unit to be at 825 or 900 RPM what else could happen when we replace that with that 1200 RPM Motor okay well it has a fan blade or a blower wheel that is placed on there

designed for this RPM so if we place the wrong RPM on that now we’ve messed up the blower wheel or the fan blade from what it was originally designed to run on so just to put that into perspective for you just based off of numbers okay uh in our fixed frequency this is where we’re getting our numbers from here is 60 hertz in the U.S so that’s where our numbers are coming from here so on a six Pole we’re looking at operational range between 900 to 1100 RPM and this is a really High number based off of a lot of motors and drag and resistance all that fun stuff um that’s kind of a positive outlook

there on a six pole this is ideally what you would get near RPM okay so there’s our first number right but when we look at an eight Pole our operational speed can be anywhere from 600 to eight fifty now just just look at the numbers here look how much they differ when you’re looking on a motor like this and you see something that says 1080 1075 and then you see another number that’ll say 8.50 you know when you look at it that way it doesn’t sound so different right but look at what it actually translates to on full load if you had a motor that was that lower RPM like that and he placed something

so different between the two how would that not cause problems and the answer is it would and it does now the reason why this is especially important in say some of the more southern states with condenser fan motors is each of those fan blades have not just a different diameter uh but they’re going to have a different pitch as well as to how high those fan blades are going to be moved for resistance for the wind resistance as it spins and it Scoops the air out to dissipate the Heat from your condenser coils whereas a blower motor wheel now and it is really odd in a lot of situations for a blower

wheel to be attached to a blower motor that has a 900 RPM motor in it they do exist but this is especially important because of the differences in the RPM and with fan blades especially because they’re exposed to the outside conditions and here in Texas it can get really really hot and those condenser fan motors are worked really hard which is why capacitors tend to go out more in the South now this is just a run capacitor but uh especially on those dual run capacitors you can see them changed out quite often here once every few years but because of all those factors and because of the load on

that motor outside that RPM really needs to match so that you are effectively cooling your condenser coils therefore putting a lot less strain on your compressor and cooling it to its maximum efficiency for your unit to keep running time and time again what we know is that as long as a system is properly maintained and cleaned and running like it’s designed to be running you’re going to get that unit to work at the best if you can for as long as it can because you take care of it so keep this in mind when you replace your Motors make sure that the specs line up if yours is quarter horsepower somewhere

between 900 to I’ve seen even some Motors that say 810 RPM replace it with something that’s going to be somewhere between 800 to 900 RPM same goes for those 1200 RPM Motors now I’ve seen quite a few of the newer Motors switching over to this 825 or 800 RPM and that’s because an 825 RPM motor runs a lot quieter than a 1075 RPM Motor now hypothetically you could replace it that way but then you’re going to have to account for that with your fan blades so you know if you’re going to be replacing all that it seems like a lot of work to go through and a lot of calculating to figure out which band blade

should I use and let me tell you there’s not a definite between some of the fan blades used for 8 25 RPM and some used for 1075 RPM it’s whatever the engineer has designed in order to unit running correctly now you’ll have to excuse me guys I’ve got a sinus infection going on here so again as long as you’re doing what you need to do to keep your system running to its best ability you don’t have to worry about something breaking down on you in the middle of a really hot summer or cold winter so just make sure you’re treating it correctly and it’ll last many years for you thank you so much for joining

us today and if you have any and if you have any questions just leave them in the comments below and I will respond to them as soon as possible thank you so much and have a wonderful day

hello everyone and this is Crystal from open to public HVAC school today we’re going to cover what happens if the label from your motor is rubbed off and you have no idea what your RPM is on the motor which is extremely important so I’m going to show you how to calculate what the RPM of your motor is if you can’t read it first things first if your motor is ruined obviously you’re not going to have to worry about pulling this apart if you need to you might not need to but most Motors you’re not going to be able to accurately count the poles and so what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to count

