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First, let's state the obvious and clear the air a bit. The photo above is SUPER CHEESY! But this story is about three bad techs who don't know it, so a photo of three models clearly posing in clean clothes makes as good of a proxy for a bad tech as anything else. First off, I'm […]

Engineers vs. Technicians w/ Bill Spohn

If you have an iPhone, subscribe to the podcast HERE, and if you have an Android phone, subscribe HERE. In this episode of the podcast, we talk to Bill Spohn from TruTech Tools about how TruTech Tools got its start and some of the ways that techs and engineers approach problems differently. Bill Spohn is a […]

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HVAC School – For Techs, By Techs

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 as a tube-in-shell 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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