Advanced Refrigerant Recovery: Best Practices for Diverse Systems and Environments

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3:09In a world where nobody checked their flow first, one man still does. Your host Brian O'Rourer. Hello, Govna. This is the HVCR school podcast. I'm Brian. This is the podcast that often, sometimes, maybe not very often, helps you remember some things you might have forgotten along the way as well as helps you remember some things you forgot to know in the first place. And in this episode, this is a live stream that is now an episode. I'm talking with Jim Bergman for MeasureQuick. Zane Technical Trainer NavAC and Jesse Stewart NavAC's National Training Manager and we are talking about things that actually make recovery faster and better, removing restrictions, using core tools, larger hoses, all this stuff we typically talk about. But we also get into some other stuff. There's actually a little bit of debate in this podcast. I'm not going to tell you who debates with whom, but you have to listen to the end because we're going to talk about cold weather recovery. And then it kind of veers off into cold weather vacuum too.

4:11But anyway, it's a good conversation. You're going to like it. Here we go. We're talking about advanced refrigeration recovery, best practices for diverse systems and environments with Zane, Jesse and Jim. All right. We are live on a live episode of the HVAC School Podcast. I'm here with some of the best and brightest from the HVACR industry. Jim, Zane, otherwise known as Bubby and Jesse, otherwise known as Pump Daddy. I'm going to let you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves for anybody who doesn't know you. I'm sure pretty much everyone knows Jim. So we'll start with you, Jim. Give us a quick introduction. All right. Yeah. Jim Bergman, president of Measure Quick. I've been doing this since I was a young lad with my father riding around on the truck. And actually we were recovering with refrigerant before it was cool. And actually before it was even required. Because my dad did some typical chill work. And these machines had hundreds and hundreds of pounds of refrigerant. So we were actually recovering before recovery machines. So this should be interesting.

5:11Because I've seen it all and I've done it even with dry ice. Do you remember the bags that they used to have for refrigerant stuff? Oh, yeah. Yeah. They still talked about that when I was in school. Yep. And it's tough. All right. Zane. All right. Bubby, Bubbles. I think that's what we want to start with. Okay. Nick Nags. No, I'm a tech trainer at NABAC. And my whole entire adult life has been commercial and industrial. Heating and cool and some refrigeration. Stuff like that. I come over here a little over a year ago now, maybe a year and a half. We just go around teaching on best practices. How do you certain tools and certain conditions, etc. Did stuff. And then over to you, pump daddy. Other than the absolutely ridiculous nickname that Brian is saying. My name is Jesse Stewart. I'm the national training manager here at NABAC. So what it is is I manage Zane and pretty much anyone else that is doing training, receiving training, basically anything, training, everything from product to proper process out in the field.

6:15That all comes through me and we coordinate through remote sessions all over the US, Canada and we got parts in Southern or Latin America. And I am not known as pump daddy. That's not what I heard. That was being shouted all across the symposium at you. So I'm pretty sure that is what you're known as. And you're pretty sure you're known as what people call you. They call me Jesse is what they call me Brian. Okay. Yes. He called me for quite some time. He has never called me that and I pray that he never does. He does behind closed doors. He does. I pump daddy in his phone. Yeah. All right. We're going to get serious here. We've got limited time here. So there's only so much buffoonery that we can tolerate. So let's start with the basics. I mean, I've got, this is just a quick overview. I did this little nine panel diagram years ago. So I'll start with you, Jesse. You talk about the basics of recovery. What are some of the tricks of the trade or the ways to make sure that you're going to get the refrigerant out quickly and not have a bunch of heartache? Well, so the first thing I'll go ahead and address just right off the rip. One recovery is not an option.

7:16We'll go ahead and put that out there right out the gate. The sign option has a new sign option to do it. You just let the rip just put the cord to the end to get in the ground. Use the bucket of water and just go listen long gone or the day of the fog machine and a five gallon bucket. We don't do that anymore. But that being said, and let's just go to and then you are still doing it that way. And then you do it until you just come back and you're like, oh, man, I'm low. I'm low. It all turns out. I find it odd that I'm supposed to teach proper practices and yet Brian knows a couple of tricks on how to make it disappear. I'm not saying I ever did it that way. I just saw a cartoon about it one time. I think it was on looming things or something. That being said, the basics are so what we're doing is any time that you're performing a repair or even if you're going to decommission a system that you can't pump it down. Simply taking the refrigerant from the existing system, removing it from that system, the ever recovery machine and placing it in an approved recovery cylinder. Now that's the short sweet version. You want me to go past that?

8:18We can. I think let's just hit on because we're going to talk about push pool and some of the things that are a little bit more advanced. But let's talk about the basics of how to make sure you get it out as quickly and painlessly as possible. Well, the biggest thing too, and anyone who's ever heard my evacuations feel is going to understand that it's primarily one removing as many restrictions as you possibly can. That pointing towards that, and if I'm getting ahead, Brian, please stop me. Pointing towards that, the biggest thing that a lot of technicians really overlooking that particular aspect are the cores, their core depressors, and the host sizes that they're using. So, in order to do this efficiently, we've come up with all kinds of tricks of the trade on how to keep the tank from getting too hot to where pressure builds up. We can't force that refrigerator into it. But another problem that people aren't seeing is when we talk about recovering refrigerant, and this is where I'll make it a little interactive if I can, so we get feedback from everyone else. When we recover refrigerant, are we recovering with our vapor first? I'll start there because I heard, I remember hearing that you cannot recover liquid.

9:22It can't pump liquid. I always heard that early on when I first started recovering, so I'm just going to put that out there. I don't think you can pump liquid, Jesse. I mean, at least that's what I was told years ago. So, again, we got nothing. I think that we're charging systems with recovery machines. It really comes down to, first of all, you got to assess how many pounds of refrigerant you're recovering. If you're recovering a couple of pounds of refrigerant, you can definitely do a vapor recovery just as fast as you can do liquid because you're going to screw around setting up the system to go from one recovery method to the other, and you're going to lose enough in your hoses and stuff. It just doesn't make sense to do anything but a vapor recovery. If you're talking to anything probably over 10 pounds of refrigerant, it makes a substantial difference to go to a push pull method, push the liquid out first, then recover the vapor behind it. I would always, if I could, start with an empty recovery tank and evacuate the tank down to 500 microns or less. First of all, make sure the tank's clean and dry. Then, secondly, to use that vacuum to assist pulling all the refrigerant out of the system

10:25I can. The third thing you've got to remember is, are you recovering the system? Are you recovering it to dispose of it or are you recovering it to service it because doing a push pull recovery, you can carry out a lot of oil too if you're not careful. You might end up if you're not putting the refrigerant back in the system or you're putting the refrigerant back in, you could have some oil issues if you don't pay close attention to that. It also matters where you're taking it out at, too. Obviously, if you're taking it out right from the compressor or at a low point right near the compressor, then that's going to be different. I would take it out of the liquid line most of the time I was doing push pull, push it out of the condenser out of the liquid line into the tank. When I'm referring to the initial statement, then we jumped into push pull and everything else. That's all we've got, Jim here for said, Jim, you beat me to my own stuff, but I appreciate you as always. The biggest thing that I get at, and he hit it right on the head. If you're doing your first recovery ever, ideally, you prefer to have an empty tank, you want to have pulled into a vacuum because whenever you attach your hose, first of all, you would attach everything.

