Mastering Chiller Troubleshooting: Chiller Diagnostic Sheets

These diagnostic sheets will help you diagnose every type of Chiller in the market. Using this process will boost your confidence in your diagnosis, reduce your anxiety, and after a short period of time, you will understand the refrigeration circuit like you are looking through a system made of glass. 

Completing a diagnostic sheet may seem like a needless step, especially for someone who works on a lot of simple cooling systems.

I am here to tell you that its not. This discipline is one of the most important steps in the diagnostic process that separate the technicians that are right some of the time on most types of chillers, and the technicians that are right over 99% of the time on everything they touch. I failed to realize this in the very beginning of my career when a mentor of mine suggested this to me. I was young and dumb and thought that it wasn’t necessary. That was until I spent two days trying to diagnose a simple problem that I kept overlooking. Whenever I called techs for help on it, they just got irritated with me. Eventually, my mentor came to the job, logged the machine, and in 15 minutes he found the issue, and in 2 hours the issue was corrected.

Needless to say, I felt like a dumbass, but it was a very humbling experience, and I have logged everything I work on from that point on. 

Within a few months of filling out log sheets for everything, I got a much deeper understanding of how the system operated, and after a 6 months I had gotten to a point where I could diagnose almost everything I touched. In a year and a half, I could diagnose any piece of cooling equipment I touched from small air conditioners to 3100 ton centrifugals. I’ve shown up to service calls where multiple senior technicians spent 3 days struggling with diagnosing a centrifugal chiller, and I figured out the root of the problem in under an hour. I am not anyone special. I am a regular guy who couldn’t remember anyone’s names or birthdays, or keep my van organized. After I added this step to my diagnostic process, I became a much more precise technician, people had a lot more respect for me, and my confidence grew tremendously, because I now actually knew what I was doing, and I wasn’t left guessing anymore.

This product is a series of multiple diagnostic sheets that I have developed over the course of my career, and use every single day on maintenances, service calls, and providing support for other technicians. I also developed a cheat sheet to diagnosing chiller problems that is included for various types of chillers and cooling systems. These cheat sheets have been developed based off of thousands of service calls, and there is nothing else that walks you through the process of what is wrong with a system better than these. They will assist you with speeding up the learning curve, and have the most dramatic impact on your learning. It will also dramatically improve your diagnostic accuracy on day one of its use. 

You can use these for diagnosing:

Trane air cooled and water cooled chillers 

York air cooled and water cooled chillers 

Macquay air cooled and water cooled chillers 

Daikin air cooled and water cooled chillers 

Carrier air cooled and water cooled chillers 

The charts included will walk you through diagnosing:

1. High head pressure / high condenser pressure faults on chillers

2. Low suction pressure faults on chillers

3. Too much oil in a chiller

4. low water flow on the evaporator and condenser on chillers

5. liquid line restrictions.

6. Bad expansion valves

7. Under charged chillers

8. Overcharged chillers

9. High Discharge temp

10. Every problem you can face with a chiller on the refrigerant side.

Call or email me with any questions you have, or if you need help diagnosing a chiller your working on, and I will help in any way possible.