the poles on our motor to to calculate what the RPM could be now horsepower gets a little more difficult but for now what we’re going to cover is the RPM we’re going to remove the bolts on the end of the motor and we’ll get to the part we need to get to inside here so we can count them foreign so here are our windings are poles and each one of these bindings here are a pole so what we’re doing is we’re counting each one of these bundles these loops to get the poles and calculate our RPM so we’re going to go in here and we’re going to count from Loop to Loop how many we have so here we have our

one two three four five and finally six so we know this is a six hole motor based off of our wired bundles here on our windings so when we’re calculating this we’re going to take these poles and this is on an AC voltage motor VC is going to be different so on an AC motor we’re going to divide the number of poles by 7200 and so obviously we’re going to do our math here and add our zeros and now we know he’s so used to doing that okay and now we know it’s 1200 RPM now this is on a no load which means this is the RPM before we add all of our additional pressure and weight to it our blower wheel our

fan blade and then of course there is motor slip even though it’s a 1200 RPM Motor this is why often on the labels of motors you will see a 1075 RPM there and that’s going to be on a motor that has the load on it already so instead of the capability of the 1200 RPM we’re actually going to be getting somewhere between 10 50 and 1100 because of that load so it’s very important that we do get the RPM correct based off of this method of counting poles if you replace a motor that has a lower RPM such as an 825 or 900 RPM Motor that is going to shorten the life of that motor and not to mention that fan

blade the blower wheel all of that is designed to go with a 1200 RPM Motor so that could also cause more issues within your air handler your furnace or your condenser outside just a fun fact uh the relationship between these poles and the RPM which of course stands for rotations per minute it has to do with the magnetic field which is produced in the stator poles so this field here leads to the creation of magnetic fields in the rotor that actually relate to the frequency of the field in the stator so when we say slip what we’re accounting for in that RPM is the difference between the Staters synchronous

speed and the actual operating speed essentially it’s trying to keep up um the rotor is always trying to keep up so it’s going to be running slightly slower than the unloaded RPM and when that happens this is what is actually creating the torque needed to getting the motor going and now as we mentioned this is for AC Motors DC motors do have poles but the poles actually don’t affect speed like they do with the AC Motors there’s a lot of other factors that actually impact the speed on DC motors which can be the operating voltage or the strength of the magnets and also the number of wires that turns

the Armature or what the Armature has rather so DC motors can only perform at the speeds that are rated for the amount of voltage that’s going to it so there’s a little bit more math and other factors other variables if you will to calculating RPM on DC motors now if you are unsure of horsepower on Motors that is going to be quite a bit different and a lot more is going to be entailed um with calculating that you’re going to have your torque feed RPM and you you do need to know the RPM before calculating all of that so it definitely is more difficult to actually calculate the horsepower of a motor

if you’re unsure of that it’s really best to get the model number off the unit so that you’re able to get a parts list and with any of this it’s better to have a model number but in some rare cases there are some extremely old units where uh the motors are too rubbed off and some of the information is missing in which case you can make educated guesses but I would advise against it because you never know what that could have been running off of before this is just to give you information on how to check it if you’re missing the info on the RPM on the motor and that’s all you need to know so hopefully

this has been helpful for all of you and uh check back later we’re taking a poll right now it’s on our community section for our next video thanks so much for joining us guys and have a wonderful day

