Frequently Asked Questions About Domestic Refrigerator Repair:
Question about compressor oil coolers and heat produced
I really enjoyed your site, and I have a question that I thought maybe you could answer off the top of your head.
I have a massive cooler (previously used in a convenience store for displaying cokes and the like) that I got for free. When I got it back to my brew house (yep, I'm a home brewer on a frightening scale), I removed the power cord and examined the block that the compressor was wired into. I don't remember exactly what I did, but I do remember that I wasn't sure why there was a junction block with only the compressor hooked into it.
So I attached an external thermostat and set the unit to running. The condenser coil is underneath the unit and gets very hot during operation. The compressor gets even hotter. And the entire cooler will maintain a temp drop of only 20 degrees on a good day, often more like 10 after it has heated up the brew house beyond the capacity of the A/C to cool it.
Looking at your site, I notice that you mention the oil cooler. I'm an engineer (who doesn't work on refrigerants of any kind) and only remember the theoretical stuff about the Carnot cycle. They didn't teach us about oil coolers. Should there have been an oil cooler hooked into that block? Where would it be located? Thanks for any reply at all,
No the oil cooler is not an electrical device, it's a circuit in the high pressure refrigerant lines. First the discharged refrigerant is cooled through a primary condenser, then looped back through the oil in the bottom of the compressor before it goes into the main condenser. See the attached hermetic diagram
Fig 1-6.
(you can find it in Section 1)
As far as the other problems of this unit heating up your room and not getting cold enough, they are likely related. If the unit heats up it’s own too closed in environment(your brew house is likely not a large enough area for a unit like this), then it can’t cause the inside of the cabinet to get any colder than what it stabilizes at. To solve this you could vent the units’ condenser with outside air using a custom duct arrangement and a fan to loop it through.
Otherwise if the unit runs at all, it's wired correctly. This reminds me of a similar situation. I was once called out to a customer’s home to solve a problem with a deep freeze. In order to conserve energy he had wrapped the freezer with insulation. The unit could not get rid of it’s own heat it produced and would not cool down enough.
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