When you're troubleshooting an Arzel Zoning system, don't overlook the solenoids. These components are rarely the culprit, but knowing how to test them will really make your life easier if they do have a problem. Here's how to isolate and test the Arzel solenoids.
Hello and welcome to Arzel Zoning, where today we’re going to show you how to diagnose our solenoids. In a previous video we went over testing the pump so we know the pump in this panel is good. Now we need to take a look and see if we have an issue with the solenoids.
When you’re testing the solenoid, you’re going to need a digital voltmeter, a digital manometer, and a pair of needlenose pliers. You might need a little screwdriver.
What we recommend first, when you’re going to test the solenoids and pumps, is you jumper out all of your fan calls. Or you go to your thermostats and you turn the fan switch to on, turn the heating cooling switch to off.
With the fan running, all of my zone solenoids are going to be on vacuum. And then all we have to do is disconnect the G call here and that’ll open and close the solenoid so that we can test those.
So, with my fan calls all jumpered out on each of my zones, I’m going to turn the panel on. Our pump is started, we got a fan call on each of our zones. The first thing we’re going to do is check to make sure that our solenoid connections are working correctly. So we’re going to set our meter to DC voltage, then we’re going to check between the plus terminal. On the AirBoss we have two plus terminals; on the HeatPumPro and the MPS we’re going to have a single plus terminal. Locate your plus terminal. You’re going to check from plus to one, plus to two, plus to three. Each of those is showing zero volts DC. To verify that our meter’s working we’re going to check to the unused zone, and that shows 24 volts DC. So we know our meter’s working, we know that our zone solenoid connections are working, and then we can proceed to check our vacuum and our pressure.
First thing we’re going to do is check our vacuum. If you didn’t save the red caps, you’ll have to use a short piece of tubing with a plug. You want to isolate all your dampers from your panel, so put your red caps back on your solenoids, and connect your manometer directly to one of the solenoids.
With our manometer connected to the solenoid, I’m only seeing 0.96″ WC. Now, normally we’re going to be seeing what we had at our pump, and in the previous test we did with the pump we were around 60″. Since we’re not getting 60″ we know we’ve got something causing that pressure drop. Now we can check the other solenoids, moving our manometer around just to see if any of those are reading differently. As we move our manometer around we need to make sure that we cap off the unused port. That’s reading the same thing, 0.9.” We’ll go ahead and check our our last zone. That’s reading about 2.76″ so that’s still very very low.
The last thing we’re going to do is we’re going to check our ModuPASS port if we have it, because the ModuPASS port is a constant pressure port. Since all of our solenoids are supposed to be vacuum, we should be reading something different on a port that’s supposed to be pressure. So on our ModuPASS port we’re only getting five inches. When we tested the pump we were up around 60″ so that tells us that something in here is leaking.
Now to figure out if it’s a solenoid, we know that each of our solenoids are supposed to be under vacuum. That’s going to be this black and blue striped line running across the top. Our pressure line is going to be the black and yellow stripes. So since they’re all supposed to be under vacuum, we’re going to pinch the black and yellow striped line inside the panel and see if our monometer pressure changes at all.
One at a time we’ll pinch each of our solenoids. No change in pressure with zone one, no change in pressure with zone two, or I mean with zone three, so we’ll pinch off zone two. And then we see that our pressure instantly shoots up. We’re getting 63″. So we found that our Zone 2 solenoid is leaking.
That’s how you diagnose the Arzel solenoids pretty simple process, you just need a manometer, a digital voltmeter, and a pair of pliers.
