Good morning, it's me Mikey Pipes. Today is
Sunday Sunday September 18th 2022 just leaving the Woodmere location and we're heading over to
a service call in Cedarhurst which is part of the Five Towns in Nassau County on Long Island New
York. Customer called last night after the sabbath it said, "please help tomorrow morning, my first
floor air conditioning system is no bueno", so I'm gonna go head over there and see what's
going on all right guys smash that thumbs up button in advance I'd really appreciate it and
if you've maybe you've checked out this channel before and haven't subscribed yet but if you're
watching again i would really appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button all right let's
get going all right basement air handler okay Bryant looks like we have a hydronic fan coil off
a boiler this is first floor i have the thermostat the nest on i have it set to 65 it's reading 72
in the house i have no activity coming from this unit whatsoever so let's see if we have a
switch here which let's see if i can follow this see this this Romex goes to another
room let's see if we can follow that all right we have two switches here okay we
have a filter there's another nest thermostat people love these nests i swear but
they're not really they're not good you know they're just marketed well to the to
the people by the people that own google alphabet all right so i can tell by this by looking at that
three quarter PVC which is not properly secured is both units all right and it looks
like it dumps into a uh sump pump groundwater system i don't see those
the wire i don't see a service switch for the system and uh that's no good here
we go first and basement see all right by the way day seven actually no
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday yeah we're on day seven no cigarettes for me all right let's take this
cover off see what's going on all right okay smells very musty in here by the
way very very musty see this coil okay see that little black spots over
everything not too clean so there's our x13 motor all right and i was expecting
to see a dead fuse but look at that look what just started to happen
just now i just touched the fuse this wiring and then the system and the system decided to come on to look at that so we have a short somewhere here we have a
short somewhere here i wonder what the short is all right um let's take a look at how
they what they did here it looks like this red and the white wire i'm gonna guess
they lowered it to speed tap one on this variable speed ECM motor all right that's
probably for heat running off an aquastat right because we have that fan coil up here all
right ladies and gentlemen so here's our voltage coming in there is our uh the gray the gray is
i think what the gray is the gray is let's see the gray is my green or fan right why they made
the gray fan well this is the way carrier does it white is for eating circuit red is 24 volts brown
is common so they don't really follow carrie don't follow you know just the traditional wires equals
colors chart but it is what it is so we know this is our 24 volts all right we know the the gray
is our fan all right we know the brown is our common and we have a short here somewhere and
i'm gonna wager it's probably something to do with the connection of this fuse and or nearby
but i want to you know what let's turn this off all right we turned that over that didn't
really do anything right let's turn this one off there we go they're reversed this is first floor that's basement all
right so i just want to turn the power off and then i want to see if it comes
back on so ladies and gentlemen um when you're troubleshooting electrical shorts
sometimes it's it's even harder than diagnosing a issue where you can't confirm the problem
let's say customer has no cooling you know when they call them as a service call you tell
them to turn the thermostat off you get there you turn the thermostat on everything
works perfectly fine it's like like now what do i do but finding this is like
trying to find like a needle in a haystack but you got to be diligent take your time and just
leave no stone unturned worst case scenario i'll just take some wiggles and we'll clean all this
up in there we'll clean all that up but now that the system's been off for about 20 seconds a
minute we're gonna uh turn the switch back on and see if it comes back on voluntarily without
me tampering no human interference let's see her condenser i heard condenser i heard
that condenser come on immediately as soon as i replied power so before before i actually
took the cover off and we're touching anything my condenser was not coming on my nest thermostat
was in fact though powered though and that may be because of them could be because it's we have a
fan core let's go look at the thermostat wiring all right rc h w green no common no common here r h and w r rc y1 not even a g all right we're going to clean this up this is our h and w this is not being
utilized and we only have rc and y here so i came back down here
to start playing with this uh wiring not that playing with it but i
wanted to identify the greens i wanted to give fan control at the nest thermostat you know and
that nest thermostat by the way if you notice there isn't a common uh so it's power stealing
it's stealing from rh or r c right because it needs to charge that battery inside right it
needs it it's not it needs 24 volts so it's a power stealing thermostat so it's either stealing
power from the relay at the boiler or stealing power from here but nonetheless i came down here
the thermostat's been off the wall for at least a good five minutes and the system is still running
so i'm gonna turn this switch off actually i'm not gonna turn the switch off right now let's
do a little a little recon work here all right thermostat for your equipment may be off the power for your equipment may be the power
