This webinar covers how to test the dampers, solenoids, and pumps on an Arzel system. You'll learn best practices, what readings you should look for, and how to temporarily bypass the zoning system if you need to wait for a part.
Today we’re going to be going over testing the pump, solenoid, dampers, and the outputs of our panels.
This is our solenoid. It’s going to be in every single one of our panels. We do have two different solenoids but this is the most common one we have now. And we will be switching over to this solenoid indefinitely. So across all the panels here in the near future.
So the solenoids themselves are actually DC voltage. Each of your zones is going to have a solenoid. And that’s how we’re actually switching back and forth between pressure and vacuum going to our dampers. So if you guys don’t know, all of our dampers are pneumatically driven. They open under vacuum and then they close under pressure. And the solenoids are what actually switch back and forth between those two functions to open and close the dampers themselves.
When you guys are doing a new install or anything, just be careful not to get any kind of debris in your tubing. So if you guys are carrying the tubing on the back of the truck, maybe put some electrical tape on the ends or put some caps on it. If you do get some debris in the tubing, it can work its way into the solenoids and actually gum them up so they’re not able to switch back and forth properly.
The wires on the solenoids themselves are non polarity sensitive. So it doesn’t matter which wire and every solenoid you’re going to be hooking up on the panel itself. You’re going to have a plus side. And then you’re going to have a number for your actual solenoid. So it’ll be a plus, and then one through however many zones you have.
So one of the wires will go to the plus sign, and those would be all your commons for every solenoid. Then the other wire will go to the designated number for that.
So one of the things too, that we get a lot in tech support is when you guys are going out to clean and check, you got to make sure that all the dampers are open and you don’t want to go to every thermostat in the home, a really easy way to do that is just disconnect the plus wires. So it’s going to be different on every board. On the left there’s our HeatPumPro. You’re just going to have one plus sign and then one through for the number of zones. If you disconnect the plus it’s going to leave all your solenoids de-energized and all of your dampers will remain open. And then you don’t have to worry about running every single thermostat in the home.
If you look at the next picture there, that’s the AirBoss. It’s always going to have two plus signs. Ideally the same thing. Just disconnect the pluses, wiring them together so they don’t arc anything on the board. And that’ll keep all your dampers open.
Same thing with the MPS panel. It’s just a little bit different. The plus is on the right rather than on the left-hand side for that one.
Another easy way to bypass the panel on a cleaning is to just turn the main power switch off on the panel. You could flip that MPS switch at the bottom of the panel to the on or manual position, depending on what it’s labeled as. That’ll open all your dampers, and then you could just jump out your call to the HVAC outputs as well. That’ll keep all your dampers open and get you a full system, so if you guys do have to check your charge or anything like that.
So we’re now looking at our panel. A couple of things to kind of keep in mind. We have a power side of the panel, which is going to be powered up from our Arzel transformer. And that’s going to actually power all of your thermostat terminals. So the coil side of the panel is all, your R and C, is going to power every thermostat on the panel.
And then when you are looking at the HVAC outputs these are dry contacts. So essentially if this was a non zoned system that would be your thermostat. The power for your outputs is always coming from your equipment air handler or furnace.
So if you guys are not getting power between R and C on your output side, it’s because you’re not getting power from your equipment. So kind of keep that in mind, that’s how the panel is separated, all your thermostats are powered from our transformer. HVAC outputs are powered from the equipment or just dry contact.
One of the things here, when you are checking the relays, is if you have an open circuit, you’re going to be wanting to check your relays actually in ohms. The easiest way to check it. So if you have an open circuit you’re always going to read, OL, it’s going to be, you know, nothing there. It’s going to be an open circuit. When your circuit is closed, if you guys are checking ohms, you’re going to get continuity there.
This doesn’t tell you if the relay is any good. The better thing to do when you guys are checking this is actually ohms rather than continuity. So if you guys are checking a closed circuit, essentially you just put your meter on ohms. Anything less than one ohm is actually a good relay. If you are getting over one ohm, it’s going to be getting a weak relay. And it may not be operating correctly.
So the easiest way to do this is depending on what function you guys are under. So you guys are under a cooling call, what you guys are going to need to do to test resistance is always disconnect your R wire from your HVAC output. You do not want power here when you guys are checking continuity.
So let’s just say you guys are checking a heating call. You’re getting a W1 W2 contact, you guys are going to disconnect your R wire, and then you’re going to check between R on the board and W1 for your ohms. And it should be less than one ohm. If it’s not that relay is getting weak. And then you would do the same thing for W2.
