(Yes, my AC units broke and the time to even get a technician to look at them, was so long I researched how to diagnose them and do the easy fixes, ran into the EPA requirement, studied the material and got my EPA certification, bought a bunch of gear off Amazon and refrigerant from a “good old boy” at an exorbitant price (global shortage, plus most is sold in palette quantities), and fixed my own unit in half the time it would have taken to get an appointment with a professional company. The first unit is working. If I succeed at the second unit I’ll even be money ahead. Of course if my yak had already been shaved maybe it could have tolerated the heat.)
Venting refrigerant is illegal in most of the world but it's almost impossible to enforce and compliance is typically quite low (good data is, as you can imagine, difficult to find). CARB in California now requires owners of large refrigeration systems (>250 lb of charge IIRC) to report all refrigerant recharge to the state so at least there's some efforts underway.
A lot of the newer refrigerants are much safer for the environment, but you are still allowed to recharge and buy older refrigerants. Only the manufacture of new refrigerants is prohibited.
If you came away knowing not to vent, to use the right refrigerant, not to vent, to take your waste to the reclaimer, not to vent, to leak test with nitrogen, not to vent, and that you can be fined $43,000/day for not having your paperwork in order… then it worked enough.
It can not be too onerous, because people need the work, and people capable of solving systems of differential equations have better opportunities than work on them.
So the EPA cert by itself isn't usually enough to work professionally (unless your repairing home refrigerators).
Unfortunately, my r410a units regularly vent to the atmosphere because flare fittings suck.
Now it’s probably fair to say that /r/HVAC isn’t a completely representative sample, but at least it gives me a good feeling that the situation probably isn’t as catastrophic as this article indicates (in the states at least, it’s probably worse in Indonesia like in the article’s example)
You will need something under $1000 of gear and supplies to get going, half that if you can rent an evacuation unit. (I can't find any near me.) You need to store your refrigerant outside where it won't get over 49°C, 120°F (assuming R410a) So it rates pretty high in the "pain in the ass" factor.
For modern home units, the circuit boards and motor controllers seem to be a common failure point and these are crazy expensive from the manufacturers anyway and hard for you to buy as an individual. If you have an older unit before variable speed compressors and fans then you can probably get commodity parts to replace them.
The requirements seem extreme, though I did break a fan blade in my indoor air handler while checking its temperature, total noob mistake. If I were hiring a trusted contractor I'd want someone better than me!
Ideally there might be room for a grade of lightly trained technician which can handle the easy stuff and do some of the time consuming diagnostics then just throw in the towel and say "You need a better man than I."
The other day we bought an indoor tent for our toddler. The frame is composed of wooden sticks with some having an aluminium tube glued at the end to connect it to another stick.
One of the tubes was slightly damaged, so the other stick wouldn't go in.
Fortunately the ceramic base of a (broken) LED bulb is harder than aluminium, so after some twisting I managed to file down the tube to size.
Please write more or make a video or something. I have been thinking very seriously about doing exactly this.
HVAC is an absolute racket in my area, and nothing is ever a single-visit fix. If you don't sign up for their "maintenance plan" the fix mysteriously doesn't last very long.
So many questions. r/BrandNewSentence
Though depending on your local vernacular and what "yak" might mean to you I can see room for confusion.
I used to go to a town named "Knob Lick" which my English acquaintances found quite an amusing town name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene
Interestingly the best option for a refrigerant may be CO2 itself, which if collected from the atmosphere has no global warming or ozone depletion issues. The only drawback is CO2 refrigeration equipment has to operate at relatively high pressure, but this isn't a major problem:
https://www.rsi.edu/blog/hvacr/carbon-dioxide-refrigerant/
Getting rid of the chloro-flouro stuff makes lots of sense, but not producing any of it in the first place would be even better.
Both of those mean specialized factories, supply chains, and labor. AKA higher prices unless it becomes the dominant option.
Also, in larger systems higher pressures is a safety concern.
None of that is a showstopper. But those are severe hindrances for a technology. A government can just fix every one of them, but then it would require government involvement.
They had to shut it down and redo all of the welding (I don’t recall if they fixed existing welds or pulled the whole thing apart). Afterward they still got complains about the smell, swore they’d fixed the leaks and the neighbors were imagining it. I suspect some esters were coming out the end of the pipe, and/or the dust everywhere around the place was saturated from the pilot project and every time the wind shifted they got another nose full.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifluoroiodomethane
https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=93007...
In principle you could also go without phase change refrigerants with the reverse Brayton cycle, essentially running gas turbine cycle in reverse. But AFAIU these are not competitive with phase change refrigerants in the usual temperature ranges used for AC's and refrigerators.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007964251...