from your equipment to the thermostat may be off there's no power let's just see something
here right there's no power there they're both on there is power maybe it's an older era let's see no done f you for you damn you nest equipment detected done okay so now that was
probably an error from when the thermostat was off right so let's see if i turn off first
floor no basement which we think is that which we know is this right but is
it controlling that that goes off okay let's see starts and damn you time delay you know
what let's leave this offer right now because i am unsure if these are actually
labeled correctly something's labeled wrong either the switches are labeled wrong or these air
helmets are labeled wrong and i don't know which one it is right now but right now i do know that
the base the thermostat nest thermostat module is connected to the base and i thought i left
it on set to cool but did not power on yet so maybe just maybe we'll be able to find
the error or the short say 65 it's not on okay let's go back all right power is applied we think this is
the basement we think this is the first floor my condenser is not on all right let's see let's see if we can find that short be very very quiet hunting rabbit be very very quiet right so right now me wiggling wires
have a good fuse is not doing anything right i'm wiggling up i heard something just come
on maybe with another floor all right so now i'm going to do some
troubleshooting let's get the voltmeter out and see if we have 24 volts where it needs to be all
right i'm going to try to show you how i do this while we carefully check there and there and i have 27 volts trust me let's see
if i can prove it to you oh come on back here damn it one-handedly this is when i
wish i listened to some of you guys and got myself a gopro but let's see 27 volts oh i got a little zap there oh he got me right here i got a little zap there
oh that felt nice that felt nice i got zapped right there i think our condenser is on right now yep hear that refrigeration hmm your coil's nice and cold yep all right we need to figure out
why this fan isn't coming on because the condenser and the fan weren't
running before something's very funky going on here all right so it's time to go back to the
basics all right we have this ecm motor this x13 motor we need to make sure that if i give it 24
volts it's going to power on right because it's 24 volts for speed control yes it gets 240 volts
but the 24 volts is a control circuitry which tell it what speed to run on so let's turn on
the power back on here and i took my grey wire here now the gray wire which we
saw earlier on the wiring schematic right thermostat connection remember the gray
wire is g terminal g terminal which we know is fan control we know that the red wire which is
r is 24 volts so if i take my grey wire to the 24 volts my fan should come on as long as
there's no problems with this let's do that right now and i'm just going to use my hands
my fingers and put to touch these two together okay and as you can see my fan is
now running capiche fan is running so let's take that back off
let's do that a few times right because there's a little
bit delay on this so let's let this power off we're going to turn this
back on we're going to consistently prove that if my x13 ecm motor gets 24 volts a signal
to turn on that it turns on if it doesn't turn on then we're going to suspect that as a problem
maybe a bad module or in this case we'll replace the whole entire blower not just the module the
motor itself so let's turn this back on okay let's go here and yeah we have
a little bit of vibration there but she did come on again so
let's try that one more time and if that works then we're going
to eliminate a fan issue power on bingo okay so now i'm going to focus on cleaning
up these wires because i do know that when i was first here touching the wires you saw it earlier
the condenser came on and the blower came on so let's focus on that let's clean up these wires
let's use our waygo lever connectors clean this up that way we know have no problems turn power
off let's get to work all right so let me show you what i did uh for my l1 l2 my 240 volt connections
i have the way go the two conductor lever 221 connectors wire connectors so there's l1 l2 for
red or 24 volts i have the three conductor way go so there's 24 volts coming from the transformer
and then going to the thermostat and maybe another i don't know spoiler who knows i don't
know i'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here this morning because
it's only 9 15 sunday morning and there we go all right so let's see what happens nada not an effing thing hmm let's go to the nest okay rc and y1 we have
connected now let's see if the air handler's on negative it is not on something is loose here something is a culprit i don't know what it is right now and
i'm gonna figure it out cause i'm pissed my condenser is not on and my blower's not on okay now it's time for
a little process of elimination as you can see i'm not taking forever but it took me about a good
eight minutes to figure out what's going what here i separated some duct tape from these two line
sets up there yes duct tape actual duct tape d-u-c-t not u c k tape right duct tape separated
that and i realized that we had some a lot of uh we had these three wire wire nut connections um
one was going to the other arrow handler one was going to one was going to this air handler from
the from the condenser another one was going to the other this cond air handler from the condenser
and then we had the thermostat wire there then i i took my wire going to my um my high limit
aqueous strap on aqua stat right which was this wire here and i just put that out of the way and i
saw that the red wire right here went to 24 volts and the white wire went to speed tapping
number one and to verify that that was good i lowered the aqua stat to a lower temperature
