How to Diagnose Arzel Dampers and Pumps

Hello and welcome back to Arzel zoning. Last time we covered how to install our dampers with the Ezyslide, the Ezyfit, and the inserta for the Ezyfit and the inserta are the best options for when your customer is going to drywall the basement. The Ezyslide is our standard damper. Today we’re going to cover how to diagnose the dampers.

It’s a question we get often enough with tech support. We want to make a video to make it easier for the technicians in the field to learn how our dampers work and how to work on our dampers. We have our zones connected. We connect it up a manometer to a spare zone. Not everybody’s going to have a spare zone.

If you don’t, you just disconnect one of your zones and connect your manometer up there.

Components that we want to test if we suspect there’s a damper leak, or if the dampers aren’t opening or closing, we want to test our pump. We want to test our damper runs. And that’s we want to test our solenoids. That’s really about it. We have a drill so we can remove the dampers. We got needle nose pliers so we can pinch off the tubing.

We have a manometer so we can read inches water column on the pressure side which is what we’re looking for to close the dampers. We want to see at least 40in positive pressure of water column on the vacuum side, which is what opens our dampers. We want to see at least 35in negative pressure to open the dampers. If you have an open tube, you’re not going to build up pressure, you’re not going to build up vacuum.

If you put a screw in the end of your tube to cap it, you may or may not build up vacuum or pressure. Screws do leak if you don’t have our caps. We do offer plugs that push right into the end of the line. Just take a T, curl it back around itself with a spare piece of tubing, and use that to cap the line.

If you’re short a damper and you have to come back, but you want the system running until then. First thing we need to do is test our pump. We’re going to remove the pump. The best way that I found to remove the pump without removing the control board are these two plastic stake ons in the front. They’re held in place with the Phillips head screw on the underside of the panel.

You can pull that stake on out.

That frees up the front of the pump, and then you can push it down, lift off the back. And use your screwdriver or your fingernail, whatever that will allow you to. Push your tubing off the back ports. You can get your pump out of there for testing. The first things first, connect our manometer up on the vacuum side, which is the back right.

And we know it’s the back side of the pump because we have the two red wires coming off the two front ports or vent ports. If you plug those up, you’re going to damage the pump over time. We don’t want that. We don’t want to replace the pump unless it’s actually bad. And if you do have to replace that component after talking to tech support, make sure you give us a call 800-6 118312.

We’ll issue you an RMA if it’s under warranty you can get that sent out to you free of charge. We hooked up to our vacuum side. Now we turn our switch on at the bottom of the panel. That’s going to start the pump manually, and we can see that we have 38in water column for right about there on our vacuum for.

That tells us the pump is good because we’re doing better than the -35in that we’re looking for on the vacuum port. So next we’re going to test our pressure port. And this is what closes the dampers. We’re looking at 40 or 55in water column on the pressure port. So that’s good. We have a good pump.

We can go ahead and unplug that. Get it put back in the panel. We’ve checked our pump. We know our pump is good. Now we’re going to check it. At the top of the panel we have our manometer connected up on our spare zone. If we didn’t have a spare zone we would use a short piece of tubing and a T to connect up in line with one of our zones.

So you just connect it up, connect your manometer to that. And that’s how we would actually test the zones themselves. But since we have a spare zone, we don’t have to do that right now.

Turn our switch on. Watch our pressure. With the panel being off. All these zone valves are open and we should be getting a negative pressure. Right now we’re only getting 13, 14in. It’s taking quite a while to build up. That tells us we have a leak somewhere, whether it’s in the tubing or the dampers. That’s what we have to figure out.

Fastest way to test to make sure it’s not the panel itself. Disconnect both of our zones. Save the little red caps. They look good in your toolbox, and they’re handy to keep. Plug off both of those zones and then watch our vacuum pressure. We shot up to 47in, and it’s going to stabilize down pretty close to what we tested at the pump here.

So the -47in tells us the panel itself is good. So then we can just pull off one zone at a time. Reconnect them. Give it a minute to build its pressure back up. We’ve got zone two connected 44in negative pressure. We know there’s no leaks in zone two. So then we’re going to connect up our zone one.

We’ve pretty well isolated that. Zone one is the leak because we weren’t pulling down with both of them connected zone two tested good. So that only leaves us with zone one now that we’re connected up 13in, we know there’s a leak in zone one. We need to test the dampers themselves. The fastest way to test the dampers. Pair of pliers.

Go back through. Pinch off your tubing. Going to the damper. If your pressure doesn’t change, you’ll know that that’s not the damper in question. Work our way down. We can hear the pump noise change. We can see our pressure improving on the manometer. We know that we found the bad damper and. You can double check the damper by taking your manometer.

And I’ve got a second one so you can continue to watch that one. Take the manometer. Pull the tube off, connect up to it and we can watch our pressure. So right now we’re still shooting up.

We’re getting up above 40.

So it tells me that we can hold pressure in my zone. But my damper was leaking which was causing that pressure to drop out. So we found a bad damper. Just as an extra verification, we’re going to pull it out.

You can usually create more pressure sucking on it then the pump can. So we want to we want to pressurize it to close the damper.

Makes it easier to remove the damper if you close it.

We’re going to hold it open. Plug the airport off with our finger. Now we’re going to try to close it. The damper closes quite a bit. We’re also going to check it through reverse function. And we can feel the pressure bleed off. Which tells us we have a bad damper. We are a good damper. We can open it, plug off the air port, try to close it.

We’re met with enough resistance that it’s not going to close. Then it springs back mostly open. We check it in reverse, plug the air port, try to open it. Damper. Springy. It’s not opening. We know this is a good damper. So we’ve covered installation. We’ve covered diagnostic of our dampers, of our pumps, of our own tubing. If you do have any trouble give us a call 8006 118312.

Again that’s (800) 611-8312. And we’ll be happy to help walk you through these steps again. But I do hope that this visual presentation is going to be beneficial for you. Next time. We’re going to cover the electrical to help you get a better understanding of how the low voltage circuit works, how to diagnose your HVAC outputs or your thermostat connections give you a well-rounded explanation of how all the Arzel products work.

And again, we thank you for staying with us, and we’ll see you again on the next video.