Welcome back to Teaching the Unteachables, where we dive into methods for teaching and learning for professionals like you.
This episode recorded live at the National HVACR Education Conference. Check out richieengineering at yellowjacket.com.
Alright, thank you all for joining us at the 2023 National HVACR Education Conference. We are hanging out with Greg Gusey from Yellowjacket.
Thanks for having me, Cliff. How are you, my friend? Very good. So today I actually wanted to touch base a little bit.
The topic of my presentation for this show is not your father's hammer, which, you know, we're not doing construction, right? So it's kind of confusing.
Why would we talk about a hammer? Sure. As a reference? So in history, you know, we have a lot of different traditions, right, that we hand down from different families and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, in the construction industry, it was a hammer. You hand down that hammer to the next generation. They can build their future, right?
And construction typically was very much based on that. You had to have the hammer.
Now, as you know, the construction industry, there is now a hammer for finishing nails. There's a hammer for doing studs. There's a hammer for doing cement blocks.
So the hammer isn't just a universal hammer anymore like it used to be. A little bit more specialized. Very much so specialized.
And that's what we're getting into in the HVAC industry as well, right? Absolutely. So in our industry, you know, we started out with, you know, as far as refrigerants going back in the recent history, it was, you know, R12 and R22, right?
R22 was developed as a refrigerant way back in 1930, and it had basically a 90-year run. That, for a refrigerant nowadays, is a horribly, terribly long run.
That's a long time. So, you know, your Greek grandfather to grandfather passed down their gauge set. They could do that.
Nowadays, you can't do that anymore because things are changing so fast in our industry. In 2010, basically, that R22 was basically phased out, and it's getting to be more and more impossible to find.
And they figure basically by 2030, we won't have it in the US at all. Supply lines will be gone. Yeah, I completely understand that.
So since that time, though, a lot, you know, since the 1930s, a lot has changed with that gauge set. You know, it's still telling your pressures based on the temperatures and everything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's based on different refrigerants. We now have typically on our gauges, two to three refrigerants, so it's not just a dedicated refrigerant.
So you have multiple to look at. Exactly. So you can see many different things.
So overall, you know, since basically 2010, what's really been the big change? Well, 410A came on the scene and a lot of industrial applications.
And it was really created back in 1991, but the market acceptance was still for R22. Yeah, a lot of people didn't realize that.
So I mean, it's got a huge rich history, but it was one of those that the big change that came with the 410A was the pressures were 50 to 60 percent higher. Pretty significant. Yeah.
So, you know, where gauges, hoses. Exactly. But then also your systems, the way the systems were set up, they were, you know, they wouldn't leak very easy on R22.
It had some lower pressure. It was low pressure. So you didn't have that chance for it to leak. So with 410A, it meant that we were now dealing with new gauge sets.
We had higher pressure readings. You know, we had to do better things to prevent the refrigerant from leaking out of the higher pressure systems. Yes, exactly. Right.
So now coming into 2023, everyone's throwing around acronyms. We got GWP, which is out of the title 40 code for federal regulations. And it's a hot topic. And 410A, they're saying is potentially on its way out.
Oh buddy, EPA's got a proposal out there for, you know, residential air conditioning heat pumps as early as January of 25. And we're seeing even territorial. Oh, California is all over it. California is jumping on this, you know, ahead of time.
So, you know, I decided to try to help in general the people understand the why, the how, the details of the history and what we should look at, where we have been and where we're going from here.
So to start out, you know, the R12 was the predecessor to 22 and 22 had a GWP. That's that global warming potential acronym that people are throwing around. That was at 10,000. I mean, that's 10,000 GWP, right? So that's a good baseline to start from.
So switching over from the R12, I should say had that R22, it brought it down tenfold. It was down to 1,700 GWP. So it's like, wow, that's a huge improvement, right? So we come out with 410A. Now that took us all the way down to 2,300.
A lot of people don't understand that. Wait a minute. That was an increase. I thought this was like the long term, like, you know, replacement, refrigerant, earth friendly.
Yeah. So then, okay, wait, why did we do that? Because that's a big change, right? So the GWP actually went up. But what we were looking at was another acronym that we're now throwing around, and that's the ODP, which is the ozone depleting potential, right?
Exactly.