So far it has been a problem for scale. There are very few consumer appliances that use CO2 as a refrigerant. I can think of 1 right now - and it's 3x the price of it's alternative that uses traditional refrigerant.
They’re also more efficient, but more expensive. So I wonder how much of the price differential is the refrigeration loop, and how much is using more expensive processes to offset the lower tonnage for the system.
Also good and cheap!
Regardless they are very widely deployed in existing equipment which can't be upgraded, so a program to collect and burn these gasses is a very good thing.
Science doesn't work like that though. You can't study something until it does exist. However, we just don't study something long enough (we just can't think of everything to test against) to see what the true long tail effects will be.
Yes, there's lots of things that would be amazing if we could un-invent them. But wishing won't make it so. We just need to be much more ammenable to the fact that somethings don't work and just STOP using them rather than shrugging shoulders and kicking the proverbial cans down the road
It turns out running a business where you give people money in exchange for their junk is suprisingly harder than you would think.
The degree to which not screwing up the environment has become partisan for some people is really quite depressing.
Straws and plastic bags in developed countries with working waste disposal systems are another example. Each time someone pulls a half-dissolved paper straw out of their drink, you've just made a person that is less willing to support environmental measures.
In fact, now that OP has jogged my memory, I might start using this as an interview question for junior marketing people. If given a budget of $10K, how would you deliver me enough people willing to sell me 1000L of 10+ year old refrigerant? I bet the answers would be revealing and almost all wrong.
Is it too much to roll down a window?
Why are those who don't use air conditioning paying the "environmental refrigerant tax"?
How much refrigerant would be saved if vehicle air conditioning was an additional expense?
Above 30°C it's actually more comfortable to just ventilate the train instead of A/C.
Come to Texas and drive your car with no AC and just the windows rolled down. Please, I'll let you stay at my house for the duration of the experiment just to watch you bitch about the heat. I'll even record it for your socials so you can just show everyone how amazing your idea was.
As a human, with a normal body temperature of 98.6 degrees F. If the outside air temperature is 100 degrees F, then having your windows rolled down will actually increase the speed at which your body heats up to match ambient temperatures.
This makes driving motorcycles in desert areas where air temp is > 100 degrees especially dangerous as it can quickly lead to dehydration and heat stroke.
An A/C is better for the environment.
I used to live in Maryland. The summers there are brutal. On hot days, rolling down the window is like having a hair dryer pointed at your face.
I was talking with a friend of mine in Delhi, a couple of weeks back, when they were having the heat wave.
It's no joke. People are dropping dead at their workstations.
But in a decade or so, it will be the prevailing opinion. Some czar of the environment will go around deciding who gets AC, and telling others "You don't need AC". (Generally, this is decided by campaign donations and party support.)
Of course there is some negligible environmental impact that will come out in a college paper some point. But otherwise, the only thing people will notice is the rise in deaths of the elderly.
But this is a small price to pay. The environment is our god, and it demands sacrifice.
1. Scrappers likely don't have the skills, equipment or inclination that AC technicians do.
2. Those self-contained units typically have a lot less refrigerant than the split AC systems (or large chillers) we see, which require venting in order to remove once installed. A refrigerator might have only 30 grams of charge, vs a split system with 2-3 kg.
1. Already operates at negative pressure with a high enough temperature and long enough residence time 2. Alkaline environment neutralizes the HF and HCl that are produced when the refrigerant burns. 3. Already consuming massive amounts of energy so the marginal energy use is negligible. 4. Allows use to use an existing facility instead of building our own -- great for developing countries where building infra is harder (but cement plants are everywhere).
[1] https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/TEAP-DecX...
The tax deductibility and employer gift matching means you could go a lot farther for each dollar a donor is willing to spend.
So a regular home refrigerator has about 60 grams of R600a in it. It has a global warming potential of 3. That means if you illegally vent it to the atmosphere, you are doing the same environmental harm as venting 180 grams of CO2.
However, if you hire a trained technician to extract the gas for you, and he drives 10 km to get to your house, then his van (a brand new average van getting 158 g/CO2 per km) will emit 1580 grams of CO2.
Considering this, it seems crazy to bother regulating this stuff.
I'm confused about this remark about price. Isn't there a market of buyers and sellers? Why would one sell carbon credits below market price?
I have a startup in this space but we mostly do MRV, always looking for solutions like yours to link to our clients and contribute to this new economy. Send me an email (check profile) to get in touch!
It’s your usual market pricing adoption curve. And frankly, their solution is more effective than paying to not cut trees down.
Thus I am absolutely in agreement with recollecting, reselling, and reusing, but in strong opposition to destroying what would otherwise be useful. The latter only encourages the replacement of equipment in a continued cycle of forced obolescence, which might be far worse from a CO2 perspective.
