Herrmidifier 490-6 Fan Powered Humidifier Repair Help

Be sure to turn the power off before performing any maintenance.

Hi I'm Jay, and this is a Trion CB100 Fan Powered Humidifier. All the fan powered units basically look simillar to this, they operate the same. They all have a little fan that's hiding inside of here, that circulates air through the humidifier pad, and what it really does, is it takes air from the duct work draws it through the pad here, puts moisture into it, and blows that humidified air back into that same duct work. When this thing is running properly, you will see water trickling down the drain here. It should not be running down the drain, like flying down the drain like a fire hose, it should be trickling down the drain when it's operational. Right now we have this one turned off and we'll show you this running here in a minute. If you see water flying down the drain like a fire hose that is usually an indication that up inside of here there is a little orifice, and that orifice has failed and has a large hole in it. Those orifices are very easily replaced. If you see water running down the drain continuously when the humidifier is turned off, and unplugged, that is not normal. That usually means the solenoid valve is stuck open. And that does happen at times, and you will need to put a new solenoid valve in. So let's turn this thing on so you can see what it looks like when it's running.

Alright, we have the unit running now, and I can hear the fan running inside of here barely, but I can hear it. And I can also see water trickling down the drain here. If you look at it properly, you will see water barely trickling, but it is water trickling down the drain. And that is normal when it's running properly.

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Be sure to turn the power off, before performing any maintenance.

Hi, I'm Jay, and today I'm going to talk about how to do maintenance on a Trion CB100, fan powered humidifier.

Be sure to turn the power off before performing any maintenance. Before performing this service, it is necessary to shut off the water. Find the saddle valve, turn it clockwise, until it stops.

Ok, first thing we need to do, is remove this access door. Put the screw on the side. Alright, now there is another screw right here, that we need to remove. And we'll put that screw on the side. Alright, right now there is a cord right here, that is attached to the fan motor inside, so we need to unplug that. There we are. Alright, now it will just hinge off from the top. So there are clips on the top, and you can just pull it towards you, and then raise it up in the air. And set it on the side.

Alright, if you have a different model of the fan powered humidifier, an older generation or a newer generation than this particular one, the access to the panel might be slightly different, you may not have to remove a couple of screws or anything, but essentially its the same, you are removing the top cover that has the fan motor inside of it. This particular one, again, happened to have a couple of screws, and this plug to disconnect. Alright, now that we have the cover off, let's take a look. So we have a humidifier filter here, which we are going to replace. We have a little frame here at the top, and we have a drain pan down at the bottom. So, let's move this section here. So we're going to throw this away, and we're going to wash this off. And here we have our drain pan, this just gets washed off. Alright, now we're gonna put it all back together. So, drain pan first. Alright, and a new humidifier filter, and the frame. Section at the top, put that back in here. Again, very important, spray mark at the top. This frame slides in metal tracks on the left and the right. Alright, so, this frame here will trap here and trap there where it slides into, and it clips in back here to stop it from blowing back out, so now we have put it all back together, we have a brand new pad, we have washed this top frame section and the drain pan, and now we're ready to put the cover back on. Alright, I'll put the fan cover back on. Alright, those clips here, they go into sockets on the top of it, there we go, now we need to put the screw back in, alright, now that we have the screw in there, we can plug it back in. Alright, so now the fan is plugged back in, and we can flip this cover back up. And insert that screw. And that's it. Now all we have to do is turn on the furnace, turn on the humidifier, and test it.

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Hi, I'm Jay. And here we have CB100 fan powered humidifier. All of the fan powered humidifiers basically operate the same, and kind of look the same. So, we're going to talk about one of the common problems we hear about, and that's water leaking. So if you have water leaking down here underneath this or water leaking into the duct work or somethisng like that, the first thing you want to look at are these connections inside of here. We want to make sure the water connection going into the solenoid valve and also going out of the solenoid valve are tight and not leaking. So you're gonna want to dry them off with a rag and look at them and make sure there's no longer water dripping out of those areas. If you still have water at that point leaking here, then it is something else going on. So then the next thing to do would be to take this cover off.