foreign okay so let’s get into this kind of motor this particular style motor I’ve only seen with carrier products as you can see we have a model number here which is carriers part number that HD 5 to I apologize guys I’m holding the camera but the hd52mq124 so that is carrier’s model number as you can see the wiring diagram is a bit confusing this is going to look much different than how it functions and how this one functions is exactly like an x13 so it is essentially an x13 motor I’ll show you what a normal plug-in style looks like and how to correctly wire these up so that you could use say a universal or a drop in replacement as you can see it’s a bunch of wires and I’ll show you in a minute what a normal x13 motor looks like on the ends in which again guys I’ll show you what I’m talking about a carrier puts these smaller terminals these smaller connectors that a lot of people don’t use another thing you’ll notice about this motor is the mounting style this kind of bracket is hard to find if you’re going to get a universal motor now we were able to find where you purchase a removable bracket that lines up with this style I have come across some rigid brackets that will actually line up with these holes obviously when you’re going to replace this with an x13 Universal make sure that you match your specs like we mentioned before it’s not just about the wiring it’s also your specs they have boards or modules in them and those are going to contain the capacitor or capacitors um so if you have a motor like this in your system it’s not going to have a capacitor the x13 or the full variable speed known as a electronic communicating motor these are constant torque or x13 make sure if you have a gas system or you know some of you propane is going to be 115 120 volts so make sure the voltage lines up then we’re going to make sure that our horsepower lines up sometimes you kind of have to hunt around a little bit but that’s our voltage on that side and then on this side you can see one HP now I’ve had several customers especially with condenser Motors and even some blower motors they’ll flip the one HP which is horsepower but they’ll flip it with ph so if you see the number one and then pH next to it it’s not saying it’s one horsepower that’s simply stating that it’s single phase so double check and make sure you are seeing that this is HP okay so what we’re going to do is we’re gonna go ahead and take that carrier motor I’m going to take it up to the bench at the front and compare them side by side so you can see how you wire them up and I’ll go ahead and draw a diagram for you as well so let’s take a look okay so as you can see here most x13 or what we call constant torque motors have a plug style like this there are some where this plug is actually external but this is what most of them look like uh you’ve got c l g n and then numbers one through five what we’re looking at here is C is going to be your common okay uh L is going to be your line uh G is going to be your ground and then n will be your neutral now if your unit is an electric air handler um this neutral actually becomes your other leg of 120 and that’s not exactly how it works but essentially what we’re doing here is 120 120.

so if your unit is a gas unit you’re going to have just the one leg here of 120 and then your other line would be neutral these numbers right here indicate speeds ranging from low to high so from you know one being your high speed um to or I’m sorry your low speed low um to five which is going to be your high speed here we’re going to look at that with the carrier motor so that you can see how we’re wiring it and they label it a little strange we’ll get into that in just a second okay so here as we look at these labels uh I know they’re a little hard to read on here let me zoom in just a little bit hopefully we can kind of get closer to see that I can get it to foot okay so as we mentioned before when we’re looking at this wiring chart it can definitely be kind of confusing to match up to you can see how simple this one is charted out here so on the speeds one through five listed on here on here they are listed as m so we’ve got M1 M2 so on and so forth so from one to five these are going to be the same speeds as one through five on here and I was actually curious so I went and checked out the specs for these motors uh through the manual and they are indeed the same sorry guys I’m having to hold this because this label is a being a bit of a pain to focus on then on whereas most a lot of people use blue for common on their wires they actually use green on theirs the green is going to be your common line here where the C is here on your x13 harness so where it’s labeled under the green as common that’s going to be your common on the top four here on this motor so just keep that in mind because there is blue wires on both of them and literally blue wires on the speed and the common line ground on this plug so we need to keep track of that as we start explaining how this wiring harness is going to go