my fan comes on all right so when we have the voltage from the sorry the hot water from the
boiler circling through here that'll sense temperature turn the fan on so there's no boiler
control here whatsoever so that eliminates this now we have red 24 volts going to this wire
right here this wire we're assuming is going to the thermostat so let's take off this white
wire right here and this red wire right there all right that should be going to my thermostat
right and remember when i first got here i was touching everything and then it all of a sudden
came on condenser and fan so there's something something up with this wire let's check for
continuity first touching the wires together proves that the voltmeter is sensing
continuity we're going to take these two one right there oh let's try that again one
handedly one right there and the other one right there as you can see we have no continuity
there this is our thermostat wire all right we know this is our thermostat wire all right
but it seems to be going towards condenser it really does seem to be going
towards condenser but this was at brown see this is common that's
common and this is why going to going to condenser see this is going to
condenser we have y in common all right we should label these for the next guy but we'll do
that later but we have no continuity right here let's go double check the red and the white wire
here we'll check it here i cut the wire with my needle nose and now i have continuity
say no i don't so let's clean this up all right so i spliced in some way
goes here to replace those wire nuts all right and i still don't have
continuity right so let's utilize the green wire so it's not being used let's see if
we can save the day right now all right so now i have the green and the white wire connected so
let's check the continuity downstairs on those so i'm taking off one of my leads off my
multimeter i'm gonna put it on green and nothing so now we're gonna take the white put
it on the red here and let's switch the white to the red wire
upstairs and see what happens okay red and green let's go let's
see if we hear that multimeter i don't think it's his lucky day nope
today is not his lucky day that sucks it's upsetting it's upsetting
because this is the wire it's messed up damn it this is the wire
right here and let's just check this wire you know for any loose connections let's go
right to the source right here so i also went up there with the red and the green and still
nothing that sucks so that's the problem uh temporarily i'm just going to run some just some
some wiring from here to just outside and at least have some cooling up there maybe we'll relocate
the thermostat you know what just to eliminate the theory that maybe that thermostat is
controlling this air handler just to eliminate that possibility let's go to this uh thermostat
right there right there and let's see if that controls it some [ __ ] sunbitch you can hear
this ladies and gentlemen here's our green wire some [ __ ] i had a very very sneaky funny
suspicion that this was the problem here that they were mismatched they
were labeled wrong because because these switches didn't equal was labeled on the
air handlers and here we are hunting for a goose making all this noise silly rabbit tricks are
for kids ladies and gentlemen i want your honest opinion honest opinion you saw what i just went
through right you didn't see on video that the homeowner directed to me to this air handler which
was labeled first floor right you didn't see that because it wasn't rolling the camera that is but
you saw the steps i took to figure out what was going on here and then we figured out we bypassed
the nest thermostat we checked for continuity and then we switched wires and still wasn't going
still wasn't coming on i mean still wasn't uh i wasn't satisfied with that answer right
because i wanted to give them some some some comfort cooling because as you
may know or even here in the video that over the next couple days is going to be like in
the 80s and you know we need our comfort cooling when we do you know it's a luxury here in the new
york metropolitan long island area especially when you live when you live in service taj mahals how
many of you now get keep it real how many of you would have just given up on this not giving up on
it but saying hey you need electrician to run a new wire from point a to point b honestly let me
show it let me see a show of hands and the first one to say you know mike i would have said i would
have done the same thing i would have had to bring an electrician and run a new wire how many of you
would have done that first one to tell me actually the first three people to tell me honestly that
they would have done that i am going to send a winter 2022 pipe doctor mikey pipes long sleeve
winter t-shirt too all right it's got the pipe doctor full color logo in the front and mikey
pipes if you ain't testing your guests and logo in the back full color at no cost obligation
anywhere within the 50 united states right the first three to tell me they would have done
they would have walked away told the homeowner call electrician i got you i got you all right
it's time for us to switch sides right so i took the cover off the what was labeled basement
air handler and i took it over there and i put it over here and i'm gonna throw
my little sticker on there i spent about i don't know at least 40 minutes before
i figured out that the long run was controlling the wrong one so that gets a sticker now let's
focus on this one let's first we're gonna take a visual observation we have lots of growth we have
mold and mildew growing inside of here see that look at all that mold and mildew it is gross
that is absolutely gross okay so now here we are you can even see it on the wiring look at
that you can even see it on the wiring okay so first thing i'm going to do is check to see
if we have a blown fuse and can't tell but see i don't know if you ain't testing you're
