HVAC 130 Next level fast recovery

so we got to see in the last video we were able to really really speed up our recovery process by doing away with the manifold gauge set doing away at the low loss fittings and simply putting a t on the input side of a recovery machine then we took two hoses straight to that tee and then we're able to take the straighter cores out which sped that process up even more so we got full flow all the way to our recovery machine then we used a larger hose going to our recovery tank and we turned

the recovery tank upside down so we're putting liquid straight into the bottom and we don't have the restriction of that dip tube going in there so that's able to really speed this process up a lot of people overlook the importance of that larger hose and the importance of having no restrictions on the high side that really slows it down and we were able to speed a recovery up significantly also we were able to pull the liquid refrigerant out first and it made that go a lot faster now other things we can do to speed it

up even more i'm glad you asked and the answer is yes we can absolutely do more stuff and there's several things we can do the first one i want to point out to is to make sure that we use larger hoses just like i use this large hose going into my recovery tank i want to get two more of those hoses and putting them where they're coming from the unit to the recovery machine short thick fat hoses the distance of that hose is to be as short as possible that you can still work with and

also a large diameter so this way we can pull straight from both sides to our recovery machine now i have more of those big hoses but i save them for vacuum i never want to use the same hose i'm using for recovery as i use for vacuum because the oil will get impregnated into that hose and take a lot longer to do vacuum which we're going to be doing later on so thick hoses here no shredder ports putting a t here and doing what that manifold gauge set was a huge difference that big hose here

inverting the tank made a huge difference but we can still speed it up more one of the issues we have is as we're putting that refrigerant into this tank we're filling up that volume and we're putting that refrigerant in and making it condense into that liquid so the temperature of this tank starts going up and up and up we're putting more molecules refrigerant in here so as there's more and more molecules those molecules are moving faster and faster the temperature of the tank goes up and so does the pressure and as the pressure of the

tank goes up we have more compression ratio against this pump right here so their compression ratio gets higher and higher apart it's more work in the pump and it takes longer and longer so other ways we can speed that up sure we can reduce the compression ratio in the pump and we can do that by reducing the temperature of our tank so there's several ways we can do that the most popular way my good friend the bucket what you can do with this bucket is fill it up with ice water and from there i can

take my recovery tank and dump it inside this ice water by doing that we're going to have heat transfer and the ice will melt we're going to transfer the heat from the tank to the ice and we're cooling the tank off dropping also the pressure so we're pumping up against lower pressure and it speeds the recovery up there's a few important things i want to discuss about this method one of the issues is once we use that water and on our scale it's going to be an issue so we're pretty much having to remove the

scale from the scenario and then we don't really know how much refrigerant we're putting in our tank or if we're close to overfilling it so that is a warning now another thing about that is when we take this tank and we drop it inside of this bucket we'll see that the volume of this tank takes up almost the entire volume of the bucket so if you were to fill this bucket up and you were to drop this tank inside of this bucket most of the water would come out there's only about this much water all

the way around the tank so ultimately you end up with very little water so your next option is continuously put ice in it or continuously have water running on it which then you're working around a wet environment and you're having to keep your scale away and there's lots and lots of variables and complications so while this is a method that works is there a better method absolutely one of the methods is they sell this product called a molecular transformator all it really is is a sub cooling device by hooking this up in series in other

words the hose goes into this device out of this device and then into our tank we're able to use this heat transfer method to sub cool the refrigerant drop the temperature of the refrigerant which also drops the pressure in our tank and it's able to speed up a recovery process just to show you how that's going to work we can take a little device and we hook our hose going into this device then we have the other hose going out of this device and then it would go into our recovery tank so this way call

in series into this device out of this device into a recovery tank from there we have our bucket full of ice water and notice how small this is once we drop this into our bucket of ice water there's a lot more surface area to do it so there's a lot of ice that can melt a lot of liquid touching this device so we're able to cool the refrigerant off without having to put the whole tank in by doing it this way i can also leave my tank on the scale without having to worry about water

getting on it or changing away to my scale or all of their issues so it's a great way of speeding that process up now a company came with this device and it's a great option but it's not your only option all it really is is quarter inch tubing so here i've taken some quarter inch tubing and just made a nice little circle out of it this is copper that we pulled out from another ductless job and what i would do is do two or three of these and braise them together and then what you want

to do is separate them pull them out hear the metals touching each other and i don't want that to happen i want it spread out a little bit more so there's more of the liquid more of the cooler water touching more of the copper so we have better heat transfer but what's even a better option than that is what if we increase the size of this here we have this quarter inch tubing but that's going to be a restriction from our pump and we want to remove all the restrictions we possibly can so what i

prefer to use is a 3 8 copper so here i just took 3 8 copper we pulled from another job and i took an old suction line accumulator and i just simply wrapped that copper around that suction line accumulator rolled it up made this nice little barrel and all i have to do is add a little bit more to it and i can braise onto these connections little service valves i can put the service port brace it right in here and here and then i can attach my hose here here and still be able to