and then of course here on the top as you can see they have neutral next to the White and L or line next to the black those two colors are going to be exactly the same on here and as you can see they are labeled the same n and L so make sure you match those with the 2 on the top okay so earlier we talked about the differences in harnesses of a carrier versus well in particular this kind of motor from carrier we mentioned the differences in the plugs obviously I don’t have those smaller plugs here I do have an example so I can show you the difference when plugging in our new x13 Motors you’re going to have harnesses like this instead and don’t worry they’re only going to plug in exactly how they need to um you can see there’s only a certain amount of pins on there so it’s going to fit in exactly like it should same with your speeds here on the bottom we’re just going to plug those in and then now the easy make sure always that there’s a good snug connection so the easiest way I found and what I do when I’m in the store is I splice and the reason for that is it’s just so much easier for the customer because you know they look at it and their eyes get wide because obviously it’s completely different between the two and they’re kind of looking at it like whoa what are you talking about okay so remember earlier when we were talking about the harness sizes between the two uh what I mean by that is the actual plug itself and the physical size so as you can see here this is a much smaller terminal than this plug you can see that this is going to be larger now while you can crimp these down to make them fit were these smaller ones went I don’t like to do that because especially with electrical and you know the Golden Rule and that is if it ain’t tied it ain’t right so rather than crimping them on the actual terminal itself it’s best to just go ahead and splice these together and if you’re going to splice I highly recommend using a heat shrink butt connector but cut these back and usually leave yourself a little more than less and we’re going to cut them back we’re going to you know get the wire exposed and refer is going to make our mechanical connection meaning you’re going to and I cannot get this to focus on here sorry guys here we go so we’re going to crimp here and then crimp here as we join the two together always remember to do it one by one because you can easily confuse the blue wires since there are two blue wires here right so one by one systematically we’re going to connect them now having just a mechanical connection between the two I like to crimp both sides and the middle just to make sure but these are really going to be helpful because you’re going to use heat which a heat gun is always handy to have anyway preferably a heat gun but if you just have to have a lighter just be really careful what you’re looking for is a thin bead of glue that goes all the way around okay you’re probably looking at the two differences and wondering how do I even tackle this the best way I found is to just systematically go through and tag each wire um with these handy little guys here I mean you can use whatever you want paper tape whatever strikes your fancy but um just label them first so that way you know um usually on each side that way just you know all together crimp them and then you’re good to go okay so as we spoke about before just kind of deciphering these wiring diagrams can be a bit tedious since we know based off of our plug from our other constant torque motor brand you know that you know what each one’s going to be c l n g you know so you’re going to write those out on these tags and then just go ahead and tag these guys that you’ve removed you’re going to have those individual terminals like I was showing earlier so once you figure out which is which according to this wiring diagram uh just label those out so that you can match them up easily with this that way you’re not having to go based off of colors and potentially get confused and blow out your new motor now if you are color blind this could actually be very tricky even if you’re not color blind because as you can see here the difference between the two Grays are extremely dangerous they’re saying that this color let’s see if I can zoom in here they’re saying that this color on the right is black and this color is gray now if you were colorblind or even if you weren’t they can look very much both like black and obviously here on the wiring diagram that’s really important that you do not mix the gray with the black these are black as your high voltage that’s 120 volts if you put say the gray where the black the one black wire here is on the top harness that’s not going to work it’s definitely going to blow out your new motor so just pay attention to that or if you’re not sure maybe ask someone that could tell the difference I can definitely make it out but not everybody can I’d hold it up against something bright in color because the difference here is blowing out your motor because this is 120 volts and that is 24.