11:26If you're doing it the right way, if you're using quartals, et cetera, you could actually open everything up to the system all the way up to the tank, but you don't open the tank. The reason for that is because there is atmospheric pressure around us all times. That pressure is air, moisture, and a few other guys that you find in the air. That's inside those hoses while you were just carrying them around in your van. If you open that tank while the refrigerant is pushing at the same time, you compromise that refrigerant. You introduce the non-condensable. Additionally, so once you do that, you'd purge, but when I talk about the cores, the cord of pressors leaving those in, don't worry about the recovery machine running or pumping liquid or anything, yet along these lines. When you have any type of a high pressure liquid refrigerant that's going to pass through a restriction, it's going to create a pressure drop. What's the ultimate enemy of the recovery process? Well, some people would say restrictions, and that's true, but the big enemy is actually heat. If you create a pressure drop, then you're going to have a temperature drop as well.

12:28We own a thermodynamic properties, hot goes to what? Cold. You pick up additional heat from that. There's also a small amount that you could pick up during the friction of the recovery process like the refrigerant actually passing through the hose, but that's very minute. But what I'm getting at with this is if you have liquid refrigerant passing through a restriction like that, it literally acts like a fixed metering device. Go ahead and say you've got a straighter cord left in and cord pressors in. That's basically what you're doing. I've seen videos of techs that are recovering and when you're doing this, you actually see their hose freezing up from the service port all the way up towards the manifold. That should tell you that you're doing something wrong. The other thing people saw the time is they pushed liquid into the liquid side of the recovery tank into the dip tube. That dip tube is a substantial restriction also. Absolutely. You want to always push into the vapor side of the tank so you're not fighting the dip tube in the tank. That'll definitely cause some problems. I think another thing going back on leaving straighters in that a lot of people don't

13:28think about is obviously that's going to affect mass flow. I mean, you're pushing liquid through a small inner diameter trader cord. But if you think about that too, so when that pressure drop happens, you get the flashing of a refrigerator. So if you just go back to basics and simplicity of it, every time, let's just say for easy math, an ounce goes through there. Some of that's flashing off. Now one of the problems that's going to slow that down too is when it flashes off, one, it's going to cool the refrigerator, the actual refrigerator in itself. But that flash gas still has to leave. Back on that is if you think about that flash gas, when it is flashing, okay, so you're still going to have liquid coming out, but you're also going to have vapor. And we know that vapor takes a substantial amount of space compared to liquid. So in my opinion, I think that's one of the things that also slow it down when leaving a shrader is that flash gas expanding, turning into a vapor.

14:29And just for simple math, you say one, three, eight, six foot hose of liquid refrigerator, it might take moving the equivalent of 10 if it's in the vapor for that. And something I want to add addition to to follow up on like what Jim mentioned earlier, we're talking about hooking it to the vapor port. This isn't really complicated if you think about it because some technicians are going to argue about, well, if it gets in there, there's no dip to the bottom, flip the tank upside down and put it on the scale. Once you've started the recovery process, you'll see eventually the scale does start to slow down. And when you see that, this is the beautiful part about all this. When you see that, you know that you've pretty much finished most, if not all of liquid recovery, you can literally just take it and flip the tank over and put it back on the scale, no disconnecting, no reconnecting, anything. No risk of accidentally introducing any kind of contaminants because you didn't properly purge your hose again. This isn't complicated. In fact, it's actually a really easy way to do it. Now, don't understand why more texts don't do it.

15:31Well, yeah, I do. It's because we were taught in the very beginning the dip to was there for a reason. Well, I think the difference is, I want to summarize a couple things that you've all said here. One is, if you create a pressure drop, you create a temperature decrease as well. And when you do that, you're now going to pick up heat. How does it go? You're going to pick up heat. The next is we get confused sometimes about things like the dip tube because it says liquid on it, right? Well, I want to put liquid in the tank. That liquid is when you're getting stuff out of the tank. That's what it's there for. If you want to put it into the bottom of the tank, like Ty said, put it into the vapor side and flip the tank upside down. That way you're not dealing with that potential pressure drop of that dip tube. But then the other thing that Zane said, which I think is another good point, is that the more restrictions you have, the more you're increasing the compression ratio of that recovery machine. And so that, just like you do on a regular compressor, the greater your compression ratio, the less mass flow you're going to have, and so you're reducing that mass flow. But I do want to ask the question to you guys, the recovery machine experts, they're always because I kind of teed it up and then everybody danced around it.

16:33Do these things pump liquid or don't they? Because this has been a conversation with other recovery machine manufacturers for years. Like, yes, they did pump liquid. No, they don't. Are they actually pumping liquid when you're putting liquid into it or aren't they pumping liquid? Take my knife back that off. Now, my, this is me. Because like you said, that's what we've always heard, they're vapor pumps, right? They're vapor pumps. And some manufacturers specifically put in their literature. Yes, this is a vapor pump. Now, with that being said, I've used our NRDD for probably eight years. And if you look at, we're told to recover from the liquid side. Now, here's the thing. Depending on what recovery machine you have, we also have a four cylinder. And in that instance, when you're doing a push pull or you're moving a lot of liquid, you can actually orient the valves where you don't waste energy, run it through your compressors, back through your condenser. You just run it into the inlet and it goes right out the out. When it comes to actually pulling in liquid and it actually work with liquids, I think

17:36this is my, I don't know if you said that back when I'd be like, what? But I think that they can't. Now you have to be mindful. If your recovery machine starts jumping around, you should probably start throwing it. And in order literature, it tells you if you start getting liquid hammer, you have to throttle your inlet. But then I also talked about charging. I had a carrier HXC screw chiller and I needed to put 80 pounds of gas in it. The quickest way for me to do that is to orient my recovery machine to where it's actually pulling from the tank and discharge it into the machine. So at that point, I'm pulling straight liquid off the bottom of my recovery cylinder and pump it into my machine and then out into the chiller. So my personal take on it, you can pump liquid through it. Read your manufacturer literature, but then also be mindful of the situation. Like I said, if you start running liquid through it and it starts running around like road

18:37runner, yeah, might want to throttle it. That technical terminology, if it starts running around like road runner, you might want to run. It is a waste of getting it by a guy. Okay, it is. All right. I believe it. I believe it. And it's not suggesting. That then zanes more or less hitting the nail on the head to a degree when we're talking about this, the official stamps of the yes throttle liquid in. But if you're doing the recovery process the way that we really want you to, think about what we just mentioned earlier about the pressure drops, right? So one, we want and recommend that when you're recovering any refrigerant as a cheap investment for your machine, use a filter dryer in line. That filter dryer creates pressure drop. And you're going from a 3-8 diameter down to the quarter inch connection to the actual recovery machine. There's you another pressure drop. So yes, you are getting liquid in there, but the stamps is the throttle it in. And there is the flashing effect that's happening there. So while you say no, you can't technically leak public with no, you technically can't, but at the same time, we're technicians. We know that when we talk about this recovery, when we talk about the first portion of it,

19:40we're referring to liquid recovery process. That's more or less just my stance on it though. And I think like what a lot of people might think because it's immediately what I think is like, well, if you're going to throttle it, then just leave your cores in and then don't throttle it. Let the cores do the throttling. It's extra work for no reason. But if you're going to throttle it, you want it to be as closely coupled to the compressor as possible so that way you're not picking up additional heat in between. That does make good sense. Good, Jim. Yeah, recovery machines can't pump liquid. They can't, they can pump saturated vapor. And that's just so important. What you mean is it's not a full line of liquid. That's right. You put a full column liquid in a recovery machine. It's going to stall or it's going to break. They can't do it. That's why they have a adjustable valve in there, a adjustable valve to meter the refrigerant in. And we get it saturated refrigerant where it does have droplets of liquid in it. And it is high density refrigerant, but it is not straight liquid. The only way you can remove straight liquid out of a machine is push pull method and push the liquid out into the tank directly and pull the vapor off the top of the tank.