So, you know, yes, the GWP went up, but there was, you know, that other potential hazard that we were dealing with. And that was the primary focus at the time. We were focused on ODP, the removal of the chlorine that was in the refrigerant.
So, you know, getting that chlorine out of the refrigerant helped reduce that ODP down to zero, which left us with our HFCs.
Right, right. So we had the HCFCs and the CFCs and the halons basically were causing this, so we got rid of that stuff, right? So that's where, okay, now we have another factor, right? So what was R12?
R12 had an ODP of 0.82. R22 came down to 0.034, and R410 was zero. So that's why we changed way back to go to 410, right? So that was fantastic. That should have been the end of the story, right? We cleaned up our act ozone depletion.
Hey, ozone's going to restore itself.
So, now wait, not that fast, right? I wouldn't be up here today talking about this if that was the case, right? So yeah, we're still seeing changes. So, you know, with the 410A, we saw a whole plethora of new tools.
Because of the higher pressures, we had to have better flares. So that meant new flaring tools. New tools.
Even the smallest leaks we needed to be able to find. So soldering a lot has gone away in comparison to what we used to do.
A lot of people don't realize, we used to use a lot of soft soldering in R22. I saw tons of it when I was out in the field in the residential sector.
Absolutely. And so now, well, how do you find leaks? So we have leak detectors, right? And we have dyes that we put in to go and find them and be able to see them.
So it's a completely different method where, you know, R22, you basically pressurize the system and you found where it was leaking because it was spraying out and you plugged the leak some way, shape or form, you know?
So a lot of our tools have changed. So you're going, okay, well then what is that tool that we can pass down, right? So the manifold isn't the same manifold now.
The flaring tools aren't the same flaring tools. You know, we had a good 90 year run on product.
On, you know, the same manufactured products. Yeah, that you could keep reusing throughout the industry.
So, you know, one of the things, you know, as I'm going through everything, I'll circle back to that a little bit on which tool is the better one.
But why are we still talking about new refrigerants? So the 454B and the R32 are two of the top.
Two primary candidates. From what we're seeing in the industry as new refrigerants.
But we're also seeing things where people are looking at switching even to 290 and 744. Yeah, LoverHC's. Yeah.
So, so overall, what's that mean? That means more new tools, which trust me, being from my background with the Ritchie Tools side of the business,
we love it because that means more tools that we get to sell. But at the same time, my R&D department's not nearly big enough from the standpoint of we got to design all these new tools.
Imagine how much effort has to go into. Oh, my gosh, we just redesigned.
So, you know, I hate to tell you that, you know, that all that time you invested in developing this is a great product, but now we've got to tweak it a little bit. Right.
Exactly. So we're making changes all the time, right? So we're updating it. We're making everything better as we keep going.
So now our gauge sets are running higher pressures. The systems are running on overall less volume. Yeah, true.
So you get into the 744 and you're talking minuscule amount of refrigerant, even the 290s.
You know, a lot of these systems, they're running next to nothing. Yeah.
So one of the one of the calls that I get from our industry is, OK, so how do I put dye into an A3 system?
A system that already doesn't have much capacity. And I go, wait a minute, do you realize your system is a super small system? And if you're adding dye into that, it messes with that system capacity because you have dye in there.
Now we're compressing as we're going along with that small amount of refrigerant.
And we have a fantastic set of tools that is offered in our industry, not just by Ritchie, but by a lot of different manufacturers that can smell that smallest amount of propane leaking out of the system, you know.
And we're able to detect those leaks without putting dye in there. So it's one of those like, OK, people, I don't think you need the dye. I think you need the right set of tools.
The right tools for the job and the application. And that's really what this all comes down to is the right tools, right? Sure.
As we keep going forward, we're going to keep seeing that we have to have better and better tools.
One of the things that is scaring me right now with our marketplace is and there have been different talks with different presenters throughout this series that they're telling you, don't worry, everything's safe.
But my biggest concern is we have a recovery machine right now that when it goes down to atmosphere, it shuts off. OK, all right.
Yeah, we don't sell hardly any of those machines because nobody's looking at the one. That's not the market that we're promoting. Exactly.
But my concern is as we get into propane. So my background, I actually went to school for automotive engineering. Oh, nice.
So I studied fuels and stoichiometrics and where things go bang. Yeah, absolutely.
