We are going to change this compressor. I’ve tested it the compressor is faulty we are
going to replace it with one of these. What I did was, I cut the capillary tube off the
dryer and we allowed all the gas to blow out, and I’ve undone the 4 bolts that hold the
compressor on, and we’ve disconnected the wires so there is no gas in here and we are
going to remove the tubes and that we do with a flame.
Now normally what I do first is I remove the high side tube because sometimes if you pull the suction out and there is still
a bit of pressure it can shoot oil at you so the high side is the side that the dryer
is on so we just heat it up and I’m going to throw this dryer away so I concentrate
the heat more on the dryer, concentrate the heat more on the dryer than the tube because
if you overheat the tube you can damage it.
Now the bit of flames coming out there, this was charged with R600, which is a flammable gas but everything is out, there is just a
little bit remaining. This is the suction that we are heating up now concentrate the
heat on the compressor side, and that’s it. Now we just leave it for a few minutes
to cool down, we’ll take the compressor throw it in the recycling bin and I’ll show
you how I connect a new one on. OK What I’ve done now is I’ve put the new compressor
in its place and I’ve put the 4 bolts on it. Now before we pull these rubber plugs
out we prepare the tubes so that they line up. Now this is a 3 16th copper tube which
is going to fit there so that’s going to be quite an easy fit but this one here, has
to go on there, so we are going to need to make a sharp bend in it and for that I’ve
got this quarter inch bender which we put onto the tube and we just pull it across and
it gives you a nice bend, quite a sharp bend without kinking the pipe. So this one we are
going to put it on here, these 2 and this is the charge pipe we are going to use here.
Now when you pull these rubber plugs out first pull the one out on the high side which is
the smaller tube before you pull the suctions out because if you pull the suctions out first,
sometimes it sprays a bit of oil out. Now the tubes that are going in here is quarter
inch but sometimes they are a bit tight so we just swage the pipes and I use these little
swages just to check, you see now this is supposed to be quarter inch, there it fits
in nicely and that one is the 3 16th, which we can’t really get in there, and this is
the other quarter inch side, so we just make sure that goes in otherwise the tubes don’t
fit. So we stick the copper tubes inside there same with that one and the same with this
one so now we are going to weld. This is all copper to copper, copper to copper, copper
to copper so we use a welding rod which I call silbroloy I use no flux just a little
bit of heat and it flows very nicely so I’ll just do one joint so you can have a look.
Get a nice neutral flame. When you weld on this, these are all plastic so you don’t
want to burn the fridge so you always try and move the heat away from the plastic; you
don’t actually burn towards the plastic. So when you get the copper the right temperature
it flows nicely, it’s a very easy joint. This is a new copper pipe to new copper pipe
and there’s your joint perfect. So we are going to do these 2 joints and then what I
do at the end of this I just put a valve that we use for charging and when I’m finished
we’ll take it off but I’ll show you later.
Ok I’ve done these welds here and I’ve welded this tap on here or service valve, now the electrical connections, there’s
your power cord, the earth wire I’ve just put on there and these just plug onto the
last 2 contacts there like that. That is the power, this is a little cord grip so we can
put the wire into the cord grip there we can tighten that screw a bit later but what I
like to do when I’m at this point is just to blow a little bit of gas through the system
in case there’s some impurities from the weld and how I do it, I connect a charge line
on to this valve here, it goes through a gauge and we just rinse it through with R12 now
what should happen is the gas comes out here freely and out of the capillary, we just open the capillary,
we just break this capillary open, make sure it blows out nicely. Ok now
while it’s blowing we just put some power on the compressor for a second, plug it in,
the compressor is running and we block the high side off just let it suck a little bit
of gas in and we blow it and we switch it off. So a little bit of oil came out there
and now we can safely say the system is not blocked and also we blew the dirt out. So
now I’m going to go ahead and put a little pencil dryer on here. This is the pencil dryer
15gram and we are going to weld it on there like that and then we are going to put a vacuum pump on.
Ok I’ve done the top and bottom weld on the pencil dryer it’s still a bit
out here because it’s warm as it cools down; we’ll bend it into place. I’ve connected
the suction onto a vacuum pump and on a little system like this vacuum 2 minutes is sufficient
if your machine can’t draw a vacuum in 2 minutes there’s a problem with your vacuum
pump. So while we wait for the 2 minutes we can tighten this cord grip and then there’s
a little dust cover that covers the electrical connections which just clips on
and we clip it on there nice and neat. Ok after your 2 minutes of vacuum, the first thing you do
is you close the service valve to your compressor, switch off the vacuum pump and connect this
onto a gauge, open our gas bottle so there is pressure and we blow the air out of the
pipe, we don’t want air to go in, so just a second like that and then we open it and
the gas will freely flow into the compressor. Once the gas flows in we can start the compressor
up. The compressor is running, we close the bottle and now this fridge is warm and we
get it to settle on about 10psi on my gauge which is about there, it’s still going down,
you get it to 10 psi and then you are 90% sure you’ve got the right amount of gas
in there, but we’ll run it, we might add a little bit or blow a little bit off and
that’s how I change a compressor on a mini bar fridge. Once we are done we’ll pinch
this pipe off and I’ll weld it closed and we send it out. This is the little fridge
we changed the compressor on yesterday after it ran for a while this compressor overheated
and this dryer was getting hot as well, it’s as if there wasn’t enough condenser in it,
so I’ve added this extra piece of condenser on. We often find that on a R600 system that
if you convert it like this one it’s on R12, R12 needs more condenser to condense
than the R600 so we just added this extra bit on and now the dryer is nice and cool,
it’s running now and then when we are done we just pinch it off like this, and we are
ready to send it out. Thanks.