20:40But otherwise there's not a machine out there that can handle that because hydrostatic force is a liquid. I mean, it would just come up so fast it would hit the hose and it would, it's just going to break things. So, yeah. And that's what I was waiting for. It's like, because we always talk in terms of is it vapor is it liquid, but there's a big range in between. And as you said, you cannot pump straight liquid, but you can pump gay liquid. Just something to remember there. Yeah, I'm sorry. What was that? I didn't quite get it. You didn't catch it? Well, I'm not going to repeat it then. I'm not going to repeat it. I was going to quote the famous air colder with this entire stance and I was going to quote Eric Kaiser with his favorite words. Well, it depends. And I had to throw it in there because I know he's watching. I know he is. Yeah. I would get it pretty good there. Like you said, when you do the throttle, like I said, you're letting it actually expand and vaporize through your machine as opposed to, yeah, you're not going to hook like a water hose of liquid and run it through one. That won't happen. That's something to actually have a little bit of mix.

21:41Well, if we're going to have a restriction in the system, we want to control where this restrictions at. And ideally, we have the restriction that we're controlling is one of the inlet to the recovery machine and not other restrictions that are throughout the system. You got to remember, I mean, well, some of these things do cause a pressure drop. They're a pretty minimal pressure drop. So if you were to put a one way you can do that pretty easily, it's just to put a gauge on the inlet to your recovery machine. Those recovery machines already have a gauge on it, put one on the outlet of your system and look at the pressure differential between the outlet of the system and the inlet to the recovery machine. If you have a substantial pressure drop across that, then you know you've got a substantial amount of restriction. But as you change from liquid to a vapor too, it's also going to change because your full characteristics to the hose of vapor, if you have a hose full of liquid, it may have the same pressure inlet and outlet are pretty close. When you get the vapor, the hose becomes a significant restriction due to the conductance speed of the hose. So that's another big thing we haven't talked about, or I think we'll maybe touch on

22:42our touch, but hose size matters as much in-overly as it does in evacuation. So we're saying we don't want to use quarter inch hoses anymore on recovery. One of you do either half or larger hoses if we're doing larger machines. I mean, some of the stuff that I can be able to talk to Andrew Greaves and he's doing 2,000 ton centrifugal chillers, they probably use three quarters or maybe even a one inch hose on some of that stuff to pull the gas out. When you're talking about vapor and recovery of vapor, that conductance speed becomes very significant with recovery along with, and then you're also fighting some other things that are going to go over, I'm sure I'm going to later. I want to just touch on one last thing before we skip this part because I do think it's something that nobody really addresses and everyone here can speak their mind on if they want, but I think this is pretty cut and dry. Then we do talk about the recovery cylinders themselves, like we mentioned, skipping the dip too, hooking up to the vapor point. Make sure that you're actually checking the valves on top. Don't just assume off of color because they have been both ways.

23:42I've seen them both ways. Make sure you read it. Don't just assume you can put the colors in. The colors don't follow the wording. No, not at all. Yeah, those valves too, we were doing when we were working with acutools early on doing a lot of recovery hose testing. I was testing hoses against each other. I was using recovery tanks to actually do the testing. I found out very quickly about system conductance, where the conductance of the tank itself became an limiting factor and it was the valves in the tank. The recovery tank valves are not like a packed angle valve. They're not the best valve in the world for high flow. They do become a significant restriction too. You want to make sure if you're going to open those up, you're fully open them up to get as much flow as you can and like since they off that dip too. Just as you said, watch the wording on the tank versus the handle color because they don't always follow each other. And don't get your recovery cylinders off team, man. No, you don't want came art recovery cylinders. That's a bad sign. I just want to take a second to talk about Santa Fe dehumidifiers.

24:45We're professionals, HEC professionals. And we know that we have to do the V part too, the ventilation part. And it's a challenge, especially in humid climates and really most of us are in humid climates. So we understand the importance of providing our clients with the best indoor air quality solutions and that's why we recommend Santa Fe dehumidifiers. Not only do we recommend them, but we install them here at KALOS. These exceptional products not only help maintain optimal humidity levels, but also protect the property and enhance the overall comfort of a home. Common household dust mites and mold thrive in humid environments, leading to various allergic reactions and even can trigger asthma attacks. The EPA, American Lung Association and the American Medical Association all recommend installing a dehumidifier in basements and crawl spaces to maintain humidity levels at around 50%. By doing so, you'll protect your customers' properties from structural damage like wood rot and pest infestations. In addition to spot dehumidification, Santa Fe also offers whole house of ventilating dehumidifiers. These systems not only filter and dehumidify outdoor air, but also help maintain a healthy

25:46and safe living environment by minimizing pollutants. When you choose Santa Fe, you're not just getting great products, but you're also gaining access to their expert training, commitment to the community, and unparalleled expertise. Offering Santa Fe dehumidifiers is a fantastic way to truly benefit your clients. So make the smart choice for your customers and team up with Santa Fe for all your dehumidification and ventilation needs. Visit Santa-fei-products.com today and experience the difference. So let's say that you have a recovery and we're talking normal conditions right now, normal split AC, residential, light commercial, rooftop unit, that kind of thing. Nothing crazy. Your conditions are typical summer conditions across the US. You start to find that your recovery is stalling. What are some things that you should do or pay attention to when you have a recovery that doesn't seem like it's getting there? Again, we're not assuming we're requiring that you're using a scale.

26:47You're not going to fill a tank more than 80%. You have to make sure you know how to do that, which we have a calculator on HVC school for that if you don't have another good way to do that. But what are some things you pay attention to there? You either got to fight the inlet or you got to fight the outlet and you got to figure out first of all which you're fighting. If you're running high pressure on the outlet, or that you've got a, and your tank is hot, obviously the first thing you want to do is cool down that tank. If you're running a low pressure on the inlet and you may have to add heat to that system or jostle look compressor or do something to warm it up a lot of times, because of cold place in the house is typically when you're doing a recovery is in the house. Outside it's 90 in the house. It might be 70 degrees all the refrigerant migrated to the evaporator. So the first thing I'll do if I have a gas furnace is turn on the gas heat to drive the refrigerant out of the evaporator coil and into the outdoor unit. And so just to follow up with what he said to an end the event that you're not dealing with a gas furnace typically in most circumstances, just simply turning the actual fan on is going to cause some heat load to actually hit the evaporator, help the refrigerant move.

