Beverage Air DD58 - Not Cooling

[dbdubb]

I picked up pretty old Beverage Air DD58 system from an old German restaurant that was closing. You can tell its old by the wood grain front to it. Nevertheless, before I bought it, it worked just fine. We got her home where I cleaned her up and plugged her back in. It ran overnight and cooled down to 39 degrees that following morning - so I was feeling pretty good about it. Spent about a month after that just redoing all of the seals and gaskets and converting the connections for home brew kegs. Once finished I fired her back up and now shes not cooling at all.

Compressor and both fans come on just fine. When you turn the Tstat to Off, compressor shuts off. I thought maybe it needed R12, so my neighbor gave me a hand with getting a can of that and we found the charging port and pumped it through last night. Unfortunatly it didn't help. The coils aren't getting hot / cold, no sweat, nothing.

Was curious if anyone had any ideas on what else I should be checking...?

Thanks,
Dave

 

[dbdubb]

Any ideas here? :-(

 

[Bobby_M]

Did you transport the unit on its side or back?

 

[dbdubb]

No. It stayed wheels down in the truck bed.

 

[ajdelange]

If the line out of the compressor isn't hot then it isn't compressing anything. The first thing you might do is put an ammeter on the compressor and see if the current it is drawing is reasonable as compared to the compressor nameplate ratings (or the system nameplate ratings) if there are any. Next step would be to put a gauge set on it to see if high and low side pressures are reasonable. Apparently these run really low suction pressure - 10 psig according to one post I found on the net. The same post said hi side is at around 180.

All sorts of things could have happened when you moved the thing. A flake of something that had sat there for years came loose and blocked the capillary tube, for example. A stress point finally gave way and all the refrigerant leaked out is another possibility. This seems likely as it ran for a while and then stopped after a month of standing. As you have recharged it you should run over it with a leak detector. It's probably, given its age, to grotty inside to find the leak by looking for oil stains.

Just dumping R12 in there without paying attention to how much is likely to result in over or undercharging and in a small system like this it takes a fine hand (I am assuming there is no accumulator). Without the manufacturer's specific procedures in hand or a tech experienced in servicing this type of equipment probably the best method is to shoot for superheat of around 20 °F. I'm not a refrigeration tech so if someone who is comes along with a different recommendation, listen to him.

 

[Gotti]

Hello dbdubb, Iwas wondering if you fixed your issue with your dd58 (2 years ago)? I was wondering if you found out what the high/low pressures are supposed to be. I have the same issue and they keep asking me this before they will come out to recharge my ssystem.

 

[dbdubb]

No, ended up junking the unit. Tried for quite a while on a recharge and it just wasn't worth the fight. Found a much newer unit on craigslist that somebody was looking to get rid of for $300.
Goodluck!

 

[ajdelange]

Hello dbdubb, Iwas wondering if you fixed your issue with your dd58 (2 years ago)? I was wondering if you found out what the high/low pressures are supposed to be. I have the same issue and they keep asking me this before they will come out to recharge my ssystem.

Who is supposed to be the expert here? Tell them to charge it to 35 psig low with a superheat of 15 - 20. Coil temperature should be above freezing and the amount of charge should be about right.