[AT] No A/C in Oklahoma in August!!!

[Cecil Bearden]

Since the experience and knowledge on this list is so varied I am 
posting this in case you guys can give me a little help.   Monday 
evening we had one of OKlahoma's summer monsoons complete with 10K 
lightning strikes per hour.   My Climatemaster Geothermal A/C system 
quit and I did not know it until Tues night as my house is super 
insulated.   I have 3000ft of 2in pipe buried 6-8ft in 3 500ft trenches 
with 1ft of sand above and below the pipe.  I built this myself in 1985 
when I had more time and energy and broke.

I have been trying to diagnose what has happened and really flying blind 
on it because there is so much computer crap on this one and it is 
already obsolete even though it was installed in 2010.  I also do not 
have thermometers or flow meters on the ground loop.  The thermometers 
died many years ago, and flow meters were terribly expensive when this 
system was installed. I had a tech from a Climatemaster dealer in 
Kingfisher come out and he looked at the system and really seemed to not 
understand what was going on., Kept telling me that I probably added too 
much Freon when it was low over 2 months ago, and kept telling me that I 
needed to remove the Freon and vacuum it down and add only a certain 
amount. But it was working fine before the storm. the circulating pump 
was very hot. I threw another circulating pump on it and added a couple 
of valves to make it easier to drain the system to replace the pump. 
Same problem. I took the new pump apart to make sure it was running and 
determined the check valve was reducing flow, the old one did not have a 
check valve.   Removed the check valve and it ran longer before shutting 
down. Finally able to get some numbers of the old pump I found the old 
pump was a 5/16hp and the new one was 1/25. Also old pump was larger 
inside. This is a 3 ton unit operating at 70% capacity, so only 9 
gallon/minute max flow should be needed.  Not sure if there is a problem 
with the head on the pump or the flow.   Another pump is ordered and 
hopefully will be here today.


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