guessing right let me stop guessing all right here we are i got
the red and the gray wire and we don't have any voltage
well let me show you what we have that's what we have we have
bad motor see that bad motor that sucks i don't remember and motor was
dead i had to wait wait wait like three days so the number well you say well you just said
why always replace motors but if you replace one motor in 11 years and three systems okay
that's not so bad but if you replace several motors over the past 11 years since you've been
in the house that's a problem so the number one reason for continuous or frequent or frequent
i mean like every several years okay you know a motor should last a lot more than a couple years
or like five years six years it should right but sometimes it just dies prematurely i've had
systems that are three two two three years old and everything's perfect and it still does it's
just the same zone right yes it's man-made it's subject to failure at any of the time yeah but
the number one failure for let's say you replace this motor three times in 11 years okay there's a
problem and the problem is airflow because these motors if they're not getting enough air
flow to it and it can't discharge it fast enough it's called static pressure right and we
measure that okay professionals measure that yeah um most people don't but professionals measure
it but the filters not the filters but at the equipment itself okay yeah you know before the
filter after the filter at the equipment itself yeah so but without complicating things but if you
had to replace motors over and over and over again you would have you'd be in big trouble because
your whole house is finished the basement is finished all the duct work is concealed right
you would have to make you'd have to drastically change the the air distribution system in order to
right fix static pressure okay but that's not the case here you have to replace one motor and that
this motor has never been replaced um but another thing let me show you downstairs yeah another
thing i want to show you is what's growing inside these units no but but the basement system's
been replaced once before oh it has that's the one that's been so i always want to show you
this this is the first floor system this one was first floor but now we may have this one so this
is the first floor this is the first one the first thing i always want to point out you forget about
why i'm here see all that black stuff on the water that's mold and they'll do all that nasty stuff
so you need to address that there's easy ways but there's more complicated ways but it has to
be cleaned and it has to be treated and it has to go away does it chew through the wires or
like it won't shoot through the wires but it's it's in a cool damp place yeah it's subject to
growth my wife was telling me maybe i should get humidifier down here no is this but this is for
the first floor system you know yeah i'm saying it's only growing because yeah the easiest way to
get rid of this permanently is ultraviolet light sterilization yeah i heard about that yeah all
right so i pulled the whole blower compartment out of here i spoke to him about the mold and the
mildew in here uh we're gonna follow up later in the week for uh ultraviolet sterilization
but in the meantime i have a ecm motor in the truck all right there it is i rescue all
right a little bit taller than the other one right a little bit taller but nonetheless we have
it in the truck and uh we'll be able to fix them and get them up and running short all right so
outside i uh took the blower wheel out i took these two screws out here here and there i took
the blower out and i cleaned it as best as i can not using a pressure washer and it's it's much
better it's much better than what it was it's not 100 but like i said it's much better
so i got the flow wheel back into position i'm going to take off the um the motor mount
of the motor transfer it over to this one when i do that i want to pay close attention
to the positioning of this because i don't want to be too high or too deep when i mount
the new motor to the blower wheel assembly one hand is not going to work obviously okay all right so my new motor is in i'm
just contemplating cutting down the shaft but i'm going to leave it i'm going to leave it
or else i think i'll get the shaft blaster yeah let's get the shaft blaster did you
really think i was not going to cut that end of that shaft off i got the sh subco shack
blaster of course i'm going to cut it off duh there it is the shaft blaster okay nice clean cut there a little bit of annoying
i can't do it one-handedly you gotta hold hold the fan um fan squirrel cage you know the hamster cage
for moving around but not bad all right and yes it's not 100 but it's a lot better than what
it was so go kick rocks and play in traffic trolls all right there's one thing that i
forgot to pay attention to and don't forget a good technician as observant of his surroundings
when i go to slide this bad boy in right i got to plug in my wires and my harness is not there
so now i'm going to unbolt it and move it over and there baby perfect perfect all right so now i'm going to
re-secure the screws back to the system making sure i reattach ground
let's get you right there right there and of course i lost the screw but we have
some more down there let's get ground on there run away wire no you are not cooperating today mother effer mother effort right there all right so earlier i took a picture and i labeled my wires right so one was a
small white wire for heating two was the blue four was the white wire so put these wires back
on like that okay they're all nice and snug so the only thing left to do now is to restore power
there's power and we're gonna see what happens and there we have it we have blower motor
see that beautiful beautiful beautiful all right so you think the job is done
right nope it is 10 to 11.