I've always found it a little amusing that R152a, which is a pretty good replacement for R12, you can buy in "gas dusters" and legally vent all you want to the atmosphere, but it's technically illegal according to the EPA to recharge an R12 system with it.
This is from the viewpoint of someone who restores and repairs old appliances. Environmental considerations aside, I'd never vent deliberately, just because of how expensive and rare these substances are now --- and not surprisingly, there is an underground market for banned refrigerants too.
Thus, "you're throwing away money if you vent refrigerant" is probably going to have a much bigger effect than mentioning "climate change".
Old designed for R12 were not engineered to meet those guarentees. R152a can be huffed to get high, and doing so can be lethal. Thus we know that prolonged exposures to high enough concentrations of R152a can cause fatal cardiac arrhythmia.
So it is fundamentally a safety concern. Just an unfortunate one, considering how good it otherwise is as an R12 replacement.
R12 on the other hand is used a fire suppressant on submarines.
I don’t think banning the use of a high flammable gas in systems originally designed to operate with a fire suppressant is a bad idea.
I think it’s quite reasonable to assume that designers of R12 systems didn’t worry about accidental leaks into enclosed environments with ignition sources, on account of an R12 leak being completely safe in that situation. R152a on the other hand, that’s just an explosion waiting to happen.
Many companies are certainly looking to buy the cheapest credits they can find but there are promising indications that things are changing, led by companies like Stripe and Shopify.
I winced a bit at their attacks on low quality carbon credits because the very idea has been under sustained attack by climate change deniers for decades.
Oh, rich people just paying money for carbon credits and still flying around the world, that's not real it's all fake, like climate change.
Obviously some are better than others, but the concept itself is useful and worth fighting to improve, not write off.
Or coldness I guess.
I believe R-12 and R-22 were phased out because of their ozone depletion potential. In the states R-134a replaced those.
R-134a was great! No more ozone layer damage!
But its global warming potential is still too high[2] to comply with various climate change pacts and laws (I think California has a law that will limit refrigerant GWP to 750 in 2023 [3] ).
It's a bit weird for consumers though because if you're buying an air conditioner/heat pump right now then it's probably still R-134a.
Who wants to buy hardware that will last for 15+ years but could cost a significant portion of the original unit price to refill in the event of a leak or installer error?
[1] https://us-ac.com/usac-news/r410a-phasedown/
[2] https://www.daikin.com/corporate/why_daikin/benefits/r-32
[3] https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/January%2...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants
It's not a very good one for general space cooling for the reasons others have stated here, at least near typical ambient conditions. Water / steam are often used for space heating, though there the energy conveyed is typically from combustion rather than via a heat pump as in an air conditioner.
Water does work well for cooling high-temperature equipment such as automobile engines and power plants.
Both typically operate at or above the standard atmospheric boiling point of water.
The problem is that if you want to reduce the temperature below ambient you need some kind of expansion cycle, either with a single-phase gas, or something that has the gas-liquid phase transition somewhere in the temperature of interest. Water doesn't really work for common AC or refrigeration uses.
I knew the unit was into EoL based on age, but when something seems to work fine it's really hard feel like preemptive replacement is the right choice or priority.
At least in the US R-22 is so expensive and people still repair and recharge units not infrequently. Wonder how reasonable or possible capturing leaking refrigerant would be. I was watching it leak and vaguely wondered if it would be possible to catch in a large umbrella.
That said, ‘reduce, reuse’ comes before ‘recycle’ for a reason. If the unit still worked and was reasonably close efficiency wise, it’s just a waste to replace it when it still functions.
Generally this kind of failure was a couple hundred dollar fix. Pull the compressor, braze on a new one, flush the system, vacuum it down, and refill.
Only now, the refrigerant can cost a grand, the markup on a $200 Emerson scroll is 4x, the fact that you need a license to work on the system means the tech charges $200 an hour, and it all adds up toe selling someone a new system, that is likely going to last 1/2 as long because R410 runs at 2-3x the pressure, the major manufactures have penny pinched every gram of metal out of the condenser/compressor tubing so its as thin as possible, and a half dozen other factors means that the 30 years a good R22 system would run for is unheard of now.
I looked into an R134a conversion for my 1990 car about 10 years ago and found that any remaining R-12 would need to be vacuumed out of the system and collected for re-use. I elected to just live without A/C for a few more years and let the junkyard collect the refrigerant when I ended up scrapping the car.
It's HFC-152a[1]. Looks like it's a much "friendlier" refrigerant than 134 (and of course vastly better than R-12)
In any case, it's still amazing to me how restricted these are when used as a refrigerant, but then they're sold to consumers to spray on whatever they want. It really undercuts the environmental impact of these chemicals.