27:50And you'll find this. I'm sure we'll talk about low ambient conditions here in a bit, but it's a really simple answer to at heat where you can where it makes sense. The other part of it is like you said on the outlet if you tank is too hot, we've come up with all kinds of cool tricks of the trade. Keep that tank from getting hot. Every technician has used the bucket of ice trick, water hose over top of the tank trick. I mean, there's all kinds of tricks that we've used. Your company loves you enough. They'll get you one of those fancy molecular sub-cooler doohickeys if they don't. You make your own. Well, I'll tell you, one of my techs tried to add that to our tool fund because we have like an approved tool list of things you can buy with the tool money that they receive. And I blocked it. I'm like, hey, if you're... I think it's the government with manifolds. Yeah, well, if you'd buy. Right. If you need to pay for that doohickey and you can't just spiral some copper and put it in a bucket and put some straiters on it. I mean, come on. This is a very simple thing to do. So it is a good idea in some cases if you've got. And we're running a system sometimes that do have a good amount of refrigerant in them.

28:52And so it might make sense in some cases. But generally speaking, if you're not in the middle of the summer in Death Valley or Arizona or New Mexico, Texas, where sometimes you can get 115 degrees, whatever, you're probably not going to need that. Sometimes just a water hose running on the tank is going to be enough to do it. And like we simply put, like we were saying, going from get off that dip tube, you're creating a tremendous amount of friction and heat right there. Get off it, go to your vapor side, flip your tank. And another thing is, is use as big a hose as possible. A lot of times we'll see people get those molecular transformers and they work great. Trust me, I've worked in a field with them and they do help. But some of the stuff is self-inflicted. A lot of the guys, like I said, I bring it up. They want that, but then they're pulling through manifold gauges. And I'm like, well, before we go by this piece of equipment, why are we not pulling cores? Why are we not using large hoses? There's other things you can do. Why are we not hooking to the vapor of the tank, flipping it? There's other things we can do before we go by one of those.

29:55Now with it being said to it, could just be a teacher point. But they say, well, I don't know. Well, you need to be vulnerable enough too to also come to somebody say, hey, I saw like you said, I denied that tool purchase. Is there anything that I can do where you see in my current setup that could speed this up without buying that? Just like we talked about earlier, and he said it in the very beginning, if they're pulling through a manifold, again, we're adding additional heat. Because if you're pulling through a manifold, I guarantee, guarantee that you still have your depressors in and that you haven't pulled the cores. Because I don't know any tech that's going to do that every single time. Add additional heat might not seem like much to you, but it will slow your process down. Yeah. Anything that removes something is better than adding something. Because when you're adding something, now you're left with a refrigerant in it that you get a deal with, and you're left with something that can go wrong. It's the same thing in vacuum. The more that you can pull out, the better. Well, the other thing too, I found is the inlet hose definitely needs to be half three

31:00quarter, but the outlet hose, because it's liquid exiting the recovery machine, can be smaller, not be as detrimental. That way, also, it's a little easier for the machine to pump itself out or in an outlet with trapped liquid in the hose. The key thing is pulling out the cores, getting rid of the restrictions, going with a larger evacuation hose right into the machine, letting the machine do the throttling, get your throttle point, get your pressure drop at the machine instead of somewhere else in the system, use a dryer to protect the recovery machine, especially if the refrigerant's contaminated. The bigger question becomes to is, what are we doing with refrigerant? Are we going to reuse it? Or are we going to put virgin in? Because I tell you, with all the testing we do here at Measierquick, I have a test systems in my lab, and I have a 410A system, and they say 410A doesn't fractionate, but I will tell you, after hundreds of people coming through and myself doing testing every day, and people doing training and stuff here, my 410A system, and once a year I got to pull the refrigerant out of it, recover it, put virgin refrigerant in, because it fractionated enough that we can actually see a degraded operation.

32:04I was thinking at first it was the equipment, but it ended up being the refrigerant. So Nancy, the other thing you got to ask yourself, if you don't have a pure refrigerant, you know, if you're dealing with R454B, R410A, and not an R32 or R22, or a single component refrigerant, is what are you going to do with that gas? So I think that's something you haven't covered yet, but I think if you're going to reuse that gas, you better know that it's good refrigerant, and then I'm a big believer in cleaning that refrigerant as we're dumping it into the tank. Other thing you can do is put a moisture, right after that cyclist, put a moisture indicator in there to see if that refrigerant's contaminated going into that tank. You may not be enough time for a moisture indicator to respond on a small machine, but on anything we're talking, and hundreds of pounds of refrigerant, you can definitely use a moisture indicator to see if the refrigerant's wet. Do you remember the outlet side? Yeah, on the outlet side of the recovery machine, just to your dumping in your tank, just to know if it's dry or wet. And the other thing you're talking about, my dad and I, back in, oh gosh, you got to be 80, 84, 85. We were out recovering, I'll be around a thousand pounds or 20 out of a big built-up

33:10system. And we were using 125 pound tanks, and we were using dry ice, and we would just literally put blocks of dry ice underneath the tanks and around the tanks. My dad just had a like a 50 gallon bucket, we just set the tank in, and that tank would scream whistle and pull in that refrigerant in just because refrigerant travels from high to low. You had to be sure you didn't overfill the tank, so that was probably the biggest dangers you could overfill a tank easily. But at the end of the day, we got the majority of the refrigerant out without using the rig, without having, before we hooked up the recovery machine. And I've done the same thing just by evacuating on a residential system, evacuating the tank. Hook, if the compressor is running, pull out the liquid line for out and hook the tank right up to the liquid line, turn the machine on, pull the condenser fan, and just let the refrigerant pump right into the tank with a system compressor, liquid just dump it in and get as much liquid as you can into the tank. The metering device is a much bigger pressure drop than the liquid line with the liquid service valve pulled with the cord pulled out. So it's not going to travel through the metering device very easily. It's going to

34:13force all of it right out the liquid line right into the tank. And then you can just spend a couple of minutes doing vapor recovery because if you can do something to get that liquid out first, that's money. I mean, that's where you're going to really save the time. Because once you start turning that liquid to vapor is when you start fighting heat, you start fighting everything else. The whole secret here is get all as quickly as you can get the liquid out of the machine, so you don't have to fight the vapor recovery removal because that's a diminishing return. And it's a constant fight because as that liquid gets cooler, there's a pressure in the machine drops faster and faster. The saturation temperature, the refrigerant gets lower and lower. So you're continually fighting this lowering vapor pressure and lowering refrigerant temperature. That's why your compressor frost, that's why when we pull a compressor out and seal it up, we open it back up the next day. It's got what feels like four pounds of refrigerant in it because the refrigerant drops in saturation temperature so far. The recovery machine shut off yet we didn't have all the gas removed. Yeah, a lot of good points there. Dry ice thing is actually, I don't know why I hadn't

35:15thought of that before, but that makes a lot of sense, especially for. Well, I am slow. That's true. And sometimes I recover slow too. But Matt put it, I think, really well. He said it's a big difference pulling 20 pounds or less versus 100 to 200. And that's absolutely true. Also, if you're going to be reusing or if you're going to be getting rid of it, also makes a big difference what your practice is going to be. I think that's a really, really good point. So some of the things we're talking about here are going to be really helpful. Like, for example, using that cyclast and moisture indicator plan to put it back in that really matters, making sure that you use, I showed this picture that I had here is a rig that I did early on when right after Jim and I first met I was playing around with different rigs. And so I used a big half inch flare dryer on it, just playing around. And of course, the downside to this is my hoses are a little longer than they need to be and they're not in that back. So sorry guys, but it worked really well. I can't box. But it's a good setup for getting a lot of refrigerant for a small residential system that only has eight pounds and 12 pounds and it's probably a little bit overkill. Yeah, that's where you look at the

