HVAC Contractors Hate Me For Sharing This Secret

Every spring I get countless calls about people's air conditioning not working after running all season last year and then going through the winter where it wasn't used and then turning it back on. This is very common, so I first want to share it with you. what it is and how you can mitigate it and prevent it from happening and save hundreds of dollars by not having to call an hbac contractor to come do

this

to your house so what we're talking about here is a clogged condensate drain . let me explain how

this

works and then we'll show you how to fix it so that when you turn on your air conditioner during the summer months you have an A coil or an N coil that is very cooled by the refrigerant cycle that contains the refrigerant.

It gets very cold and causes the coil to cool and then air passes through it, bringing cold air into your home. Now a byproduct of having a really cold coil is condensation, so every hbac system will have a condensate drain here next to the evaporator. Roll it up so all that water slides into the drain pan and then drains out of your house. Now most homes will have a condensate drain somewhere on the outside of your house, or it will be a 3/4 PVC drain like this one. here or it could be a tube like this that comes from a condensate pump so if your furnace is below ground level you should have what is called a condensate pump and that condensate pump pushes the water out about every hour during the summer months.

As you collect that water, what can happen in very humid climates is that mold and other bacteria can grow in that condensation water because it stays stagnant and that can really clog the condensation drain for a season or two of use. Well, you'll end up with a lot of sludge in the condensate drain and a lot of times, if it's in an upstairs room, you have to go around a lot of curves before you get out of the house, so this can get clogged quite a bit. ease now that we are. We will show you what to do in this situation and also some things you want to avoid to prevent damage to your hbac system.

Now for the first and by far the easiest way to clear a clogged condensate drain or just clean it out for peace of mind. The important thing is that this is a shop vacuum. Now we're going to demonstrate this in just a second, but before we do I want to warn you about what not to do if you take compressed air and plug it all the way in. your condensate drain and you just hit it with air, the likelihood of bursting one of those joints inside a wall is pretty high because a lot of

contractors

, especially if they're in a rush, may not have primed those joints or even in some I've seen cases the ones that haven't been glued on they literally just put it on and got out of there so definitely don't blow air on it so first of all we're going to show you our 3/4 PVC Drain on the outside of the house how easy it is to vacuum any residue with our shop and then we will show you with a condensate pump how you can clean the hose too before you start.

One thing I want to mention is that if you're using a shop vac, make sure you take this filter out and make sure it doesn't go through this filter, otherwise you're going to throw it in the trash, as you can see, this one needs to be cleaned really well. I just cleaned our Trager a couple of days ago, so first we're going to clean this up real good and then we're going to show you everything that we've sucked out of this condensate drain, so as you can see, we've got this cleaned up real good, let's move on.

Go ahead and put the cover on and head over to our condensate drain, so here's our condensate drain. Now you'll notice that the attachment on this M12 Milwaukee is basically the exact same size, so what we can do here is keep it like this, turn on our vacuum, let it run for about 20 seconds, maybe 30 seconds if you want, and if you have a obstruction, it will make a sudden sound when you pull that, um, you. You'll notice it on the vacuum if you have a larger shopvac, what you can do is just take a rag like this and you can just fluff it up and just make a seal, it doesn't have to be very tight.

As long as it's a good enough seal that you can suck, you won't have to have as much suction to get that debris out, so let's go ahead and start our workshop again and keep it here and see what we can get. I hear quite a bit of stuff going through this pipe. I can feel it, as you can see. I have quite a few things just in this rag, but let's open our store here and see what we have and, as you remember, when I cleaned this. It was pretty spotless here. Wow, that's impressive as you can see a lot of stuff will come out of the condensate drain, especially if you don't do this regularly, so I highly recommend you do it.

You would be very surprised. How much garbage can come out of your condensate drain now? As you just saw, we took out a ton of that condensate drain. That particular one goes through many elbows and a long distance before leaving the house, but it's what most people don't. What I don't realize is that, as you saw at the beginning of the video, the air travels through the coil and if that air has little pieces of dust particles that pass through the air filter, all of that goes down to the tray. drain and it can build up in that drain condensate now with that I just want to briefly emphasize the importance of keeping your air filter changed as you probably know my recommendation for that is the filter but they ship those filters right to your door , they come in virtually any size and are made in the United States.

Very good quality filters and really good prices. You can find a link to them in the video description below. Next, we will talk about condensate pumps. If your furnace is below ground level, you must have a way to eject it. We're going to show you how to treat that and how to prevent that buildup from happening, so I wanted to show you this in person on my evaporator coil because you can see the super cold water is condensing and I don't know. If you can see on the coil itself, um, but these coils are wet and all of that just drains out and goes directly here to the bottom of this tray, as you can see, all of this is wet here and then it travels through this pipe. and sometimes it goes outside but in my case it goes to a condensate pump as you can see there is a lot of dust and buildup on the top so I'm going to go ahead and start by cleaning the actual box of the unit and then we'll show you how really try this condensate pump.

Well, treating your condensate pump is extremely easy. You'll notice there's probably some little plastic caps on two of these depending on how many devices um you're draining. on the condensate pump, so we're just going to take that cover off and we've probably got, I don't know, a/4 cup of chlorine in here and we're just going to pour that chlorine into the condensate pump and that's literally it. just do that maybe two or four times a year and what it will do is prevent that slime from building up inside this pipe pushing it out and it will also keep the inside of your condensate pump clean.

Alternatively, if you don't want to use bleach, you can also use vinegar, but I found that bleach is more effective at keeping mold and slime away with our condensate drains. Okay, now that we've talked about both cleaning methods, whether you have a hard pipe or a condensate pump. Below, we'll talk about how you can stop slime buildup in your condensate drain and also how you can mitigate that musty smell in the spring months when you first turn on the air conditioner. and this is what I recommend, they are called evaporator tabs and what they do is prevent that slime from accumulating and that musty smell from occurring.

Now gives a nice neutral smell in the home if you are concerned about sensitivity when it comes. to the smells, these are not strong, it's a very neutral smell and it just smells fresh, it doesn't smell like any certain scent and it just smells like a clean HVAC system, so we're going to show you how easy it is to install these, just open them up. Place it and place it inside the tray right here, as I'll show you in a second. This one in particular is an aciq um. It makes it very easy because you don't have to remove this entire panel like a Goodman, but sometimes you can. just remove the panel enough so you can slide it down into the tray and then you're done you just want to make sure it's on the bottom horizontally like this so there we go our tab is just sitting horizontally right there on the bottom bottom and it's literally that easy as you can see these goodies last 4 to 6 months so easily in an air conditioning season you can buy them in larger quantities and I'll make sure and leave them in the video. description now a lot of furnaces are going to have a P trap.

I don't have one here as it goes directly to the condensate pump and then it comes out, but if you have a P trap here, a lot of times you will have a little cover and you can take that cover off and pour vinegar or a little bit of bleach in that PE trap, if it's a tea it will go straight into the PE trap and it's as simple as doing it a couple of times a year and we're good to go. I also want to talk briefly to you homeowners who have a package unit, perhaps on the side of your house.

Luckily for you, cleaning this and suctioning the drain is very easy, there is simply a drain on the side of your pack. unit, it probably has a P trap and those P traps can definitely collect mud and other stuff in them, so all you have to do is put your tent back in it, suck it up and voila, guys, it's that easy. Clean and maintain your condensate drains now. This is just one of the most common repair calls I receive. If you're curious to see what the other most common repairs are, watch this video here and I'm sure you'll find it.

Informative until next time, stay safe later.