so really double triple check and if you’re dyslexic like me that can make it extra fun so I have to have a system when labeling things to make sure that I am doing it correctly that way I don’t have to worry about blowing out you know somewhere between a 400 or I’m sorry 350 dollar motor to upwards of a 1400 motor so just be aware of that when you are labeling these so if you really want to make this easy on yourself do this on both sides so that way you can line them up perfectly and you know you haven’t made a mistake but always double triple check that your wiring is correct before you actually splice them together for obvious reasons you can also see why this is important because there’s also two blue wires here and this one is your common wire and this is a speed uh even though this is say your one leg of 24 and this completes your 24 here in your speed when a speed is your common this is going to run on a different winding and you remember from before when we were talking about how PSC Motors work there’s always going to be your start and your run so remember these are not going to run on the same winding therefore you need to make sure this will be tied in with your common and which we’ve labeled it also on our other wire so make sure that your common is lined up and then as you can see we also have a blue on this one which is one of your speeds so always make sure that you do not just use two of these and you know accidentally connect this up with your other or connect this up with your other blue wire um so once we’ve got our labels on both sides here what we’re going to do is we’re going to splice these onto the other motor now I’m not going to splice these wires obviously this is a good harness I’m going to keep it that way for the store because you know sometimes people will come in with burned harnesses and you know we’ll tell them hey we have some and uh you know it’s just very useful for people because those harnesses can run and they can get very expensive so having the option for us to keep these sorts of things for people you know it’s it’s just a good idea so remember we spoke earlier about how these mounting patterns can be different on these kinds of Motors you can see they kind of have some funky legs compared to some of the a normal PSC and x13 Motors they usually have a flex mount which I can show you what that looks like in just a minute but if you’re going to try and find a bracket that’s going to line up when you are purchasing a different brand of x13 motor uh you’re going to look for this style mount these are specialty mounts um literally only carrier does this style you might be able to find a rigid bracket that might line up here with these bolt patterns I know that this is called a torsion Flex Mount so try Googling it and just seeing if maybe you can find this exact bracket here okay so I’ve pulled a normal Flex Mount just to show you these let me see if I can back this up just a little bit so you can see here what we’ve got going on okay so this is going to be a normal Flex Mount and you can see that the legs are different now even if a mount might look similar I might not always work based off of where they have placed the holes on the housing itself keep in mind there’s some that are going to actually come in closer to where the opening is and some that are actually going to go further out like many old style Reem and root mounts that I’ve seen and the legs are different lengths and there are actually some like I have seen some York housings where one of the leg mounts are actually longer than the others so keep that in mind when you are buying a universal you’re going to want to make sure you pay attention to how the mount looks because most Universal Motors they’re not going to come with the mounts like these how they’re welded on now you can find some universals that have welded legs but this is a specialty style motor that only carrier does so keep in mind you can see here if I can kind of show you at an angle these are tilted differently they’re going to be a different length from here to here and you can see how that tilts now you could make any Mount work for this you just need to make sure that the mount can hold a 42 or I’m sorry a 48 frame motor which is just going to be the you know the distance between the bolts on the motor here or basically the diameter um make sure that you are looking at that because if you cannot line that mount up that means you’re going to have to tap into the housing to make them line up and that can be a lot of extra work now if you’re into you know into doing that no problem you’re like hey I can do it no big deal then you know go for it just make sure that they’re sturdy enough to be able to hold an x13 motor up because they are extremely solid Motors I do like these style Motors um they’re made by U.S Motors this is a private label for ream however this is made by us Motors also known a formular formerly known as Emerson fun fact U.S Motors the parent Corporation is MedEx so it’s kind of fun learning when you’re purchasing these motors now in store I do have a lot of worried homeowners and new techs ask about the bracket where it should be lined up keep in mind with these style you are going to have to keep this where you can plug in the connectors so remember when you are installing it adjust the bracket as you need to to make sure this comes up above the opening to where you can plug these in without them bending or straining uh it’s okay that this motor sticks out a little bit because you’re going to balance it with your bracket and the shaft is adjustable you can literally put that set screw all the way to here if you need to so with blower motors they are an open motor um it’s okay when you place the bracket on these if you cover up say if you need to move it up really really close to here and you’re covering some of this up that’s okay as long as it has you know some air somewhere here to breathe okay so just to review now that we know how this wires up here and what their wiring diagram is saying just like the normal style x13 Motors let’s just do a quick review so we’ve got on this motor common line ground neutral okay so on the common line ground and neutral and then below that we have our speeds one through five and each one of these are going to be labeled here on the carrier version of the x13 motor so we’ve got our and hopefully it’ll at least catch a little bit but we’ve got our neutral which is white or our other line uh black which is our 120 for gas or our other line for 240.