36:16hood because there's no refrigerant left. On that tree that I built there. I did want to ask your thoughts on core max. So we talk about removing cores, but core max is kind of specifically designed for flow. And sometimes you guys get this, get a little worked up because removing core max can be exceptionally difficult. You need a special tool. So what do you suggest there? Just using a core depressor. How do you think about that? So in my experience in the field, like a lot of carriers, you know, have core max. And not everybody's going to have that tool. So what I have done, and this is just me as a tech and what I've done in the field, I would use a actual angle valve or something like an actual depressor. And then I would hook my core tool on the back of it. So for instance, you have like a 45 or 90 that hooks into your core tool that hooks to the actual core max. That goes back to kind of like Jim was saying at that point too, I can still open and close. I have an isolation valve right there at that core max. That's

37:19supposed to try to outfit everybody on your truck with a core max tool. That's what I've done in the past. And it seemed to get me where I need to go. But obviously it's like we better than a tool, but that's what I used to do in a field when I would run into. We pioneered that with acutules. That's true. That's true. That's true. I'll talk about that. I have no way power plant. Well, as far as though including him in evacuation kits for evacuation, we were doing that seven years ago. Core max is usually people don't understand. When you have a port, the port conduction speed is due to two things is due to a diameter and it's due to length. And the length is directly proportional to the conductive speed. So if you double the length, you double the conductive speed. So when you look at a typical ordering port on a system, a quarter inch port fully open has a conductive speed of about 14 CFM by itself. And that's because the quarter

38:19inch port is only about half out of a niche long. Now, if you're talking liquid, now that's a whole different game that's going to change the flow characteristics versus liquid versus vapor. But when you're talking conduction speed with vapor, it makes very little difference on that opening that port up or removing that port on a core max. So you're better off just using the core depressor and open it up and put the cord tool on the end and it's pulling through that. So that's the only way to really do it economically. Otherwise, you're spending seven to $900 for a tool to do it. What Ty says here is and then once you get the refrigerator out, get rid of the core max, which I know that. That was literally what I was going to say. Bubby is the one or Zain is the one who had done that in the past anytime that we worked on the system that had a core max and we recovered the refrigerator and we got rid of it. Yeah, and again, there's a preference side to that. I mean, core max is designed. That's why they made it is that when you depress that stem on a core max, it does open up a lot more than it does on a trader. So you can still get a lot through a core max.

39:21Yeah, but it's also considered a factory process stuff in some cases. When it comes to eating and charging machines, that kind of stuff, I usually leave them in. I just use the core to presser and depress the thing and get it open and leave them in unless there's a good reason to pull them there. They don't tend to leak any more than anything else. It's just when they do leak, it's frustrating because you don't have inexpensive way of swapping them out. So the only reason to change them out might be an economic reason going forward. But the other thing I was going to say is when it comes to reusing refrigerant and unless I put the refrigerant in, I'm putting virgin refrigerant back in the system. And the reason is I've worked at a lot of, like you go down to where Brian's at, where you go to property management companies, and a lot of the young guys are landscapers one day and they get their section 6-8 card and the next day, their HVAC technicians. And we hear things like, let's drop in replacement and younger technicians that don't know any better drop in another refrigerant on top of another. We end up with mixed refrigerants. And again, that really impacts performance. So where jobs were literally thousand systems every

40:26single one was austrointuitive refrigerant because they dumped an alternative refrigerant on top of R-22. That happens quite a bit. And interestingly enough, it was until we had tools like measure quick and we were measuring actual performance of systems. Those things were really hard to see. But now we can actually see we're losing 20 to 30% of the system's performance with mixed refrigerant. So a little bit of savings your customer is going to have from refrigerants is going to be long term a big impact on their system performance. So if I can, I want to add on that too, especially like Jim mentioned when you're talking like, we'll say customers that have an entire facility or even, I mean, thank hospitals and stuff. Their entire campus can be massive. And I've encountered where he mentioned before maintenance men. Once there's been, let's say they've recovered a contaminated refrigerant. They don't know what's contaminated or not. But they say, oh, this is 22 or this is 14a because they rode on it with a sharpie. Yeah, well, it might be full of acid. It might be oil

41:28load could have non-condensables. And they don't know. And most of the time until their equipment makes them call someone else, they don't care. And because of that, they will just dump it in there. And even some texts, I've seen, well, let's say, well, what if you come across a tank that has refrigerant in the tank already? You know, you still have space to put in there. I don't know what's in there. What do I do? You'll simply put, you put a standing pressure check on it. You actually attach a probe manifold if you absolutely want to. You get the reading of the actual tank itself compared that to your PT chart to try to determine what's inside that tank. And if that doesn't work, most distributors will either have a tool or something that you can rent or just type the tank to them, they'll hook it up. They'll tell you what's inside that tank. We've had to do that a handful of times with my previous contractor. Yeah. I mean, obviously there's ways you can test it. It's not real practical out in the field. You can do the standing pressure test all that. But I want to talk quickly about the tanks themselves. Because what we're finding is that a tank that's been through many cycles back to a reclaimed facility or recycling facility, I guess where it is,

42:32the tanks themselves can be dirty. I initially thought that tanks were cleaned perfectly when they went and before they came back to us. And we're finding that that's not always the case. I'm still not sure how bad the problem is. But obviously, if you have a brand new tank that's never had anything in it or you've controlled that tank its entire life, you can have pretty good control over what's in it. But as soon as it's been multiple times, you can't really. And that's also another reason why, if you have any sort of mission critical situation, you really want to be putting version charge back into a system. Obviously, there are cases where you have a lot of refrigerant that's very costly, that it may make sense that even just take multiple passes to a line dryer or actually charge it in through a line dryer. There's other techniques you can use rather than potentially wasting that refrigerant if you just took it out. But in general, kind of keeping track of your tanks. And if you really have something that you need to be able to reuse it, make sure you know the history of that system yourself and you're not relying on others. But then also try to use a clean tank or one that you believe to be clean. Well, that and even like when you talk about if it gets sent to a reclamation facility, I know a lot of technicians, the role on it,

43:37I believe is what, five years per tank before it's supposed to be recertified. I know very few technicians, some of them are still running with a tank that's 20 plus years old. That tank's seen probably every type of refrigerant from the, we'll say early 90s to present day. There's a huge cause for concern because at some point, especially while we mentioned the filter dryer as a thing, if you come across a unit that is or does contain acid, you perform an acid check, why don't you still have to recover that refrigerator? And that acid laced or acid coated, whatever you want to call it, that acid base refrigerant still goes into that tank. It can still sit there. There can be pieces, oils, anything can stick around these tanks. And you can pull vacuums on them and all that, but at the end of the day, if it's seen several different refrigerants at some point, you're hitting that cross contamination issue or potentially even introducing acid into a system without even knowing. This is actually like a great topic and I'm just curious to gauge the room and see what everybody's, so like you said, even when you get a new recovery cylinder or a clean recovery

