Save yourself the trouble of testing every damper! If you suspect a malfunctioning damper or other component, use this method to test each zone on the panel. You'll narrow down the list of possible issues, and save a lot of time on testing dampers and other components.
Hello, and welcome to Arzel Zoning, where today we want to show you how to narrow down if you have a leak somewhere that’s causing your problem, what zone is that leak going to be in?
The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to turn all our thermostats for fan on, and what we can see on the output line here with the HeatPumPro is that we have a G output with zone one, two, and three. If you have an AirBoss or an MPS, there’s going to be some LEDs that will tell you what your outputs are and what zones are calling. We do have some videos available for that so check those out.
But in this one, we’ve started a fan call at all of our zones. So, all of our zones are supposed to be under a vacuum. We have a G call, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to make and break the G call by disconnecting our fan wire. We want to check the dampers for closing. Those are going to close under pressure. We’ll pull our red cap off the ModuPASS port and connect our monometer directly to the ModuPASS port.
On the ModuPASS port, we’re getting 55″ WC, so we have a good pressure, but the complaint when we walked into this was that the dampers aren’t always closing. So when I have this zone supposed to be closed, I’m getting air through my registers. So with all of our zones under vacuum, we’re going to disconnect our G call one at a time. So we’ll start with zone two.
By disconnecting our G wire in zone two, we’re going to watch and see what our pressure builds up to.
And this can take about 60 seconds to 120 seconds, so 1 to 2 minutes. But we can see that our pressure is now climbing and it’s climbing fairly rapidly. So it doesn’t appear we’re going to have a leak in zone two, but let’s just give it a minute to get up to where it should be at and stabilized. We look for at a minimum positive 40″ WC if they’re supposed to be closed. This is getting up over that 40″ WC, so we know that zone 2 can hold its pressure. We know zone 2 is not where the leak is at. So we’re going to reconnect that G wire.
And then we’re going to disconnect it over at zone 3 so we can test zone 3.
We can see that with zone 3 disconnected we’re getting over that 50″ WC right away. Zone three was a smaller zone; not a lot of dampers on it. So that one built up pretty quickly. So we’ll go ahead and reconnect our wire there.
So now zone 3 is calling again; everything’s back under vacuum. Now we’re going to disconnect our fan call at zone 1.
Now with our fan call disconnected at zone 1, we’re getting four, five inches. We’re going to give that a couple of minutes here just to see if that pressure builds up.
But the pump getting fairly loud indicates it’s not able to actually reach its pressure. It’s kind of unloaded. The pump is going to be at its quietest when it’s able to reach full load, but we have a leak somewhere that we’re trying to find. The pump hasn’t been able to reach full load and that’s why we’ve got the noise from it that we do. Now it looks like it’s going to stabilize under about 10″ WC. So knowing that zone two and zone three are under vacuum, and zone one is the only one that’s supposed to be under pressure, our ModuPASS port can be used as a test for that pressure.
So we’ve narrowed it down. Our leak is in zone one, and in another video we’re going to cover how to figure out what damper is leaking on zone one.