these are our speeds so we’ve got red orange blue yellow gray and then green is our common on this one so this m and then the number after it are our speeds so as we mentioned before go by numbering and labeling what each blue wire is because there’s going to be a blue wire here at the top and there’s going to be a blue wire here on the bottom make sure we label label label label so we’ve got our common line ground and neutral so remember neutral is going to be white on both of these motors here when you’re switching over to a 240 volt motor that neutral actually becomes an additional 120 and these motors default to 240 volt so they’re going to come with a jumper and it is a little confusing because on here it says 230 volt and all that’s letting us know is that this defaults to 230 volts so with that jumper you’re going to open that and you’re going to place that Jumper in here to make it a hundred and fifteen 120 volts same thing so always remember to do that with these style Motors because the original one is going to automatically be whatever voltage it’s supposed to be which is labeled here so that brings us back to our other point from earlier to make sure that you get the voltage correct check all of the specs on your motor and make sure that they’re correct make sure you read all the directions on Universal Motors a lot of them are set for 230.

and then you’re going to make it 120. for gas by using that jumper so always pay attention to the numbers on the motor all right everyone thank you so much for joining us today and if you have any other questions feel free to leave them in the comments below and please help us out by leaving a like or if you’d like to see more of these subscribe thanks again guys and have a wonderful day bye

all right top side view here we can see as we pointed out before the contactor right here now this one is a single pole contactor your could actually be a double pole which might look a little different now our unit is on right now so I’m not going to touch any of this I just want to show you what this part looks like yours probably does not have this cover right here and if it doesn’t have that cover that’s probably part of the reason why you might have ants this actually protects your contact from Bugs dust debris things like that so it’s good to leave that on there and just remove it if you’re

needing to test it uh and look for ant patties you’ll know with an exposed button you’ll see the ants right away and I’ll show you what that looks like here in a second um covers don’t always fully protect you from ants because ants they will climb up in there but they do help quite a bit you could do a quick test make sure that your power is off when you do this we’re going to check continuity between only the break if you have a solid what we call a shun leg there they’re also called hole and a half contactors you don’t need to check here because that already constantly has 120 going through

there this is where your break happens right here and your contacts are so we need to know if there is little to no resistance on the brake the button and see if it is making good connection and has good continuity we’re going to go inside and I’m going to show you how to test that and what a ant filled contactor looks like and we’ll actually get into the science behind my aunts do this so let’s head inside guys walking walking walking back into the store going to look at contactors like we were talking about earlier yours could look a little different you could have a partially covered contactor

like this one you have a fully covered like this one or you could have an all the way uncovered like this which is what most people have now this is a double pull got two switches here two brakes and this is a single and it’ll either look like this it’s got kind of a fatter section there or you could have more of a slim guy that goes through here so if yours is covered while it does help to have covers on there to help reduce the possibility of ants doesn’t mean you don’t have ants so how do we check that well we’re going to open this guy up just a normal Philip screwdriver okay and that’ll just

come right off there we have it that’s where your contact points are kind of hard to see them I don’t know if we’ll be able to get a really good look here but contact there it is kind of hard to see but it’s that guy right there and every time this comes on it arcs and it burns So eventually those contacts become pitted and it’s time to replace your contactor now the only reason to take that off is if you’re getting high resistance across here you know maybe an OHM instead of under an OHM should have the least resistance possible so it should always be less than an OHM preferably close to 0.1 or

lower so if you do put your meter across here and see normal reading for contacts which I usually just put them here is you press it down and you can see 01 very little resistance and that’s what we’re aiming for on contactors so if you press that in and you’re getting a higher number over an OHM remove this C like we just did like we just did look under there and see if you see ant patties and I’ll show you what that looks like here in just a second so as you can see it is completely and totally covered in ants and this is probably one of the worst ones I’ve seen it is very extreme so interesting

and it it actually happened on our neighbor unit which is what we were just at back there and it was absolutely covered if you need to remove the cover and yours isn’t fully covered like that where you can unscrew it there’s actually tabs on these type which are partial covered so you can see right here we can get our screwdriver our flat flat head under here and that just comes right off so different ways to remove that but it’ll come off and you can take a look putting it on however may present itself as more difficult so that’s how we get into that and as I said you’ll always have continuity

here because because it is a literal solid piece of metal so you don’t need to check continuity on this if you’ve got the pole and a half also called single pole because well as you can see it’s all connected all right so we’ll put this back together here and we’ll get into the science behind why ants do this all right welcome to to HVAC science and what we’re going to get into today is why are ants attracted to contactors what makes these interesting in a way that ants will literally come to their death by going into those contacts well this is an electromagnet and electromagnetic fields a attract

