Refrigerant Management Strategies w/ Rick Roland

Rick from Certified Refrigerant Services joins us to talk about recovery and refrigerant management. He also explains what to look for and do to get the most from your program.

A refrigerant management program offers recovery services, reclamation, and other options for processing refrigerants. Rick's company also buys and sells refrigerants. With his line of work, there are also plenty of opportunities to educate contractors. The goal is to reduce refrigerant mixing and keep high-quality refrigerant in circulation.

Mixing refrigerants kills their value, though it is sometimes inevitable. On the contractor's side, you can take steps to prevent mixing by diligently using tags and weighing the charge each time. When we commit to careful recovery practices, we can keep high-quality, discontinued refrigerants available for people who have those systems. Contractors can also do injustice to their customers when they recover into dirty tanks, though it can be difficult to understand those tanks' histories. As contractors, we have a lot of difficult decisions to make, but we must always act ethically in terms of EPA guidelines and put the customers' needs first.

It's a bad idea (and illegal) to give customers unprocessed recovered refrigerant charges. You can't possibly know if the system has bad refrigerant (such as from a system that burned out) or other issues, so you're probably not helping anyone by giving them unprocessed recovered refrigerant. Quality is the key to the refrigerant management industry, and contractors can both contribute to the cause and benefit from it.

Rick and Bryan also discuss:

• Refrigerant A/C vs. commercial chiller systems and mixing
• Recycling R-22
• EPA refrigerant disposal reports
• Service vs. recovery cylinders
• Being proud of being in the HVAC/R trades
• How much should we really fill our tanks?
• Life cycle of air conditioners
• Refrigerant pricing
• R-410A recovery