So it's not required that it's CO2 or R290, but rather than you can use any refrigerant that has a GWP of 1 or less.
R290 seems an ideal refrigerant, especially since the technology to use it as a refrigerant is so old/mature. The challenge is that it's /highly/ flammable. This is true of most refrigerants with a GWP less than 1. R1234yf partly exists because of a desire to reduce flammability.
In theory, reclaiming gases that are still unrestricted for production/import is at least as good as destruction from a climate perspective. However, virgin refrigerant is really cheap until import bans take hold -- so there is never a point where it is both economically worthwhile and impactful for climate. In theory you could use credits to boost the economics around reclaim but you end up with a very messy additionality story. My sense is that most reclaimers are very low-margin or even loss leaders for the companies that produce/sell the gas!
Anyway the short answer is that it's harder for us to figure out in this first push, but we do intend to look into it more closely as we expand.
Eventually the gas will leave the system from a leak, unexpected damage, shoddy technicians, or the unit being destroyed
I often hear that r12 cools better but that's not true at all according to thus Perdue study. There may be other factors though.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D...
I think that came about as a result of people filling old R12 systems with R134A and then complaining that it didn’t work as well as before, back in the 90s.
I heard they're switching next year away from R410a to something new. But... not propane?
He definitely had a bottle of nitrogen on hand because he used that when pressure testing the new system. And it was just a replacement of the evaporator coil and the condenser, so the line set was reused. Your explanation makes perfect sense, thanks!
This raises a few questions in my mind. TFA makes it sound like the refrigerant boogeyman is a problem of fixed quantity. It sounds like after we've destroyed all the refrigerant, it can cause no more harm, but clearly these refrigerants must be manufactured on a continual basis?
Can refrigerants not be recycled? What materials go into the creation of refrigerants? Is anything of value lost in destroying refrigerants, besides the energy that went into making them?
The organisation at work here are targeting developing countries who've been much slower to migrate to less harmful refrigerants, but old units are being cycled out for new ones, so new demand for janky old refrigerant (from failing units, so likely contaminated) is lower than you might think.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
"The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income."
We never pay our partners more than the market price of new refrigerant, removing any possibility of a perverse incentive. And because we use well-studied industrial processes, as approved by TEAP at UNEP, there’s no science risk: no carbon is going to bubble back out in 5 years, like you might worry about with soil, forestry, or other nature-based processes.Every time he does this with a single air conditioner, it has the same effect as burning 250 gallons of gasoline, which is more than enough to drive from SF to NY and back
It surely doesn't consume 250 gallons of gasoline equivalent to ship the collected gas.
Edit: where is this 6% number coming from? https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
Chemical & petrochemical (3.6%): energy-related emissions from the manufacturing of fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, refrigerants, oil and gas extraction, etc.
2. That 6% is based on the most recent IPCC report which estimates 1.4 GT from HFCs, and another ~1.4 from CFCs+HCFCs, so 2.8 total. OWID seems to get its data from climatetrace, I haven't dug into their data, but if I'm reading that correctly it looks like that is only energy usage from manufacturing, rather than direct emissions of the gases. Looks like maybe this breakdown just ignores refrigerants, which is unfortunately common.
However, in a fridge/freezer the refrigerant circulate in metallic tubes, usually made of copper which have great conductivity. And what do you think happen when you leave copper tubes unattended at night? Copper thieves come and scrap the fridge with no regards for the refrigerant being released to the atmosphere…
It was a huge political failure, which was completely focused on the "ozone hole" rather than making wise decisions. Just banning CFC's as propellants, and all the other uses which basically dumped huge quantities into the atmosphere and putting licensing requirements around their use, and enforcing the recapture (aka AC techs are tracked for how much they buy vs return), and not filling leaky systems would have solved the immediate problem. But the legislative bodies were also convinced to legislate a change in equipment/refrigerant to these newer compounds which had a huge positive effect on many manufactures and AC installers bottom line. And now we have to do it again because the people warning about the dangers of these new (frequently patented) refrigerant compounds were ignored.
Like the story about American democracy, this is going to be one of those cases of trying all the wrong approaches before doing the right thing.
Pro tip: there are certain advantages to living in a place where not everyone is an engineer in high tech.
"Our plan is simple and has zero technical risk" What do you see as the biggest risk? And what is your assessment for why no one has pursued this approach before?
I've done it with my home office room A/C, a small 12,000 BTU unit. I couldn't believe it when I found out you can do that.
They say R290 is cleaner, purer, blah blah, but the gas from a simple propane tank you can get anywhere works fine. Remains to be seen for how long, so far 2 summers and going strong.
It’ll be really interesting to what happens as the next gen of refrigerants rolls out. There was a great link on hn recently about them but I’m unable to locate it.