"Zyp" wrote in message
news:NeidnXtFCYUCPfjVnZ2dnUVZ_v_inZ2d@championbroa dband.com...
wrote:
On Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:00:33 -0400, "Smarty"
wrote:


"JayN" wrote in message
...
I had my Central A/C tuned up at the beginning of June. It has been
working nicely, I still am getting cooling. My unit is a 4 ton
Carrier system. It is an older system that uses R22.

Today, I happened to take a peak through the top of the condenser
unit, and noticed that there is a crack in the metal case of light
grey colored cylindrical part.

Here are links to 2 photos:

http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeofpch/cracked_ac.jpg

and

http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeofpch/cracked_ac2.jpg

What part is this? Does the crack in the metal case mean failure
will soon happen...if so how soon? What is the brown stuff I see
on the side of this part below the crack...is this oil? Do I have
a freon leak?

Nobody mentioned this during my tune-up. From the looks of it, it's
hard to believe the crack didn't exist at the beginning of the month
at all, and they didn't need to add any freon because pressure was
fine, and I'm still getting adequate cooling as far as I can tell.

Does anything need to be done?

Thanks,

Jay

Jay,

I am guessing that the light-colored cylindrical part you have
photographed is a large electrolytic capacitor, typically used to
start the outdoor

Dude - you're out of your area. Stick to electricity.

It's an accumulator, and regardless of how you probably relate
that word ( and the word 'condensor', knowing you :-) ) to
'capacitor', it's not.

It's a hollow steel cylinder with an inlet and an outlet pipe,
no wires. Liquid refrigerant goes in, vapor comes out ( in normal
operation ).

Thus, it gets cold. Contracts and expands. Sweats. Thus
the strain on the paint. Which separates sometimes.


Maybe some of the "experts" on this newsgroup can offer better
advice. Based on my participation on Usenet and Arpanet dating back
to the 1980's, I must say that I have never seen a more pathetic
collection of people than I have encountered here. Many questions
are answered with snide, sarcastic remarks

Like the one you just threw out ? Dont' get ****ign ****y all
of a sudden. Especially on a post where you just gave the most
incorrect answer imaginable.

by people have sniffed far too many chlorinated and fluorinated
hydrocarbons. Some questions are ignored altogether. You might
consider posing your question at alt.home.repair or one of the HVAC
forums on the Internet. This newsgroup is about as dysfunctional as
any I have every seen.

Then what the **** are you doing here handing out wrong
answers ?

I appreciated some of your comments in your area, electical,
but you are ****ing UNDER WATER on this one, so STFU.

And leave if you don't like it.


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--
Zyp

Well I am very glad to see that some useful advice eventually occurred here.
From the photo, my opinion was that it was a capacitor or perhaps a
refrigerant part including a couple which I named. Had I not challenged this
group, we would still be doing the typical slow rolling bull**** here with
paint and rust being the only points of reply to Jay's original question.

I was warned by others on the alt.home.repair newsgroup that this specific
group at alt.hvac was a sorry bunch of losers, and not to post a question I
had earlier in the season here since it would, no doubt, be answered, if at
all, in a snide, sarcastic, pompous, or incomplete way. I have been lurking
and reading here for a month now, and boy were they ever correct. The
majority of questions posed here are treated with a mixture of disrespect
and nonsense which is a waste of everybody's time. A simple reading of the
recent threads shows it clearly.

My first visits to this newsgroup made it painfully obvious that some of the
experts here didn't know squat about electricity yet provided expert advice
as if they did.

I have no desire to continue participating in this group, and will only
inject a comment if either the group refuses to offer any reasonable help to
a totally legitimate question as it did once again tonight to Jay until I
arrived, or if plain and obvious mistakes are being made in any area which
is electrical. By the way, although my engineering degrees are indeed in
electrical engineering, I and all other engineering graduates were required
to take 2 semesters of thermodynamics, 2 semesters of fluid dynamics, and
plenty of physics, materials, and other relevant topics. If you want to talk
entropy, enthalpy, psychometry, superheat, coefficient of performance,
adiabatic processes, or any topic beyond what a friggin' cracked and rusty
part looks like, I will be very glad to discuss it in an intelligent way. I
am not an HVAC technician / mechanic, so I will defer to your expertise if
and when you decide to offer it, which, based on a month of observations, is
pretty rare.


Smarty