#resistive

Tech Tips:

What does “RES” mean on a contactor or relay?

Go to your truck, pick up a contactor, and look at it closely. You may find some interesting ratings you never noticed—things like terminal ambient temperature ratings and torque specs. One reading you may overlook is the RES AMPACITY of the contactor or relay. The RES rating is the RESISTIVE LOAD AMPACITY (amperage capacity) or rating. […]

Mistakes in Measuring Ohms

In HVAC and electrical school, one of the first things you learn about electricity is Ohm's law: Volts (V) = Amps (I) x Ohms (R) Pretty simple, right? Watt's law is just as easy: Watts (P) = Volts (E) x Amps (I) With this newfound knowledge, the student walks confidently into the real world with […]

Relays, Sequencers, Transformers, and Bad Metaphors

In this episode, Bryan and Nathan have a banter-filled conversation about electrical components that confuse techs. If you are looking for a serious educational episode, we suggest you look elsewhere. Low-voltage circuits may confuse the new technician because the “common” terminology is far too common in the circuit. (See how confusing it sounds in everyday […]

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Real training for HVAC ( Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration) Technicians. Including recorded tech training, interviews, diagnostics and general conversations about the trade.

In this short podcast episode, Bryan talks about the CPS Molecular Transformator and what it does.

The Molecular Transformator is a version of a tube-in-shell heat exchanger, which is a method of exchanging heat from one fluid medium to another fluid medium. Tubes containing a fluid pass through a shell containing water or glycol, and there is a heat exchange between that secondary fluid and the fluid being circulated in the tubes. In a Molecular Transformator, the fluid being circulated is recovered refrigerant, and the secondary fluid is water (in a bucket), which absorbs heat from the refrigerant and cools it down to make sure that the refrigerant enters the recovery tank as a liquid.

Refrigerant recovery machines have condensers inside of them, but they are quite small and don’t hold a lot of refrigerant by design; many recovery machines use microchannel coils. A lot of the time, the refrigerant leaving a recovery machine is a liquid-vapor mix and too high-temperature; a lot of people run a hose over the tank or put it in a bucket of ice. The “Molecular Transformator” tries to settle the vapor molecules down into a liquid; it transforms the vapor molecules using the same mechanism of a shell-in-tube heat exchanger.

The main issue is that there will be leftover refrigerant in the Molecular Transformator after recovery. However, you can mitigate this problem with ball valves and proper purging. Do so responsibly to avoid venting refrigerant.

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