One of the things we get questioned a lot with the HeatPumPro is where to put your meter probe. Unless you guys have the thinner leads you can go into that half circle there. If you guys just have regular meter leads and they’re a little bit thicker, what you’re going to actually want to do is if you look at that arrow there, right between that orange clip and that half circle, there’s that little slit there. If you put your meter there, there’s a brass bar right in there. It’s the easiest spot to stick your meter lead, and you always make a good connection there.
The reason we disconnect the R wire is because there is power there and we’re checking resistance. You don’t want to blow the fuse in your meter. So that’s really the biggest thing.
And then if you guys are not able to turn off the power for whatever reason, they didn’t put a power switch on the furnace, or you can’t get the R wire disconnected, or you just want to do quick voltage check. The easiest way to do that when you guys are checking an open circuit, you’re going to read 24V between R and your function. So if you guys are calling for, say, heat W1 if you check between R and W1, if that’s an open circuit, you’re going to read 24V.
If that circuit is actually closed, you guys are going to read a zero volt on that. So when that circuit’s closed it’s going to be zero volts. And that’s going to be AC voltage.
So when you guys are checking the pump here, there’s four ports on the top of the pump. The two back ports. The back left is going to be your pressure port. Back right is actually vacuum. And then the two front ones, are always going to be left open to the atmosphere. And they’re just vents.
So when you guys are looking, the back left as you press here, that’s going to be at least 40 inches of water column. So if you guys are checking directly at that pump, and you’re not seeing that, you’re going to need to replace the pump and then recheck from there.
And then on your back, right. It’s going to be your vacuum port. And that’s going to be at least -35in of water column. If it’s not, you’re going to want to replace that pump. And then to designate the back side of the pump, you’re going to look, there’s two red wires coming off that pump there. That’s always going to designate the back side of your pump.
So if you guys are ever checking, if you have dampers that aren’t operating properly, the first thing to check is to make sure that your pump is actually operating. If you guys get good readings of the pump, then you can start doing damper and pump – or, sorry, damper and solenoid diagnostics.
When you guys are looking at the panel, this is kind of the inside setup here. So you’re going to have your pump at the bottom in the panel. You’re going to have a yellow tube and a blue tube. That yellow pressure tube coming off the back of your pump, it’s going to go into the bottom of the solenoid. Then you’re going to have your vacuum port on that back right of your pump. That’s going to come up and it’s going to come in to the side of the solenoid, and you’re going to have the blue stripe. And the other port is going to go to your dampers.
So essentially if you’re looking in your panel at the top of the panel box, this is what you’ll see. Each solenoid will have a zone. So if you have four zones there’s going to be four solenoids inside that panel as well.
These are normally open, zero volts. They’re going to be open under vacuum. And then when they are closed then you’re going to see 24V DC between the plus sign and the number zone that you guys are looking at.
So if you’re diagnosing to see if you’ve got a good pump. You’re trying to see if the dampers are leaking. The easiest way to accomplish this is to get some of our red caps for the panel. They come with all of our panels. Just keep them. Put them in your tool bag. Or you can order a box from us. Another thing that comes in really handy is we actually sell plugs to pull the dampers off and then plug up the lines, you can test it that way. You don’t necessarily need the plug in caps, but it does speed up the process quite a bit.
So essentially what you’re going to do if you’re looking for leaks is you’re going to plug off every other zone besides the zone that you’re actually working on on the panel. So you’re going to pull the tubes off the top of the panel, put the red caps on every zone that you’re not testing at that point. You’re going to turn your main power switch off on the Arzel panel, you’re going to turn your MPS switch on, and then you’re going to tee your manometer in with the zone that you’re actually working on.
We already diagnosed the pump and found out that was good. So what we’re going to do is hook that in. Once that MPS switch is in the on position, the panel is off. All of your dampers are going to be under a vacuum. So we’re looking for at least -35in. If you tee in with all the dampers on that particular zone that you’re working on, and you see at least -35, there’s no leaks on that zone and you can work your way to the next zone and go on from there.
If by chance you hook up your manometer and see you’re reading six inches of water column and you know your pump was good, then we definitely have a leak on that zone. And two ways to kind of determine where that leak is. You could either get our plugs and essentially on that zone just disconnect every damper, plug off the lines and then start reattaching one damper at a time and watch your manometer pressure.
When you go to disconnect the bad damper, you’re going to see your pressure go back up to a standard -35. And as soon as you put that bad damper up, you’re going to see your pressure drop back out. You know that damper is bad. You can mark it on that tube and work your way through all your dampers.
You will have to do this with every single zone on the panel if you have a leak. The reason being is everything is teed together inside the panel box. So any zone that’s under the same function as each other will affect the opposing zone. So if you don’t see zone one and zone two are off, those two zones will affect each other because they’re teed together in the panel.
