1. Home
  2. Home Repair
  3. Refrigerator followup

Refrigerator followup

After a couple of hours of hunting fruitlessly for my set of R-12/22 gauges ... my wife walked into the shop and pointed right at them ! Anyway , got hooked up and turned the unit on to see a pretty good vacuum on the low side (only one service tap) so I got a can of R134A and put a little in . And the line to the condenser started getting warm ... I ended up adding 12 ounces , and now we're waiting to see if it cools like it's supposed to . It's running around 10 PSI low side right now , which IIRC is a little low for this refrigerant . Time will tell , got thermometers in both sides to check temps . Half an hour in and it appears to be cooling well , I'll wait until temps stabilize before I put it back in place .

Reply to
Snag
Loading thread data ...

Have you tried identifying the source of the leak? A little soapy water might show you where. Never had a fridge or knew anyone who had a home fridge that leaked refrigerant. Potentially repairable if a pinhole in accessible copper tubing or if coming from a coupling.

Reply to
Retirednoguilt

You may have it slightly over charged. I looked at the P/T chart and that would be about 7 deg F depending on exectally how close to 10psi you are. The other source I saw shows about 2 psi as normal. That would put you to about - 8 to -10 deg F.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

It's been slowly dropping as the box cools , currently at 5 psi . Temp in the refrigerator side is around 38° , freezer side is around 22° and the air coming off the evap coil is at 6° . I appreciate the feedback from you ! Dad taught me just enough about refrigeration to not lose a couple of fingers . I've managed not to blow anything up ... yet .

Reply to
Snag

My dad worked for a good number of years repairing appliances for a local furnature and appliance store. He told me a few things over the years. Part of my job was to work on some larger refrigeration equipment. It was a funny place about how things were. One would almost think it was some kind of union shop but it was not. Mechanics replaced the compressor and charged the units up but the electricians had to hook up the 3 wires going to the motor ( 3 phase motors). Electricians worked on the control circits and mechanics cleaned the dirty condensers which many were water cooled. Forgot the size,but thinking about 20 ton units.

I was not thinking of the unit still cooling down. It may take a while for it to stablize. Before the EPA got onto the freon depleating the ozone most of the time dad would just dump all the refrigerent to the air and put in a measured ammount of refrigerent. The stuff was inexpensive back then. That was way before the newer refrigerents came out to replace the r12 and r22. Not sure what the cost is of the r134a is now. My heat pump uses the r22 and I have most of a 20 or 30 pound bottle left that I paid less than $ 100 for over 20 years ago. Hard to say what the cost of that stuff is now.

Now you have to hook up a machine to reclaim the refrigerent and there is a big fine if you get caught dumping any of it to the air other than just a small amount that may be in a hose when you disconnect. I had to spend all day in a class learning all about the legal part of the handling of the refrigerent and then take a test on it. All we really needed to know was not to put any in the air and to use the machine to reclaim it. Could have told us all we needed to know in about half an hour, but had to know a bunch of useless things about the law. Nothing was taught about the machine to reclaim the refrigerent or how a system works. Just needed to know several dates of when certain laws were passed for that stupid test. Guess it looked good to the beurocrats in government that only know a refrigerator cools.

Someone mentiond that the Dupont pattent ran out on the R22/12 stuff and that was why they came up with the newer kinds of refrigerent and new rules on the use of it. Claim is that cows farting and belching causes more damage to the ozone than anything. I still do not see a cytalytic converter on the cows asses.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

Poor cows - now getting blamed for ozone depletion too ? ! .. as well as greenhouse effect .. New science ? .. or are we confusing things ? John T.

Reply to
hubops

I suppose you would have to factor in the greenhouse gas production involved in trucking seaweed to where the cows are but you also wonder what harvesting that much seaweed would do to the ecology of the oceans. Seagrass loss is a serious problem in plenty of places, affecting the marine inhabitants that depend on it for food or habitat.

Reply to
gfretwell

Yeah, but just about everyone is a racist.

Being a racist doesn't require fire-bombing a house when someone of the "wrong race" moves in. Or burning a cross on the guy's lawn.

Or even being rude to someone because of his race. Or even avoiding him.

It's as little as attributing to him, H, any negative characteristic no matter how small because it applies or is thought to apply or claimed to apply to others of that race. Because it's part of the stereotype, true or false, of the race H belongs to. Or because one's own reading, stories he's heard, remarks he's heard, maybe from childhood, or even his own experience with one or more others of the same race makes him expect the same from this person, H, of that race that he's interacting with now.

Even anti-racists are usually racist. But these ideas/feelings get into them, into their heads, and they are hard, often impossible, to get rid of.

Reply to
micky

Yeah, but how do you get the cows to go to the sea?

Reply to
micky

Things often work on small scale, but impractical to ramp up to a global project.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

The most common problem I've found on "seviceable" refrigeration / ac systems is leaky schrader valves or "o" rings - - -

Reply to
Clare Snyder

I will wait to see what the environmental folks say about all of that. Every time we screw with the ocean, we seem to make things worse.

They can't grow enough aquatic vegetation here to keep our exploding manatee population fed. Starvation is the biggest killer now.

Certainly bringing in an exotic plant into another ecosystem has shown itself to be a disaster here.

Reply to
gfretwell

Near as I can tell this added service tap is the only intrusion in the system . A leak will often show itself by the oil stain , I'm not seeing anything around the compressor , condenser , or lines in that area . Everything else is inaccessible . This morning the freezer compartment is at a couple of degrees below zero , fridge side is at about 35° or 36° so I turned it down one number (digital controls) . I like to see that side at about 33° or 34° .

Reply to
Snag

I got a fridge that was doing that and I hooked up my Killawatt to figure out how much the compressor was running. It seemed to be about

30% of the time so I threw a thermostat thermistor at it and fixed it. There was a way to test them that I found on the net. It was bad. If the compressor is running all the time and can't hold temp, you do have a refrigeration thing.
Reply to
gfretwell

I don't know how much it was running before the Great Thaw , but now it's holding temp and isn't running all the time . If I had a kill-o-watt I'd hook it up ...

Reply to
Snag

These kinds of things can be a bad defrost timer.

Reply to
gfretwell

I'm not sure this unit uses a DT , it's all controlled by a circuit board ... and that wouldn't account for the fact that 12 oz of R-134A has resurrected it . We had a top freezer fridge once that kept burning out the thermistor on the evap coils . Iced up so the coil was a solid block every time .

Reply to
Snag

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.