And so if you're taking and you're trying to recover a system, what's the reason you're recovering the system?
Typically, you have a leak. Some kind of repair. You need to do a repair, right?
So if you have a leak and you don't watch your system and you pull into a vacuum of any sort and you're actually pulling air in, right, your tank now becomes basically a bomb.
We're mixing fuel and oxygen and creating pressure in there and triangle of heat is ignition.
And you have the pressure, which will then basically cause that explosion.
And so all of these manufacturers that are saying, hey, we've got a three capable recovery machines.
Do you really do we have some way of making sure that they're not reaching a stoichiometric with a high enough pressure in that tank to stop it from blowing up?
I haven't seen it, man. And so that is that's a very interesting topic.
Because I, you know, I myself, I love refrigerants. I came into the refrigeration industry, you know, in that CFC and HCFC phase out.
And I love learning about refrigerants and our transitions. I think it's incredibly interesting.
I don't think myself had even stopped and think about that for a moment.
So my concern is that we're carte blanche saying, oh, it's going to be a safe refrigerant, which in in general terms, environmentally, it's safe for the environment.
It's safe from an overall standpoint. You know, if you have a small leak, as long as it goes into a big house, you know, I mean, you're talking it's a small amount of refrigerant.
It's not a problem. Right. But we really have to watch what is our recovery processes.
Exactly. If we actually go to recovery in the process. Exactly. Exactly.
So that's really what I wanted to get out here today and to talk about is how are we going to go forward with this?
Because, you know, I've talked with many people here on the floor through the convention and just had that heart to heart conversation with them is we need to make sure that as we're training the next level technicians, you know, it's not us that are going to be doing it.
It's those next levels that need to be able to go and say, hey, wait a minute. Am I doing the right things to make sure I'm staying safe?
You know, these refrigerants, I think, hopefully, will be around for a long time. I mean, if you look at it like propane, for instance, right, is a phenomenal refrigerant over all.
It's a wonderful refrigerant. R290 is a good refrigerant. It has fantastic heat transfer capabilities. Great heat transfer capabilities, low quantity that you need.
The systems can be much more compact and get your heat pulled out of the system way more efficiently.
I mean, overall, it's a win. As an industry, we just need to make sure we go down the right path.
We're prepared for that tool and procedure. I mean, everything we do comes back to proper procedures, right?
Exactly. Exactly. So that's where, you know, this whole thing I looked at and said, I think we need to make sure that people are aware.
I'm not saying, you know, this tool is the right tool, that tool is the right tool. We definitely can't use the manifold that we used yesterday. It's not going to be the case anymore.
As a manufacturer, we're coming out with new manifolds on a continuous basis.
We've got the digital manifolds that have all the refrigerants and we update that on a continuous basis.
And I mean, it's one of those some refrigerants have dropped off and gone away and some new ones have never made the cut.
They're out there for two days and then they're gone.
Like, wait a minute, you weren't as good as we actually anticipated you to be.
You know, and but it seems like they're making new refrigerants every day on almost a daily basis.
So it's one of those we need to make sure that as we go through, we're training our technicians, we're making sure they understand the hazards.
It's not something to be afraid of, though, right? I mean, you could be afraid of anything. Exactly.
I have people dealing with CO2 over in Europe a lot. The R744. Oh, that's the most popular refrigerator over there.
And they're not afraid of it from the standpoint of they use it. Right.
But they are afraid of it from the standpoint of what happens if I have a leak?
How do I keep it so that my hands don't get cold? Because, I mean, that's where cryogenic freezing comes from. Right.
It's the CO2. And so, yes, it's low quantities, but they are, you know, some of these systems are actually very big.
And if you have a leak, you'll you'll do a good job freezing body parts real quick.
And so, you know, we look at all those hazards and we try to implement that in our equipment.
But, you know, generically speaking, my my biggest concern is make sure that we're educating,
Educating on proper procedures and tools and practices. We need to look at that.
Is there things as manufacturers that we can put into the tools to make it so you can't?
Add additional safety capabilities. That atmospheric switch that we have on that one particular unit that isn't selling because the market's not accepting it.
Sure. And that's fine. But then how are we going to do it? Right.
If we're not going to do it that way, are we going to analyze what we're putting in to make sure we don't have a high air content going into that refrigerant tank?
You know, I mean, what is it as a market that we're going to do to make sure that we're doing the right thing?