Been here since like 8 40 in the morning my first floor air
handler has now been properly identified made the homeowner aware of that as well and my
blower is on my thermostat's calling for cooling but my outdoor unit isn't running
all right basement first floor second floor let's put our bag right there you can hear it hear that contact i pulled
in contact is pulled in and i checked all the breakers and they're all on so let's
go see what's going on inside this bad boy by the way who uses paper stickers look at
this paper stickers really no wire hangers all right contact is pulled in as you can see all right no action with the titan pro here wow oh my being lazy damn damn don't be lazy guys
come on get some bandai and do it the right way oh look at that we have power motor's hot as [ __ ] the hell's up with this yo stop it stop it oh my god look it doesn't
shut the [ __ ] up stop it thank god all right she finally shut the
front door so you got no power there now say no power let's test this capacitor let's test the capacitor okay what do you think i think she's
no bueno let's find out 45 5 titan pro made in china all right so i have one lead
on common the other one herm i get bupkus one lead on common the other on fan i still get
bubkus get nothing so let's get another 45.5 capacitor dual capacitor so would you look at
that made in the usa a 45.5 370 or 440 dual run capacitor by amred oh oh my god i think
i'm going to orgasm just by looking at it so let's take it out of the box and we're
going to show you a couple differences between the titan pro and all the other manufacturers
and the amred it has what we call a cpt this is the compressor protector terminal and what
this would get hooked up to this would get hooked up to your hard start for example right you hook
up your hard start to that so if the hard start fails it's going to save the compressor and tell
it not to run pretty effing smart so our middle we got our common we have our herm and we have
our fan look at that amret beautiful so let's test this because if we ain't tested we're
guessing right i say it all the time and i generally practice what i preach not every single
time but i generally do and we have a 43.9 huh so 1.1 less than its rated value so let's
go to get in there let's go to common and let's go to fan i want to get on
there baby get on there show me the love 5.2 all right and it's really nifty
about these look at this it was tested with 3.8 at the factory with a fan of 5.2
actually went up 0.1 microfarads from the factory right df i wonder if that's person who checked
it no dfsense or something else guys let me know what df stands for but here it is 45 5 dual run
capacitor tits i'm going to put this in i got a piece of band iron we're going to secure that
inside the electrical compartment and hopefully this thing will be up and running shortly
all right there's my new ambride capacitor i didn't cut the end of the bander as you
notice i had a little bit too much there but in case this capacitor gets replaced in the
next 15-20 years because that's probably how long it'll last as long as the coil is clean um if we
need to replace it with a larger diameter one at least they can reuse the same band iron but you
know they'll be replacing this condenser before they replace that capacitor and that's not a shout
out to amret at all by the way i just know they happen to make the best capacitors that we can
buy so let's plug our power and see what happens that's amazing look at that effin amazing all
right it's 11 o'clock i've been here for two and almost two and a half hours and we are now almost
done all right ladies and gentlemen it is 11 18 in the morning i got here around 8 40 sunday morning
and uh last night keeping it real i wasted a good 40 minutes troubleshooting and diagnosing a
potential thermostat and or thermostat wiring failure before realizing that i was working on the
wrong system through no fault of my own it is what it is ladies and gentlemen it is what it is and i
told the homeowner right away as you could as you saw in the early in the video that we identified
that there was a potential short in the wiring and we were working on the wrong
system that he directed us to mother effort my effort luck you know come on
ah sunday morning oh well got the motor replaced put the hamrad dual capacitor the 455 in
there got him up and running and you know what develop relationships with your clients if you're
a service and repair a contractor like my company mostly is have the parts on the truck i know
it's hard it's expensive stocking literally tens of thousands of dollars with the stuff on
your truck but it's well worth it and if you're selling it for not the right markup of that part
you're not making any money ladies and gentlemen you are not amazon right you don't have a a brick
and mortar store where you can just you know pull stuff out of a stock out of stock and ship
it off you know you're a mobile warehouse and having a mobile warehouse comes with a premium
right comes with the premium i could have sold that motor for whatever price i wanted to today
i could have right because he already knows it's not available online based on last based on his
last experience but i had it in the truck mic drop smash that thumbs up button subscribe and hit that
notification bell to get post notifications when i drop a video which is almost on a daily basis i
dropped the video yesterday evening unfortunately there was some processing errors when the
video got you know processed on my phone and i don't know the last three minutes of it was
just one still clip with just audio playing so i deleted it i couldn't find the
original and oh well it is what it is but at least i got this one video out to you today
and i'm gonna go run another service call to the emergency service call in lawrence which is also
in the five towns and they have a flooded basement so maybe i'll make it part of this
video or maybe i won't but nonetheless stay tuned smash the thumbs up button and be
well god bless stay safe mikey pipes signing
