Refrigerant Recovery Basics

 We have a lot of new people that are coming into the industry that are just now getting their EPA that come up to me and say, Hey, I've never even put my hands on a recovery unit. So what I want to take you through today is, uh, a session on how to do a refrigerant recovery process and the steps you need to ensure so that you're successful in doing it.

And not only that, protecting the integrity of the refrigerant that you're pulling out. We all know the prices have gotten very expensive, so anything we can do to save the refrigerant that we're taking out of a system and reuse it in other systems, not only the one that you're working on, you can put it back into, but you can put it back into other systems.

As long as that system's contained are owned by the same owner, and in most cases, all of our apartment communities that we're at one ownership, we can transfer that from unit to unit as long as it's on that specific property. So what I wanna take you through is just hooking it up, getting it done. We're going to recover the refrigerant out of this unit that we use for demonstration purposes, that our brothers unit, uh, the first thing you wanna do is have your gauge manifold, and you've got your color coded hoses.

Blue, yellow, and red. Blue typically glows on the low side line. Well, I remembered it when I was younger and starting out. Blue hose, big line. So we're gonna put the blue hose on the big line.

And all your hoses now, and for recovery equipment as well, all have to have some sort of low loss fitting, and these happen to be built into 'em. These are manual low loss fittings where I actually have to turn the valve on and off manually. There's a lot of neat ones out there that are automatic, that are called no blow back ends that are built into the ends of the hoses.

And you don't have to worry about turning the valve, uh, the caps when you pull 'em off easy place so you don't lose them. You screw 'em back on where your hose is. So that way at the end of the job, you're not looking around for where the caps and trying to find another one. Uh, the red hose, high side line, sometimes referred to as the liquid line goes on the small line or the liquid line.

And then your center hose will go up to the pre-filter onto your machine. On your pre-filters, some of your machines automatically come with them. Some you have to buy 'em as a separate accessory. Always when you have a pre-filter on there. Make sure you always leave it capped as it is a desiccant. If you leave it uncapped all the time, it'll absorb moisture just from the ambient air and when you get ready to do a recovery, it'll already be clogged.

So make sure you keep 'em capped with Don and use. And depending on the condition of the refrigerant, you could probably get three or four recoveries out of it. If it happens to be bad or blown compressors and you're getting a lot of refrigerant oil, you may only get one, possibly two out of it. So you'll be able to tell because your recovery process will slow down.

Very slowly, and a lot of times it's because of the inlet on the pre-filter. So once I have all my hoses hooked up to the unit itself, then I want to have it hooked up to the pre-filter. I need one exiting the filter, and I'm gonna hook this one up, coming out and going to my recovery cylinder, and I'm gonna put it in on the liquid line.

Note the, sometimes the colors coincide with liquid and vapor like they do in air conditioning, but sometimes plumbing refers to as red as li or red as vapor and blue as liquid. And then when tanks first came out, they had that. So just read the tank. Don't just assume red goes to red, but in this case it does.

But before I do, so I wanna make sure I check the tank and the tank weight. Then I'm gonna tear a tar this scale to zero, so that way I know exactly how much I'm taking out. I know this unit on the data plate told me that it had five pounds, two ounces of refrigerant. So I'm gonna pull five pounds, two ounces of refrigerant and put in this tank when it's full and it's all out.

The only way I can do that is if I find out what the. Uh, tear weight is, and it says 29.3, so I know whatever I put in here will be the system's refrigerant and how much it weighs. Also real good for when you're doing refrigerant recovery now on all equipment containing five to 50 pounds of refrigerant.

You have to track that, how much you're pulling out of the system, how much you're keeping, how much you're reusing, and how much you're sending off, uh, for reclamation. So now that I've had it all hooked up. The first thing I want to do is purge my line. So with your gauge manifold in the off position, I'm gonna open up my ball valves on all the systems that go to these tanks.

Tank is closed. Closed here, ball valve open here, and this ball valve open here. Make sure everything's off. So before I start recovery, I'm always gonna purge my lines. So I'm gonna crack this. Now the system's refrigerant pressure will push out the air. So now I pushed all the air that was in this hose out and the refrigerant has filled the lines.

Yes, there may be a small escape of refrigerant, but it's called a Perce. Good faith release. I'm doing this in good faith so that I don't mess up the refrigerant that either A, I'm putting in, or B, I'm putting in my recovery cylinder. So I purged those two lines. Now, when I open this manifold up here, I'm letting it come through the suction line.

It's filled up in to my vapor line here, going into the recovery equipment. I'm gonna purge it. So I've gotten it out. So now I'm gonna open this. It is gonna let the refrigerant go through here. The outlet is still closed, so I'm gonna open the outlet here

and open the tank here.

And now I can purge this line from here to here.

And open from there. Now that I've got everything open, all my lines are purged. I can turn the machine on and start to recover the system to recruitment. So I've got it halfway between closed and open, and you can obviously hear the machine when you open it all the way up. It labors a little bit because you're putting too much liquid.