If you have water leaking here, or here, usually you can tighten these up. If it's leaking right here sometimes you can just tighten this up a hair and give it a turn, same here, these two connections here on this particular model, they are friction fit and sometimes you can just push the hose in there deeper, and it will stop it from leaking. So that takes care of these two possibilities. Another possibilty is there's too much water running up here. And it's just flooding this humidifier pad, and overflowing the pad itself. So if you have that happening, usually that's an indication that the orifice inside of here, which is a very small piece of nylon with a tiny hole in it, that that scomponent has failed. And you no longer have a tiny hole in it, instead you have a large hole, which is allowing far too much water to come up here and it's just flooding this pad here.

So that can happen, those little nylon orifices are easily replaced. So that's another potential problem there is too much water running across here. Another possiblity is if this pad has become completely covered in calcium because you haven't replaced it once a year like you're supposed to. If that happens, water can potentially leak off of it and run inside of the duct work. So that's another thing that can happen. Last but not least I suppose is this drain here. You could potentially have this drain completely plugged, and instead of water going down the drain it's just building all the way up here to the top of it and overflowing the pan in which case you'll need to find out what's going on with this drain line. You perhaps have a plug in it or perhaps its just crushed somewhere downstream here from this connection.

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Be sure to turn the power off, before performing any maintenance.

Hi, I'm Jay, and here we have a Trion CD100 fan powered humidifier, there are various versions of the fan powered humidifier, and they all kind of look the same and work the same. Ok, so one of the problems that people run into now and then is the water won't shut off. So right now, they have a situation where there is water running down the drain, and they can't figure out why, so that's what we're going to talk about today.

So what we want to do is we're gonna look here and we see that we have water running down the drain right here now, and we are going to turn the power off to the humidifier. So we are going to unplug the humidifier, that's this cord here, we're going to kill the power to the furnace, we are going to make sure all the power is turned off, and we are going to wait a couple of minutes, and if there is still water going down this drain, then the problem is very simple, there is a solenoid valve right here, and it is stuck open.

So, we have water running down the drain right now, and we have the humidifier unplugged, we also have the power turned off to the furnace. So there is no electricity going to the unit right now, and still we have water running down this drain. So, that is a fairly common problem, and what it means is that the solenoid valve that is right up inside of here is stuck open. There is no electricity going to it right now, and it's still running water through it so that valve is bad and needs to be replaced.

Thanks for watching, for additonal help or questions, feel free to contact us.

Be sure to turn the power off, before performing any maintenance.

Hi, I'm Jay, and we have here a Trion CB100 Fan Powered Humidifier, and I'm here to talk about how to figure out why there is no water going down the drain when it's running.

Be sure to turn the power off before performing any maintenance. Before performing this service, it is necessary to shut off the water. Find the saddle valve, turn it clockwise, until it stops.

Alright, next thing we are going to do, is take the cover off. So, this model has a little access door here. We'll set the screw on the side. Now we'll remove this little screw here that holds the fan assembly on to the base. Now, we'll unplug the power cord. And pop the power head off. Alright, first thing we are going to do is determine whether we have water here on the inlet side of this valve. So I've had my assistant turn this water off, so we're going to disconnect this right here. This particular one happens to be a friction style so we can just push up on this little button. And pull the line out. Alright, now we're going to aim this into a bucket and I'm gonna have my assistant turn the water back on. Alright, beautiful. So we do have water to this point, so now we can have the assistant turn the water off.

If you do this test, and when you turn the water on, nothing comes out of this pipe, the problem is the saddle valve. That is not an uncommon problem, most saddle valves do fail over time, they will get plugged up with sediment and the easiest repair for that is to just put a new saddle valve in. They're available from us, and once you put a new one in you should be able to have good water to this point and that should solve your problem.