So just kind of keep that in mind. That’s why the caps and plugs come in handy, it’s just to isolate everything inside the panel.
We do offer a spare parts tool kit, and this particular parts kit is going to come with all of our replaceable components on our panels. The only thing it’s not going to come with are the circuit boards themselves. And that’s because they’re different on every panel. But it will come with a new pump, which is the same pump across all the panels.
It’s going to have our 40 VA transformer, which will work for anything from a two zone all the way up to a four zone configuration. If you guys are getting into the 6 or 8 zone, that’s actually a 100 VA transformer. So that one wouldn’t work for that. But we do sell that individually as well.
It also comes with our modulating bypass transmitter, which is for our ModuPASS damper, which is our bypass.
It’s going to have 12 of those red caps that we talked about. It’s going to have our sensor for the HeatPumPro, as well as the sensor for the AirBoss. It has both of our different solenoids that we have one for the older AirBoss and MPS. And the PAN-SOLO5 is pretty much across the board on the rest of the panels.
It’s going to have five 3-amp fuses and then 25 couplings, tees, elbows and plugs, which will help diagnose and troubleshooting if you have leaking dampers. So it’s a nice kit to have on your truck.
Then if you guys ever do have a complete board failure on a panel, it’s really easy to bypass the panels themselves. It’s essentially pretty close on how you would actually troubleshoot the dampers themselves.
What you’re going to do is you’re going to turn your power switch off on the Arzel panel. Then you’re going to go ahead and turn your MPS switch at the bottom of the panel to the on position or manual position, depending on what it’s labeled as on the panel. That’s going to open all your dampers and then just decide whatever thermostat you want to control your equipment, remove it off of your zone inside and just move it up to your HVAC outputs.
You can either put it right underneath the terminals with your output, with your equipment wires, or pull them out and wire them out together. And essentially you’ll have an un-zoned system that’ll work off that thermostat and blow air through the whole home until you can get a replacement for it.
Then with all of our products, we have a lifetime warranty. So if you guys do a new install, just make sure you register the panel within 90 days of installation and it qualifies for our lifetime parts warranty. If the panel is not registered, it actually reverts to a one-year warranty. But we’re still covering them in-house for five years. So if you guys are out there installing a new product, just make sure you register to, you know, prevent any issues down the road from now.
And we also offer our 100% comfort guarantee. Essentially what this is if you guys sell a system, within that first year, if the customer is not happy with it for whatever reason, Arzel will buy that system back at no cost to them.
And that’s, you know, contingent as long as it’s installed correctly, as per the install instructions. Other than that though, if you guys do it, installing correctly and that customer is just not happy for whatever reason, we’ll buy that whole system back.
So it’s a pretty good closing tool for you guys. If you guys have got someone on the edge and they’re not 100% sure they’re going to be satisfied with it, it’s kind of a nice little tool to help you guys close the deal as well.
Then our tech support number is going to be (800) 611-8312. We’re actually available Monday through Friday is our regular hours. And it’s 8 til 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Typically when you call during those regular hours, there’s no wait time at all. You’ll get ahold of us right away, and we’ll walk you through whatever you guys are having issues with. We’ll get you squared away.
We are available after hours as well. And on weekends. And that’s 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. So after that, five and on weekends, the phones route to our cell phones, and they roll in a rotation until one of us answers the phone. So if you guys are calling on a weekend or after hours, just let the phone ring a little bit longer than you normally would.
We will eventually pick up the phone, but because we got to hear it and kind of get to it. So it’s a little bit different than when we’re at the office, but we will pick up. We’re not going to let you guys just ring on the phone all night.
And then other than that, we can help you guys with troubleshooting, application design, any kind of technical info we can get you as well. If it is a warranty issue after hours, we won’t be able to issue an RMA. But the next day we’ll get you guys squared away and get you out a part, if that’s what it was.
Then we do offer a number of marketing resources out there as well. One of the big things that I recommend, if you guys haven’t already, if you’re a contractor or distributor, is go to our website. That’s arzelzoning.com.
There’s troubleshooting videos on there. All the marketing literature is on there. All the webinar Wednesdays are recorded and posted on there as well. There’s a lot of useful information for you guys.
Also, if you haven’t, I would sign up for the contractor locator tool and the distributor locator tool. If you guys are a distributor, once you guys enter your address in there, the customer goes on our website, looks for a local contractor or distributor, it’ll pull up everybody in their area that signed up on the website. So it’s a nice little tool for you guys as well.
And if you guys need any literature or brochures or anything like that, we also offer that to you guys. It’s free of charge and all you have to do is contact our marketing department for something like that.