drop it right in the bucket this is much much cheaper than buying that whichever you prefer by doing it this way we're able to drop the temperature and also drop the pressure of the recovery tank by having less pressure pumping against is able to speed up our process and there's many many different methods the downside to using this is once you get done you have a significant amount of liquid refrigerant in these connections and also your hoses so what i'll find to do is put an extra valve right here so when i'm done i can

then put this on my recovery machine and recover that last little bit out which sounds like a whole lot of steps but simply i want to recover all the liquid refrigerant that's in here and it doesn't take very long for that and we can let that happen when we're doing the rest of our work but that's only one half of the system we still have the other half to talk about now remember we were pulling all that refrigerant out the liquid refrigerant came out pretty fast but then the vapor took a lot longer what's happening

is the temperature and pressure for tanks going up and our compression ratio is going up but we already have a solve for that but the other side our pressure is dropping on the side which is what we want we want to be able to drop the pressure by getting all the refrigerant molecules but that liquid refrigerant is boiling from a liquid to vapor inside of your compressor in that oil if you saw that compression started to freeze in all those other scenarios so we want to do is think of a way that we can keep

the pressure up for as long as possible to speed up a recovery process and we have multiple options one of the options i like to turn the fan on in my air handler so i'm taking heat from the house and moving that heat across this evaporator coil they're still having heat transfer by keeping that evaporator coil as warm as possible we keep the pressure up inside of this evaporator coil which keeps the pressure up on your suction side which helps speed up a recovery process so yeah leaving the fan run inside helps we can also

put a heating blanket or something like that on there but this really isn't our restriction our restrictions really going to be at the compressor where we have the oil so what can we do to solve that we have lots of options one of the options we can do is turn on the crank case heater so i have to do is leave it energized and the crankcase heater is going to keep the oil warm and by keeping the oil warm it's going to make the refrigerant boil out of the oil a whole lot faster and it's

also going to raise the temperature and the pressure inside this system so our recovery machine can pull it out very very quickly instead of waiting for it to be all the way into a vacuum and having to slowly pull that refrigerant out of the oil we can then make that speed up by making that refrigerant boil much faster a lot of equipment doesn't come with a crankcase heater or maybe you've already disconnected your wiring so there's other options remember a good old tank heater from a previous video this is a great option we can wrap

this around the bottom of the compressor we can plug this in and what it's going to do is start heating up the crankcase section of the compressor so by having this around the bottom we're able to warm the compressor up raising the pressure boiling the refrigerant out of the oil a whole lot faster there are some other options you can use a heat gun but that problem with the heat gun is notice all the leaves inside of this unit so we'd have to first make sure all those leaves are out of the way because that

heat gun could very quickly set those leaves on fire or also maybe there's leaves under the unit or around the unit and that could cause a fire that could spread very very quickly and again never use a torch because that's a whole nother issue of safety but especially with the fire hazard so using a heater blanket like this using a crank case heater or a heat gun after removing all the fire hazards and leaves having the fan motor run inside helps speed up that recovery process it makes it all go much much faster anytime we

do recovery with any kind of a chiller system where we're taking heat out of water on the inside or with a water cooled condenser any of these options dealing with water cooling water glycol any of the above we want to make sure the water is moving so if there's pumps we'll make sure the pumps are on we want to keep that water flowing and keep that water moving what's going to happen is we recover that refrigerant very quickly the temperature and pressure drops the refrigerant starts boiling changing state from liquid vapor which means it's absorbing

heat and the temperature and pressure is going to start to drop and if we have water around that water will freeze and it could damage our pipes very easily and very quickly so by keeping the water moving there's a large quantity of water and that quick moving water is going to prevent that water from freezing or at least reduce the risk of it freezing so as we're recovering refrigerant we don't have to worry about any of those pipes breaking in the future so again we want to keep the temperature of our system as high as

possible for as long as possible we want to keep the temperature of the refrigerant going into our tank as low as possible that way we reduce the compression ratio to make our pump more efficient i also want to use the largest shortest hose possible especially in the high side going in make sure we have this in liquid form make sure we go in as a liquid through that vapor side that speeds it up without the restriction of the straw do away with their schrader cores do with our manifold gauge set two large hoses straight to

the input side now we've reduced all those restrictions kept our compression ratio low and by doing all that we've reduced our recovery time even more so the last video was seven minutes we could probably drop that down to say five minutes hopefully it gives you an idea how we can speed up that recovery process nobody likes to do recovery but it's required as a part of our job so by knowing these little tricks we're able to speed up that recovery time saving you time saving you money and still be able to do the job the

right legal way all these little things go a long ways and stay tuned we'll talk about some more methods we can do in this as well