So when you get that labor point, just kind of jo your mouth back down, let it take it in. Once you start getting down to the systems, pressures start to come down really good for you, and the machines not laboring, you can slowly open it back to wide open, which is. We've got most of the refrigerant out already, so now we can stay in a full, wide open position and I don't have to worry about jocking the positions down.

You can see on my gauge manifold, we're just about there,

and once this gauge gets to zero, I've met my requirements required by the EPA for systems that five, I've gotta get that pressure down to zero pressure. We've got a little bit of left in there. We've got 4.3 pounds of refrigerant, so that's telling me we've probably got another eight ounces left in the system and it's still got pull out.

We're almost at our five pounds of what the system came in to. Let me know that everything that was in there is in there. We're right now at two or three psi, so we're almost there. I'd like to get a little bit below zero or at zero and. First thing you do after you complete your recovery process is shut the system off, isolate your gauges from the system, and then wait a few minutes.

And if the pressure rises, what it's telling me is I still have liquid refrigerant in the oil that's boiling off and I need to repeat the process. So zero pressure is my target, but I'd like to go a little bit past zero. I don't want to go too far negative on the machine. I can watch it. It's telling med.

On the recovery unit, and I am at probably 0.5, vacuum right at zero, maybe a hair below, and they could not, they could be slightly outta calibration. So for all intents and purposes, I'm done with this vacuum. I'm gonna isolate it, shut these off. Now I can go over to the machine, start to shut my valves off here.

Go ahead and everything's shut off To that point, close my outlet first. My inlets already closed and then turned the machine off. So now everything that, there's still leftover refrigerant in the machine, but I've gotten all the refrigerant out of the system and as you can see, the pressure did come up slightly.

One or two PSI. So that's telling me that there is still a little bit of refrigerant. So now we can repeat the process. So what I'm gonna do now is turn it back on. I don't have to purge anything because no air has gotten into the system. Open 'em back up

and bring this gauge back down again.

Now come down into a negative pressure on my manifold gauge. Shut it off again. Follow the hose and back. Up back, turn off each one of yours in that same process that you hooked it up, close, closed,

and close.

Turn the machine off and it says that our system's refrigerant is. 5.1. So there may be a half an ounce lost in the purge, but we got all the refrigerant that was in the system that it said it had in the system into the recovery cylinder. Uh, this is going to be the basic setup for doing any of your refrigerant recovery.

Um, the process can be a little bit intimidating with all the. The knobs that you have to turn on. But I guess the biggest emphasis I wanna make, just make sure you purge the lines, take care of the refrigerant and the integrity of the refrigerant that you're taking out of this system. So if we can do the repair, we can reuse that same refrigerant back into the system without testing or doing anything with it.

I can turn this jug back on once I get it charged and repaired. And I can put that free on right back in the system. And there's no need for me to really add a whole lot to it because I took what I took out, I put back in, which was the charge that it called for from the factory in closing, um, just want to hit the, the key topics here.

We've got limits on the tank. We wanna make sure that we do weigh the tank, and it hasn't exceeded the tank limits. The tank limits should never exceed 80% of the holding weight. So on a 50 pound cylinder. The tank limit is 40 pounds less, two per two pounds for safety and expansion for the tank. Never allow the tank to get over 120 degrees.

CAU could cause an explosion if allowed to stay there and handled improperly. Make sure it's in with hydrostatic dates. There should be a date stamped on there, and it has to be date stamped and re hydro tested every five years. If the tank does not appear secure, show signs of rust or it's pretty beat up.

Reduce to zero pressure, discard or srap and cycle the recycle the metal. Uh, the biggest thing here is we want to handle the refrigerant properly. If we make sure that we purge the lines that we're handling it correctly, we can probably reuse most of the refrigerant that we recover, especially putting it back into the same unit or into a different unit as long as that unit's owned by the same owner.

And by all means, never, ever, never, ever is it okay. To mix refrigerants, do not mix refrigerants of any kind in any pieces, in any ways. I do understand and hear stories about it all the time that guys are taking some of these so-called drop-ins and putting them in on top of R 22. Uh, this is never okay, because you never know what the mixture is.

Did you do 80, 20, 20 80, 56, 50 50, 60 40? You don't know. And at some point you could have a volatile reaction. And at that point, the refrigerant is impossible to reclaim, to even bring back up to new or virgin products or specifications and must be destroyed, usually at a typical higher price than having it reclaimed and sent back to you, um, at a lot lower price, recover and reclaim and recycled.

Although they sound similar, they're quite different. Recovery is to take it out of the system in any condition without testing or doing anything to it. Recycle is by running it through the pre-filters if you have an oil separator on your machine. And also separating the oil reclaim is something that has to be done by a chemical analysis and cannot be done on site is where you actually take your tank when it's full and it's met its capacity and send it off for reclamation, uh, so that it can be brought up to newer, original virgin product specifications.

Just because your EPA certified. And you're just now getting your license. Have somebody run you through the recovery process that you feel comfortable, that no matter who asked you that you could run them through this recovery process using the recovery equipment that you have on site. Thanks for watching, and as always, we're here for you at Chad Wilson Supply.

Thanks.