Little Critters like ants now why is that well magnetic fields indicate to ants that this could provide heat it could provide a safe nesting ground they can sense these things a lot of insects can which is why wasps will build nests in AC units it’s safe there’s heat it’s hidden so they come in here and they’re like where is the Source coming from well it’s coming from this guy right here and inside this is a stationary magnetic core our contacts here boop boop these guys right here are connected to the Armature that only pulls in when this magnetic core is energized so so when we get our control

voltage our low side voltage from the thermostat the thermostat completes the circuit through the Y you’ll notice especially if you have gas heating on your control board you’ll have two yellow wires well I say yellow H I’m uh doing what I told you guys not to do don’t go by wire colors but on the Y terminal and your control board there’s one that then goes to your outside unit your thermostat gets the call for cooling engages the other side of the 24 volt and it gets magnetized and it pulls in without that lowside control voltage this will not pull in to complete the circuit of 240 Vols once that

happens once we call this thin becomes energized and it pulls together that completes it so instead of a floating Armature like this it makes contact the current arcs between the Armature and the contact points so on our contact points when they make connection as it goes through as we can kind of see here what’s going on on so our power circuit our contacts that move it arcs with electricity so literally every single time your unit comes on the electricity just let’s use a more fun color lighter green so so it’s like oh that’s the worst thing ever whatever you know what I’m talking it’s lightning

only it’s just an arc of electricity that goes through so as this happens remember we were talking about the pitting it’s going to eventually burn off that nickel plated contact and you have to replace it but getting back to the present ants so as they sense this as they sense this magnet IC field now all around here you know you’ve got the coil it’s like Boop kind of goes around like this and this is just you know traditional science I’m not going to draw anything beautiful here by any stretch of the imagination but around this is just a field it’s like a field of energy and the Ants can sense

this they’re like what is that okay let’s go investigate safe space right safe space in the little guys come they get underneath these contacts here because they can sense that this is now energized and in those little guys go and ant patties because they get zapped and now they’re little charred bodies so as you could see from the contacts I showed you earlier that was literally thousands of ants crammed into this thing just how many of them continue to go in and you’re thinking are ants that stupid the short of it is they’re not dumb it just confuses them because they’re sending this signal and

when one or two or however many kind of come in here to investigate here’s the key to why all of a sudden hundreds thousands of them they’ll get stuck all in there and now this is if our unit outside isn’t coming on so here’s how it works as these ants start coming in and they get all ant pattied what happens is the ant emits a pheromone you know this little guy with his little anten ey cute little face yeah he’s so happy and he’s got all these little legs don’t judge me I’m not an artist okay filling his little body and why not so he goes help he’s in his death throws okay and then this pheromone

just kind of comes out and starts knitting and that alerts other ants especially fire ants like so they’re like what the bro so then they run in to rescue them and so cycle continues cycle continues they keep coming to the rescue they keep building up more and more of these ant patties more and more of these delicious fried insects until eventually this gets so clogged that the 240 volts Well it can’t get through anymore since it can’t get through anymore well guess what no cool air for you that’s you know just kind of explains where their little heads are at and it’s nothing personal against you

it’s no Vendetta of any sort maybe I don’t pretend to know what these these little guys think that gives you an idea of why these ants are so attra attracted to specifically contactors you know what I just feel like coloring so magnetic field it almost looks like a brain you guys that’s crazy it just gives you a sense of what’s going on now ants love contactors and here in Texas we have geckos and geckos like to lay on capacitors in our unit and Southern Fried gecko with a side of char now that we know what causes them to come into the contactor and just squish themselves into it now we know that

but how can we prevent it there’s a way to prevent this right of course there is these simple steps so number one on the list is bug repellent now Crystal you may be saying I don’t like putting these sorts of things out into the air on my unit what if you know it causes environmental issues I got you for those of you that just want a quick and easy solution get a can of bug spray from your local P Depot Lowe’s Ace whatever you’ve got near you and get yourself just a can of insect repellant almost all insect repellants are good for 600 up to 600 volts on the contactor side from our AC current that

we have here it shouldn’t get over 245 246 something like that so you’re good up to 600 volts which is whatever everything in your outdoor unit is rated for your motor wires your compressor wires um they’re all rated for upwards of 600 volts now would things survive out there if you had that sort of power surge no it’d probably at least take out your capacitor because your capacitor is good for up to 440 all of them now are 440 that I’ve seen and I think they still make some 370 but it’s better to go with 440 number one again sidetracked here bug repellent spray right on this contactor not a problem