44:44cylinder, there can still be all kinds of stuff in the bottom. Every sludge or to be oil, who knows what's in the bottom? So me as a tech and I'm going to gauge the room, say you were curious about is my tank contaminating? What is y'all steps and then I'll go over mine or what I've done before? What is y'all steps to verify? Do you do the nitrogen in the vapor and try to push something out of liquid or obviously wait the tank, try to make sure the tank wait is exactly what it says, but what have y'all experienced? This is the secret everybody misses for evacuation too. It's called the decay test. You cannot recover or evacuate something and go, hey, I hit 500 microns, it's good. You need to isolate that tank off and you need to see what it decays to and that decay test will tell you if you have moisture in there. The decay test will tell you if you have acids in there. The decay test type of refrigerants is the tank's 30 and what we're looking for and I'll tell you if the tank's leaking too. I mean so what we're looking

45:48for is when we pull that tank down it's going to pull down when we isolate it it should sort of flatten out and flatten off that tells us it's clean and dry. If we isolate it off and we see the gauge starting to rise up and tail off, well then that's moisture, especially if it's around 1500 to 2500 microns anywhere in that range is typically moisture it between 60 and 70 degrees. If it's colder out your tail off is going to be a lower than that and then if you're going up with a constant rise over run over time so then you know you got a leak and so you can when we talk about tailing off or leak what we're talking about is timing the micron gauge for a minute and seeing how many microns it rises and time it for a second minute and see how many microns it rises. Let's say it rises 60 microns the first minute and 30 microns the second minute well then it's tailing off but 60 microns the first minute 60 comes a second then you got a leak but if you're going to reuse that refrigerant you got to pull down and hold below 500 microns for a residential R454 BR32 R22 whatever type of system 410A system because if you're going to reintroduce that refrigerant the

46:53only way you're going to get the moisture out of it is through a desicant dryer at that point. Once the refrigerants contaminated because there are two things you got to remember you can evacuate the heck out of the system but if you introduce what refrigerant back into the system again you just completely undermine everything you try to do with your evacuation that's why I go back to virgin a lot of time and on a second note if you're going to put virgin refrigerant in a machine on a lot of recovery machines you do not want to run virgin refrigerant through the recovery machine because there's no oil in it and it can ruin the machine it depends on the machine some you can do it with but many you can't because the refrigerant the oil is also what's lubricating the recovery machine pistons of outrain yeah I agree that's what I was wondering like obviously you do that you do your razzle run and try to see what's going on in the cylinder but I'm just curious have y'all had any field studies that like you've actually said I think this thing is full of sludge and then just just throwing darts at the wall say you try to get a sample from your liquid dip to you push

47:58in with nitrogen and if there's a good amount of sludge in the bottom I wonder would you get that out no now you'd have to flip the tank over and take it out of the vapor side most likely because dip two doesn't go all the way to the very bottom of the tank typically and again the other thing is you can pull the valves off these things in this case is that's not easy to do though I mean it's I don't even know how you demand handle the tank to get you know to hold it I mean you all should have to be real strong you just have to be real strong my mom tells me I'm the strongest boy in America so well I'm so just follow up with what Jim was saying about flipping upside down we did have this instance that or a previous contractor we had a recovery tank that had been in rotation for who knows how long and we ended up having a tech who accidentally contaminated new system using that tank when they brought it back we did the the K test and we could see that there was something in it but we couldn't get it out so the best way for us to get it out we actually took small hose attached it with cord tool we put a cap on the end and we did put that little

49:00liquid or cyclist indicator to see if we could actually see what came out sure enough when we flip the tank upside down with a small nitrogen pressure underneath of it that helped the force a bunch of oil sludge whatever you'll have it filled into our cyclist after that that tank was took out a rotation yeah I think the best way to look at it is if you are concerned if your tanks contaminated just don't do it yeah don't do it well and a lot of tanks even though you're getting back clean there and clean I mean I've seen brand new nitrogen tanks that are sopping wet too I mean it's tough to be in this industry sometimes because we don't have a lot of control over how well things are cleaned and how clean and how dry nitrogen is I mean there's it can be a challenge for sure Trutec tools commitment to industry training and supplying quality tools for our trade is unmatched no one can match it I'd like to see him try I'd like to just see him try because they can't they can't do it Trutec tools has a massive catalog supplying over 90 brands and still growing each week

50:03you'll find everything from hand tools every tech needs to specialty tools including one of my favorites TEC's airflow and pressure measurement products tools like the true flow grid all of our favorite manufacturers are there refrigeration technologies ue i and avak field piece and so many more they also have some great books too you'll find the great ac service tech books over there my friend Craig as well as books I'm building science and other special topics by Russ King Allison Bales Corbett Lundsford all great authors educators and all friends mine I mean I think they're my friends maybe they don't think that I don't know you have to ask them don't see a tool that you're looking for on the Trutec tools website just let the team know and they'll do their best to help you get what you need there's a lot to say about the Trutec tools team too the people there have so much knowledge and experience and they really provide the best customer service and tech support for techs guys like bill spawn and Eric Kaiser they dedicate a lot of their time to educating others on industry podcasts at trade events including the symposium and even bills

51:07amazing podcast building HVAC science go check that out as well the team also publishes a lot of free downloadable guides for things like recovery tank fill and they'll be charts commissioning worksheets all really great content and all free Trutec tools ships to all US states and territories and make sure all customers have a good experience the warehouses are always stocked to ship orders out quickly the team is open to improving the customer experience whether it comes to their catalogs shipping or website just let them know if there's something that you suggest and they have a great discount code go to trutec tools dot com fill your cart with some of the best tools in the industry and use the offer code get schooled for a nice discount and check out let's get school no spaces no caps just get schooled trutec tools dot com all right so let's talk about push pull before we do that anybody see a problem with this really crappy diagram yeah it's really crappy no thanks well i gotta say my camera is right in the way of it so so you can't even see it wow yeah i see

52:11a little one to the left yeah so i would flip it upside down and put the liquid into the vapor side that's how i would do this but anyway let's talk about push pull so when do you use it when don't you use it personally anything over ten pounds i'm probably starting with a push pull under it's probably a slow return on investment i do anything over forty anything yeah i think the same word caused you to forty or fifty i feel like with ten me personally that's not a lot of refrigerant and if you are ditching your manifold you're doing everything we've talked about getting up to this and like for instance if you use a rapid wire a tea and you hooked it both sides i feel you can pull in a conventional pull you can pull ten pounds pretty smooth oh sure yeah i mean it just depends on what you consider your minimum forty is not a bad minimum either i mean i wouldn't fight you on it but i do think the other thing is i guess if you ask me the first thing i'd ask you is do you have an empty recovery cylinder or a full one because it was empty i'm