Exactly. And that's there's so much of that right now.
You know, the thing that we hear the most as we're out walking around this conference is how do we as an industry move forward responsibly?
Right. Our booth, the first day that we had the flyer out, we had our A2L product listed that, you know, what's acceptable for A2L.
We ran out of those within the first two hours that we were open. It was crazy. A hundred of them were gone just like that, which is fantastic.
Well, yes, that's a lot. It says people are craving the education and that first day of knowledge.
People want to understand what's that mean? What does it look like?
And we have actually gone to the standpoint from our company standpoint of where we're actually labeling with an A2L on the product now so that people understand that.
Yeah, and understand what the capability is because we have, you know, as technicians and we get calls all the time from technicians and educators, contractors.
And that's some of the questions we get, you know, what equipment do I need for A2L?
I mean, people think about A2Ls and they're coming. No, A2L has been here for a very long time. We had A2Ls back when we had 410. We just didn't realize it.
A2Ls were around, have been around in Europe for a long time where they've been using them on a regular basis. And now we're starting to see them here.
So I just had my first conversation last week. So I was up in D.C. at the Johnstone Supply Spring Expo and after I did an A2L class to help prepare them on content for training on A2Ls.
And in that discussion after the end, I had one of the one of the Johnstones came up and said, I got a jug of R32 recovered refrigerant. What do I do with it?
I said, you got what? He said, yeah, you know, we're pushing R32 ductless systems like crazy up here.
He said, I've been in stocking them. He said, I was stocking the R32 ductless systems a year ago before they were even allowed by code in my area.
So we've been pushing them hot and heavy. And I've already had my first contractor bring in a jug of refrigerant from a big repair job that they did.
I had to stop my tracks and go, that's where we are with A2L refrigerants.
It's happening. Yeah, it's not a, oh, well, that will happen in the future. We need to prepare for it. We need to prepare our technicians now.
They need to understand what's that look like? What's that mean? And, you know, generically, I talked to a lot of the educators here as well through this conference.
And I let them know that, you know, the A2 is the least scary one for me, from my standpoint, looking at it with the pressurized tank and all that stuff.
It takes a lot of air. Like you'd really have to not be paying attention to these A2L systems to make that tank explosive.
Yeah, absolutely. Because it is such a low fire and the flammability and everything that the fire risk is so low.
When you get into those A3s, that's not the case. That's a different animal.
So, you know, as we move forward, if we tackle the A2Ls and we say, OK, how do we make this equipment the right equipment for that?
I think that, again, is one set where you're going to have those manifolds. You're going to have that equipment that's going to match for that.
And then as we start moving more into the A3s, which I think the industry is going to go that way just because of the ODP and the GWP and whatever the next acronym is that we haven't come up with yet.
TFA, Trifluoroacetic Acid. That's my vote for after GWP. I ain't going to go there right now.
But whatever the next one is, because it's coming, whatever it is, and we have to look at what does that mean for our next set of tools.
You know, so, you know, overall, we've we've we've come from the R12.
Phenomenal low, low, low pressure.
You know, we bled it off out of the cars and not everything else and never really thought about it.
And everybody could just refill whatever, you know, their home or their car.
You just go buy what you need to grab a tab license. What's a license?
Right. And then we went into the R22, which had a really good run.
You know, you were able to use that grandfather's gauge and your dad was able to use it and everything else.
And now we're into the, hey, that tool isn't going to last that long because that refrigerant is just not going to be around that long.
You know, and I don't think we've found the perfect refrigerant yet.
And I don't know that there's going to be a perfect refrigerant.
No, it's not. I think it's going to depend on the application.
Absolutely. It's going to be application.
And you're going to have a multiple variety yet of refrigerants that we're still going to be ending up going with.
And those tools aren't even going to be necessarily cross-functional.
We don't even know yet. I mean, look at R410A. There is no snap approved replacement for R410A yet.
Right.
So all of our new refrigerants, our R32, our R454s, right? All HFC based refrigerants.
R32 straight HFC, right? Lower GWP, but still HFC, which means as we continue down that HFC phase down, which is additional 30 percent next year, right?
There's only 15 percent of the HFCs left in 2039. So we look at that and we go, OK, no matter what, by 16 years, even the HFCs are going to be not very popular.