The 5 Readings Every Tech Must Know Well
HVAC School - For Techs, By Techs
Bryan Orr
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2016
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of HVAC School, Bryan covers the "5 pillars of refrigerant circuit diagnosis" and why they matter. They are:
- Superheat
- Subcool
- Suction pressure
- Head pressure
- Air temp split (delta T)
These 5 readings give you a holistic idea of the A/C system. Instead of getting hooked on checking only superheat and subcool all the time and dismissing potential diagnoses, you can use these five readings to get an idea of the health of several parts of the system. Making it a priority to take these five readings also promotes open-mindedness, which is perhaps one of the most vital qualities of a diagnostician.
The five pillars will give you the clues to diagnose overcharge or undercharge, a wide variety of restrictions, kinked suction lines, expansion valves failing open, improperly seated pistons, condenser fan issues, and so many more conditions.
Also, regularly check and calibrate your tools. These 5 readings won't be helpful if you aren't constantly making sure your tools are accurate.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of the HVAC School Podcast is brought to you by HVAC-HAC-HACs. |
| 0:07.0 | HACs want you to remember, don't be a hack. |
| 0:12.0 | Oh, and also, Speedy Clean, they're a sponsor of |
| 0:15.3 | HVAC Hacks and HVAC Hacks is helping me out and distributing the |
| 0:19.2 | podcast so I want to give a shout out to them. They make some great products so |
| 0:22.4 | check out Speedy Clean. |
| 0:27.0 | Hey everyone, it's Brian with the HVAC school podcast a lot of times when I do this |
| 0:35.5 | I'll do a funny little intro or I'll do a you know a meeting or something that I do with my technicians but in this case I'm not going to do that I'm just going to sit here in front of the microphone |
| 0:46.2 | I'm going to talk through a couple things that I think are probably pretty common |
| 0:49.9 | either mistakes or things that new technicians or even experienced technicians who don't think a lot about this stuff |
| 0:55.7 | are going to want to think about and specifically today I want to talk about what I |
| 1:00.4 | coined as the five pillars which I later found out was actually already a thing I guess it's like a five pillars of Islam or whatever but I called them the five pillars of the air conditioning |
| 1:11.2 | especially residential air conditioning diagnosis, |
| 1:14.7 | a refrigerant circuit diagnosis, I should say. |
| 1:17.3 | So when I was initially, when I initially first came into the trade, |
| 1:21.3 | there was a lot of guys who and someone on the group |
| 1:23.7 | just made this comment you know beer can cold is good enough on the suction line and you know |
| 1:29.3 | just keep your suction above 75 on an R22 system you you know, so on and so forth. |
| 1:34.0 | Obviously those methods didn't work for me. |
| 1:36.7 | I came out of school and I wanted to do things the right way, |
| 1:39.0 | so I had to figure out some ways to know |
| 1:41.7 | what's normal and what's not normal. And that's the issue in the trade is that a lot of this stuff is like all right if your head is high guys will say well if you're you know if your liquid line pressure is high well but who's to say what's high and what's not high? |
... |
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