53:11going to pull everything i can in the recovery cylinders to the liquid line first before i even hook up the recovery machine for me i think you follow all the practices that we're talking about here then generally and residential you don't have to use push pull that's my standard residential and residential type systems so five tons and less you're generally not going to be using it even if it would be a little quicker it's just another monkey wrench you throw in the process you get switching around newer guys are going to struggle with it in commercial probably all the time you get over ten tons pieces of equipment you're going to probably do it all the time tie says it depends on who's recovered machine and setup i'm using that is exactly kind of what i'm saying too is that if you have a really four-quality old school machine then maybe it did make more sense to do push pull even with less for refrigerant but nowadays we're effectively using nap-acc recovery machines and other brands that are also high quality and we're getting pretty good results out of it we've let a push pull mode in our so there you go a lot of more time when it's the practices around it but i do want to talk quickly about what makes you decide to go to a bigger or more costly machine what helps you make that decision how much does it weigh

54:19me personally like i said i have the nrdd and i've used it on everything from two and a half ton five ton systems up to five hundred eight hundred some large systems i think really i mean i say it jokingly but i do believe a lot of techs base it off of weight it's like a vacuum pump almost for instance you look the nr7 it weighs 20 pounds the nrdd's 26 not much difference but same thing with the vacuum pump if you ask them say well why would you want this one over that one i said the first thing i always hear how much does it weigh and i think if you are a smaller company or you do a lot of smaller jobs per se i can't justify getting a one that moves faster if you're happy with one that weighs less and gets the job done for you now obviously you gauge how much refrigerant you're recovering on a basis if you do one chiller a year i don't think it

55:20justifies getting this huge 41 i think that might be alive i think it thinks at least 50 but it's great it's great but most guys are not going to carry around a 50 pound recovery machine for a mini split and i it makes sense if you're already moving big equipment if you're already having to move big equipment it's just part of what you're doing well then fine you work in refrigeration you get a big one that case you probably not usually but generally but big air conditioning that's where it really makes sense here's what you got to remember it just comes down to this there's three limitations on a system there's a conductance speed there's so much strength the recovery machine can move there's how much refrigerant the connecting hoses can move and then how much refrigerant can physically move through the system so most of the time our limiting factor is either the hoses were connecting to the recovery machine or the system itself the system itself just can't move any refrigerant out any faster than you can feed it into that machine and if you turn on that machine and the suction pressure is falling down then your system conductance or your

56:21hose conductance the limiting factor it's not the recovery machine because you can't overfeed it so a lot of this just comes down to for most this equipment it comes down to a lot of this comes the features you want an analog gauge set you want digital gauge set you want something later you want something heavier a big thing that makes these navac units nice and we use them in our shop too is a large condenser coil space a lot of recovery machines smaller condenser coils and they just do not get the refrigerant it can't handle the heat of the refrigerant as well can turn it from a vapor back to liquid before dumps into recovered tanks so all that heat ends up in your tank end up fighting the tank and that's the other limitation I guess it comes down to it is just a heat in the tank but there's going to be some kind of a limitation on iron it's usually not the recovery machine it's usually something external to the recovery machine that's causing us the issue so there's four restrictions I guess five you want to close the hoses connected to tank but you got the system conductance the hose conductance connected to the recovery machine the recovery machine itself and then the tank how hard can we push into that tank and all those things

57:25are fighting yeah all at once so I can definitely agree with jam in some rise in a shorter version I would say that process plays a big role before you should ever look at upgrading your machine if you're not doing the right process you're not following the process you can have the biggest machine in the world it's still not going to speed anything up it's not going to help you same thing with the vacuum pump right yep the exact same thing but yeah it is a vacuum I mean it a recovery machine is a vacuum pump for refrigerant it's literally all it is right I mean it's different little different technology I mean as far as rotary vein versus pistons or whatever but I mean it's still the same concept we're we're removing the gas from the system and putting it into a tank and or we're putting in a case of evacuation up in an atmosphere but all the same principles fall into place and you can make a bigger improvement to your evacuation by using core tools and larger hoses than you ever could by going to a larger machine and choking it down I've actually proven that point and then to continue with that again process over just upgrading

58:30machine get your process right first then I am with Jim to a degree on this also it does apply to features as well as like what Zainset it applies to what the technician is working on so prime example when we talk about don't use the manifold gauge well someone might not want the digital gauges on the recovery machine to measure pressures coming in and out of the machine that's something we're like NRDD or NR4 CDM come in that's where you have a digital readout you can see it right there you've also got modes you've got safeties built into more what we I guess you call it a higher end unit like the NRDD over the NR7 these are just mobility appropriate term here features features but I was trying to make it fast think of it like trim packages when you're buying a truck and I think another big point just real quick on this is when you're looking at okay you got everything now down you say which one is faster a lot of guys come to me and they'll say yeah but this one pumps liquid way faster it says permanent and I'm like

59:33okay but what's the slow part of recovery it's vapor so I always tell the guys like if you're all about speeding it up start looking at vapor recovery rates yeah good point and again if anybody can prove that it's the process and not the equipment I have 10 children so it's definitely not it's not the equipment that doesn't all right let's focus now on a low temperature and that one I just want you to know I don't want you to do very hard and I don't want you to touch it either all right so now we're going to talk about recovering low ambient conditions I just want to hit on this quickly the big thing to mention is that when it's cold outside it's real hard to recover but more importantly from a safety standpoint is that if you pull a system down to zero PSI or even into a vacuum when it's a negative 10 outside or negative 20 outside you don't have all the refrigerant out of that unit and so if you take that and then put it in the back of your warm truck or take it to the shop and you get the valves open it's going to start spoon refrigerant all over place pretty simple concept but I wanted to make sure that everybody's kind of

1:00:34aware of this so take this where you will how do you do what do you do in order to recover better when you've got really cold outdoor conditions like we mentioned briefly earlier the simple answer right off the rib I had heat where you can so Jim mentioned if you're dealing with a gas furnace fire furnace up if you don't have that opportunity I had turned the blower on you can go as far as if there's crankcase heater on the turn that crankcase heater on energized crankcase heater you can actually get the old school tank heaters you could wrap that around the compressor you could do something along these lines in drastic situations and Eric is a one who brought this to my attention Eric uses a heat gun a lot for folks when he's trying to heat up the actual unit during recovery and we got into this whole big math calculations about these tank heaters and belly band heaters versus the heat gun it's really in depth we don't have time to go that in depth but that's my easy answer right off the rib for everyone else goes ad heat where you can I wouldn't agree with that the big thing is too is like kind of the basics about it so yeah it's

1:01:40easy to move 410A at say and say 85 degrees outside so 410A a standing 14A chores price at there like 252.60 right let's say the only thing we change the charge is the same everything's the same but like you said you lower that temperature to low freeze maybe at 32 now you're at 100 psi so the common principle of high goes low becomes a little bit more in depth and like Jesse and Jim were both saying at that point you have to try to add heat because at some point the lower it's almost like when they had the podcast about the evacuation as you start lowering that temperature you start pulling gas out of it you're actually boiling point of everything will slow down and then the only way that it will either rise back up for that latent heat change is if you can add heat if there's no heat around you you have to manually add if not it'll be like the best description

1:02:41I can always say it's like it's almost like a drain and a pool so if you drain a pool with a big 4-inch hose it'll drain really quick but with that being said with it draining quick you do end up with a little puddle inside well how do you get rid of the puddle well naturally not in low ambient but naturally that little puddle will gain heat from the surroundings and boil back off and that goes back into like Jim was saying a decay test for the recovery you pull it down if it doesn't have a leak I'll pull it into a vacuum if it does not have a leak if it pulls down and then it rises back up like Jim says something's changed its day something's taken up space there's a latent change going on inside the system well I'm going to just be the elephant in the room just don't do it don't waste your time don't recover refrigerant when it's cold don't do evacuation when it's cold yeah yeah you gotta do it you gotta do it you know what I've been doing process work and stuff for years and I know for a fact that a couple of things number one is refrigerant always goes to the

