How to Straighten Condenser Coil Fins

We are going to look at how to straighten the fins on a cooler condenser. This is a true cooler, but the techniques I'm going to show you will apply to any refrigerator, cooler, or freezer. This is important is because these fins get bent over from use and abuse. When those fins get bent over it prevents air from moving through the condenser and cooling the refrigerant. When the refrigerant is not cooled as well, the appliance will use more energy and will not cool the products as completely.

So lets talk about the tools we will need. First of all it will be helpful to use a small flat head screwdriver; we'll use this to straighten out the worst bends. To fine tune the combs, we'll use a condenser comb. Condenser combs come in a variety of shapes and they typically come with a variety of comb sizes, so make sure you use the right comb size for your condenser. First start with the screwdriver to pick out the worst areas and bend those out. These completely flattened areas will not allow the comb to pass through so we want to get those pulled apart first. Then we'll get the comb and starting at the top, slowly move down through the fins. Be careful as these fins are also very sharp as well as being fragile. You might find you'll need to go back to the screwdriver to straighten the fins out a little bit more. Now that we've straighten those fins, the condenser will operate more efficiently and support the operation of the entire cooler better.

This has been a short demonstration of how to straighten condenser coil fins. Thanks for watching.