Introduction

This diagnostic process moved me from being a below average technician to being able to walk up to any chiller, and diagnose a mechanical chiller problem, or a chilled water system problem in under 1 hour.

When I first started as an HVAC technician, I never imagined where a career of working on chillers would take me. I have been all over the united stated, and now i am making my way across Europe servicing and maintaining chillers.

My journey from struggling with basic service calls to becoming a highly sought-after technician began with a single, transformative diagnostic process.

And I’m not going to sit here and pretend that it was my idea, or that i am anything special…

At the end of this post, there will be a free download that you can use every day when you are working on chillers.

My First Service Call.

I’ll start off by telling you how horrible my first service call was to give you an idea of where I was at.

Just like most rookie technicians, I spent two days fixing a very simple problem that should have only taken me a couple of hours total.

At the time of the call, I was super insecure and questioning whether this was something I actually wanted to do with the rest of my life.

During the first heat spell in Minnesota of the year, I got called out to a hotel where a split system for their hallways wasn’t keeping up. Being super green, I tried everything I could think of to fix it but still ended up looking like a fool. The head pressure was low and it was freezing up all the way back to the compressor. I talked with four technicians, but no one had any idea because they all assumed I had checked the basics, and I had not.
Eventually, a senior technician came out to help and quickly found that the problem was a clogged evaporator due to years of running without an air filter….
The senior technician shared his process with me that he used to troubleshoot the issue, this process was using a diagnostic log sheet.
He advised me to fill it out for every maintenance and service call I went on, and to give him a call so he could review it with me.
This one simple thing changed the entire trajectory of my career. It allowed me to quickly pass everyone around me in terms of skill and experience. After a few months, the shop started sending me to more complex service calls, and more and more calls on chillers, until that was all I was doing was working on the most complex issues that no one else wanted to touch, and I received significant pay raises as a result.

The Process

Using the diagnostic sheet involves recording design data and actual readings to make an accurate diagnosis. This process eliminates the need to rely on memory and allows for a more accurate picture of how the entire A/C or chilled water system is operating. By documenting everything, and doing it over and over. I trained my mind to analyze the entire system and diagnose problems from a meticulous and analytical approach VS Guessing on all of the problems.

Download the diagnostic sheets from our portal, fill them out with the design information, your actual information, then make a diagnosis. The file has many different types of diagnostic sheets that will be useful for anything from small A/C systems to air cooled chillers, Centrifugal Chillers and everything in between. There is also has some diagnostic charts included as well that should help give you a visual representation of whats happening in the system depending on the readings you have.