Alright, we can reconnect this line. Slide that back there. And again, it's a friction fit, so we can just slide that right in. Alright, now we've proven we have water to this point, so we can turn the water back on and we can figure out why the water is not going on past this point. So we'll have the assistant turn the water back on at this point. Right, and we're gonna see what happens next.

Alright, now that we have proven we have water to this point, let's find out if we have water leaving the valve. so, we have everything turned off right now, except for the water, all the electricity is turned off. We're going to take this apart here. So we can get to this fitting. So, let's remove the pad. There we are, and now this water distribution tray let's just pop this off here. There we go. Alright, now we're going to use our little tool here. I'm just using a little wrench to press the button. We're just gonna push that down, there we are. Alright, now you'll notice here there's a tiny little orifice on the end of this thing and that is what regulates the volume of water that leaves the valve and goes up this tube and into the tray. So it's important that that little fitting be in there, ok this is a replacable item. These things do wear out over time, sometimes they plug, sometimes they get a giant hole in them but they are easily replaced. That'll just slide right out of there to put a new one in. So for timing, we are going to set this on the side, and now we're going to check to see if we have water leaving the valve. So the water is turned on right here, and what we are going to do is get a rag, and we're going to cover this top, because if this valve is working there is gonna be a lot of water flying out of there. And now what we're going to do is have my assistant turn the unit on, and turn on the humidifer and see if we get water into our rag. Nothing's happening. So, we have no water here, going into the rag, so this valve for some reason is not opening. So now we're going to determine why this valve is not opening.

Ok, so now we have water to this point here, the water is turned on, we have water pressure here, we have nothing leaving this valve. so, let's make sure we have electrity leaving to this valve. So now what I'm going to do is have my assistant turn the humidistat up down up down up down and then we're going to listen for the noise, you should hear the solenoid valve make a clicking noise and also on this model, this one happens to have a relay on it , you should be able to hear that relay clicking back and forth, so let's try that. Alright, so that clicking noise means we are getting power to two things, this little relay here and the solenoid valve coil here, so with that happening we should've had water flying out of the top of this thing, and nothing happened, which means this valve is faulty and is stuck in the closed position internally, and it needs to be replaced. so you can get one of these from us and put a new one in, and put the unit back together, and that will be the end of it. Um there are certain models of this particular humidifier that right here, instead of having this little relay, they'll have a circuitboard that's fixed in a spot right here. And that circuitboard, what it does is it will turn the water which is this, it will turn this valve on and off at various times in order to save water. So it will open up the valve, see that the pad is wet, close the valve. And when it sees that the pad is dry, it will send power to the valve, open it up, once it sees it's wet, it will close the valve again. So it will kind of sample this valve back and forth so you may potentially hear a clicking noise each time it does that. But nonetheless, if you have that style, when this valve is clicking on and off, you should see water flying out of this port. And again, we don't have that here so obviously we have a bad valve.

Another way to test the solenoid valve is to see if there's electricity in it with a meter. So right here there are two wires that feed it. And what we can do is get a volt meter on these wires. So right now we have the humidifier turned off, we're going to get the meter on here and we're going to turn the power back on and test it real quick. So, here we go. Alright so we have carefully clamped these on. Here's the one yellow one feeding this solenoid valve. Ok, we have it here and the other wire goes over here but that's crimped together with this red wire so we can just grab it right here. Basically we have the two yellow wires that are feeding this on the meter now. And we want to be careful they are not touching each other or they aren't touching the duct work or anything metallic to short them out. So we have this set up, we're going to turn on our meter here, and I'm going to have my assistant turn the humidistat on and turn the furnace back on so we can just check it. Ah, alright. So right here we have a little over 26 volts. You want to be reading between 19 and 29 volts, somewhere in that range. And we are in that range. We have a little over 26 volts AC power. That is presently feeding this. And it's energizing this, and it's also energizing this and again we still don't have any water here even though we have water pressure at this point. Now we have confirmed this valve is faulty.

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