1:03:42coldest place in the system well adding heat may help to get refrigerant out of oil because oil in the refrigerator are missable the refrigerants just going to go to the next coldest place in the system so if the condenser coil is colder it's going to go to the condenser coil if it's colder in the liquid line and suction line in the attic it's going to go build up in the suction and liquid line in the attic it's colder in the evaporator it's going to go to the evaporator and it'll go almost they're almost instantaneously it will go to the coldest place in the system this goes where dry ice becomes again another good way of doing recovery because we can drop that refrigerant pressure way down with dry ice and make it migrate but if you have a system that had a leak in it and you're trying to dehydrate that system and you're below 40 degrees you're just wasting your time you're absolutely wasting your time you need to use auxiliary heat and come back when that system is more favorable to conditions to actually service it you're doing a disservice to your customer and you're doing a disservice to the industry by trying to work in conditions that aren't favorable to evacuation of recovery I've got it up and you can do that too. How do we explain

1:04:43to these customers who's going to pay this election bill? Yeah well when people are going out in charge of 16 to 20 thousand dollars for a residential system how are you going to explain to them that your residential system just lasted three years because it didn't have a proper evacuation when I put the refrigerant back in it in the winter time. I have a better solution. People just shouldn't live in cold places they should all just move themselves. How so you want to move the floor to. Is this our study right now? Just move everybody's out. No I don't actually want that I'm kidding don't do that the north is amazing nobody else moved to Florida please I understand what Jim is saying like Ty said I think I'll go here with what Ty says I greatly respect you but I respectfully disagree we don't always have the option but I think to be honest about it are you going to get a great evacuation when it's really cold no are you going to do it and because again with recovery it's more just about getting the refrigerant out there's not the same risks as evacuation as long as you can get the refrigerant out it's not unsafe then fine I would definitely suggest for example if you're

1:05:44doing a change out and you're pulling the condenser and you get the valves open after you pull do a recovery it's real cold outside go ahead and shut those valves in case that machine ends up in the shop and warms up or whatever now again it's going to build up and then you're going to have to pull it out another way which a lot of times if it's a heat pump you can maybe get the rest out through the common suction port or elsewhere and that may be tough too well but I think I talk to different things over and you're talking recovery I don't have a problem if you're going to recover when it's cold sure you can leave some residual refrigerant and it's not going to be a problem but we're talking about servicing the system it's a different animal and I did a video that's up on YouTube where I pulled the system down to 138 microns in the winter at 20 degrees outside did it a K-task and it was sopping wet and it is because the we got to remember when we turn to ice the ice is also sublimating the ice is getting colder and colder so there's that ice gets cold and colder the vapor pressure drops is a vicious cycle of dropping temperature dropping pressure and the micron gauge looks like it's doing all its work and stuff but when you do that the K-task

1:06:47and you let that sit for 15 minutes you'll see that vapor pressure builds back up and that system is soaking wet so we're just talking recovery fine take it down to zero call it a day and know you've got a couple pounds of refrigerant still in the system but you did what the EPA required you to do but if we're talking service you can't do it you just can't do it at low temperatures I am unfortunately going to agree with Ty and Ryan in this case GMI respect you but I also understand that technicians have a job we have to do and I get to do service and I know the science behind it trust me I've watched your video I've seen it but at the end of the day a technician has to do the job and they can't just let's say on the off chance that someone had a heat pump and they didn't have the emergency heat they didn't have a heat kit built into it what are we supposed to tell that customer yeah I guess it sucks to be used sometimes but I'm telling you you have to rely on a dryer to take out most of the moisture I mean back in the

1:07:4880s we used to swap dryers on a lot we didn't have great vacuum pumps we didn't have great evacuation procedures it was a very common practice to go out and pump the system down put our new dryer in and start it back up again and rely on desiccate and dryers to dry the system's out and I think that's exactly right I think what we're learning is is that that's why and this may also be another reason why I have this weird privilege that I've never lived in a really cold place so I've never had to think about these things but now I wasn't talking other people it's like yeah this is a real consideration today we're talking about recovery we've talked a lot about evacuation and I just want to end on a recovery note which is that when you are recovering you do need to recover to the EPA prescribed levels EPA also does have an exemption that if you have a known leak that pulling to zero PSI is acceptable because of the moisture just you know pulling stuff from atmosphere but what I'm saying and the point that I just want to get across is is that when it's real cold outside and you pull the system down you can even pull it down to the EPA prescribed levels and still have a hektun or refrigerant in there that's a technical term and we know this from centrifugal chillers for many of these ever taking the EPA exam even if

1:08:51you never worked on this centrifugal you can have a ton of refrigerant and centrifugal chillers even atmospheric because it operates on below atmospheric pressure so we got to get our head straight about that yeah that's another thing too like you said it goes back to the appliance and the tech with our work and on if you go up to a guy that say he does mainly resident you say oh this system has one PSI in it he might say well that's probably not much but if you think of you know say you're at even in low pressure centrifugal say you're at negative 14 PSI there's still the volume there is huge and like you said you have to actually do that recovery decay test at that point valve it off let it rise it'll tell you what's in the system once it stops rising then you know okay all my refrigerants go yep and so that's that rise test make sure let it sit see if it's still rising again I want everybody to be safe out there and ultimately do I worry about the environment sure I don't want you vending refrigerant but a little

1:09:51bit of that is not the end of the world meaning that like you got a system that you recovered when it's super cold and now there's a little bit of residual refrigerant that makes it out that's not the end of the world to me that falls under sort of a minimise you're doing the best you can what I don't want you to do is take this thing leave it open stick it in the back of your truck we drive it down the road and then pass out because the things start venting refrigerant and that's a very realistic thing that can happen that's what I'm concerned about is that there's still a lot of refrigerant in there even if you pull it down to zero or below when it's real cold outside that's the point that I want to get across and as Ty says here hektons and frig hairs he needs flirty and do a lingo or babble for flirty and and everybody's been putting up a tie and is nonsense all these years now he's going to criticize us I'm just saying I will say this I've got an arthritis attack reading that message from Ty just now Jim Zane Jesse thank you guys so much for being here and talking recovery today has been a lot of fun as always and we'll see everybody next time I'm a live stream thanks guys all right thanks guys appreciate it thanks guys once again Jim Zane

1:10:57Jesse thanks for coming on great guys love them all love navak and their products I have a truck full of them right now because I have actually been working in the field again and I'm so proud of myself it's amazing my lily white soft hands are now building up calluses once again I was even digging ditches the other day you would have been so proud of me sweating I'm like fat just like sweating all over the place just making a big mess is a good time you know dirty the whole thing I got to wear my true work pants man it's fun anyway enough about me that's good to hear from these guys and all of you out there if you find things find best practices for recovering faster things that are working especially in cold climates send me an email Brian BRYAN at hvcrschool.com love to hear from you what do you call a robbery with no fingerprints stainless steel thanks for listening we'll talk to you next time on the hvac school podcast

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