Note: My brother Nathan wrote this a few years back, and I only did some minor editing. A pool heat pump is essentially a water-cooled air conditioner in reverse. It usually has a large air evaporator on the outside that looks like a condenser coil and a heat exchanger (usually tube-in-tube) on the inside. A […]

First off, I want to thank Ulises Palacios for taking these photos. He is in the habit of cutting open the compressors he replaces to see why they failed (when possible). I think that's pretty boss. So, why would the compressor have copper plating on the inside? They certainly aren't manufactured that way. The short […]

The most common diagnosis with expansion valves is failed closed or restricted, resulting in underfeeding of the evaporator. The symptoms are low suction, normal subcooling, and high superheat when a TXV fails “shut,” but there are some other issues to watch for that can actually result in overfeeding the coil. Schrader in the Port The […]