Charging Air Conditioning Units
Posted by: Hvac at May 20th, 2009
One of the most dangerous things that can happen to you when you are charging an air conditioning unit is that you can freeze the hell out of your hand, it sucks as I have done it before. The reason that this happened because I did not have low pressure loss fittings on my gauges, which is highly recommended by any hvac technician if you can afford them. They are not absolutely necessary to have, but if you are dealing with an hvac system that has high pressure, such as a split heating and cooling central air conditioning system then I would have them on the high side.
The high side on these residential air conditioning systems will usually sit around 250 psi of refrigerant, if the system is operating properly like it should be, meaning there is no restriction of air at the coils. So if you are running low on money but do not want to risk freezing your hand off, as shraeder valves do fail some times when you are taking the fitting off, then I would strongly recommend that you invest in a low loss pressure fitting for your high side, then when you get more money in the future get one for your charging and suction side as well.
Not only will low loss fittings save you from freezing your hand off, they are also good for the envirement, or more to say the ozone layer. If you are epa 608 certified, and or an hvac technician then you should know about cfc’c and hcfc’s and how dangerous that they can be to our ozone layer. If we do not take care of the ozone, then we are screwed. We may not be screwed right away, but our future generation will be. Although we are weeding out refrigerant that causes the depletion of the ozone layer, it will more than likely not be comletely weeded out for the next 20 or 30 years, so us as Hvac technicians have to take extreme caution when we are charging air conditioning units.
The same applies for when you are recovering or transferring refrigerant. So if you are an hvac technician and you make a living out of doing this then you will need the right tools, you should already have a pair of guages, do the right thing and invest in some low loss fittings for your hvac guages.
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