just spray it all on the contacts uh remember a cover doesn’t always mean it’s going to protect it so if you decide to go ahead and get a new contactor take off the cover and spray all of this really good put it back on spray all of that really good just to make sure uh you can even take this further around your unit you can sprinkle boric acid what that does is as the ants crawl through that they’re going to take that over to their Queen their Queen’s going to eat that they’re all going to die any day now any day now Christ so as I was saying before we were rudely interrupted by someone’s car

alarm which by the way those don’t work this is going to cause the ants to get the poison take it back to the mound kills a bunch of them off that might be near the unit that’s causing problems number three this one’s a lot more environment friendly and this you it works you can plant spearmint or peppermint so if you plant that near your unit around it they don’t like it not sure if it’s something to do with the smell but more than likely it’s just something it that irritates them they don’t like it not saying that’s full proof I would still you know do some of these other things to help this

is definitely something that helps with you know with a lot of insects plants and whatnot you can plant around your home will keep them away kind of like I think it’s termites and oh gosh what was it was it like merry Golds uh zenas things like that they don’t like them so it’s good to plant that or have you know Cedar Mulch things like that to keep them away this natural battle plan can help as well using a sealed contactor it’s going to help a lot it won’t necessarily 100% keep them out but it is a sort of defense against them so using a sealed contactor okay and something else oddly enough I

just learned about this today is chalk so you could use make it look somewhat like a real letter there you could use chalk you know like that spray chalk that they use when they’re marking lines pipe lines things like that uh you can use chalk around the unit and that also helps uh if you have pets or kiddos you might not want to use something like this cuz what are kids going to do oo colorful what is this play in it dogs well you know dogs are going to do whatever the heck they want to do Neighborhood Cats whatnot it’s not practical if you say have animals or children that you suspect are going

to go through it but trying these things are going to keep them out of your unit it’s just like any bug repellent you’re going to have to reapply it after a certain amount of time that can be one of the things that causes your outdoor unit not to come on so that’s one thing to check when you’re going out to your unit and say it’s not coming on Once you pull the power we’ve talked about this over and over and over again please make sure that you cut the power to your unit before pulling this bad boy out of there to do diagnosis I don’t need anyone’s death on my conscience so please cut the power

once you do that if yours is sealed you can open it up you can look for those lovely ant Patties or charred ant bodies most people’s are already open so usually boom right away you can see I of ants personally if the units got that many ants Caked Up in there just don’t be cheap go get yourself a new contactor you never know what’s happened if you’ve scraped off enough if you’re really tight on a budget and you’re like hey I can’t afford the $1 155 to $30 that these cost uh remove everything out of there with a screwdriver try to scrape those contacts as best as you can so they can make a clean

connection again uh you can use wire brushes but be very careful with those CU you don’t want to scrape off too much of the contact material the nickel that’s in there cuz it it needs that to make good connection for all the silliness we’ve had today I just really wanted to sit with you guys kind of elaborate talk about the science behind why they would be doing this and what you can do to prevent them as best as possible from getting into your unit I’ve done all of this before it keeps them out I haven’t had an instance where they didn’t come back unless of course we had to put more insecticide

something like that nearby um it’s good practice uh again if there’s more natural ways do that if you’re not wanting to use an aerosol can you know there’s things you can plant near your unit there’s insecticide you can spray around your unit as well well you can use a sealed contactor all of these things add up to preventing these little guys from literally taking down your air conditioning and it’s quite hilarious to discover an entirely ant infested charred body contactor you’re thinking really ants ants do this the answer is yes they do keep all these things in mind I hope you enjoy this episode

I hope we were able to break it down hopefully you don’t get too annoyed by my rambling it’s how I do anyway this has been HVAC science section of it and hopefully you guys learn something today and know what to look for when you’re testing a contactor that potentially might have ants all righty well take care guys and have a great rest of your week we’ll see you again soon bye-bye