Ep.2 Troubleshoot with Pressures vs Saturation

In this video podcast episode I dive into the debate to troubleshoot with refrigerant pressures or refrigerant saturation. This play's into the analog gauges vs wireless gauges conversation as well. Where do you stand hvac technician? 

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Transcript

 So let's talk about, you know, saturation and pressures and when we're troubleshooting or we're doing any kind of refrigeration work, you know, there's always a lot of debate around, okay, well, you know, we should use saturation nono. Well, a lot of guys still use pressure and you, you really get into the weeds of the fact of, well, isn't.

Pressure saturation and saturation and pressure. Like, aren't they kind of all the same? And there's a lot of discussion, there's a lot of thoughts revolving around it. I would like to get my thoughts out there and just kind of where I stand on the subject ultimately. You know, kind of going back whenever I first got into the trade, uh, honestly, I didn't even know what saturation was.

You know, my very first interactions with it, we didn't even use temperature clamps. We didn't check super heat, we didn't look at Subcool. Uh, as an apprentice, I was strictly taught literally beer can cold. And if you're not familiar with that, you're actually holding the suction line. And the way that they taught me at least, was when the suction line feels like a beer can, it's done.

You're charged. Everything's good in the. And what's crazy about that is there's actually a breakover point when you're charging refrigerant, and usually it means you're overcharged. Actually, you know, come to find out later, but when you're charging refrigerant, you'll feel the suction line and it will feel slightly warm to cool, and then all of a sudden that line will just, you'll feel the flood happen.

Basical. It'll just go to, all of a sudden it'll feel legit. Like you're holding a beer can in your hand. You're charged your system's good if you walk up to a system and you don't feel that something's wrong a lot of the time, you know, some of the guys that I worked with, yeah, they, they legitimately wouldn't even use the high side of their gauges hardly ever.

It was almost always walk up. Throw the low side on, see what the pressure said. Oh, that's good, that's bad, whatever. Uh, and then start adding refrigerator. If they didn't fill the fill the beer can. Uh, so anyway, an evolution of that. There's a lot of people that really start to memorize numbers, and what I mean by numbers is pressures specifically.

They start to memorize pressures instead of actually start, instead of actually learning. Saturations. And there's two lines of thought here, from what I understand, at least in my perspective. And I sit back le look at it, think about it. One line of thought says that, you know, okay, I'm working on a ton of four 10 A equipment and I know that roughly I should see between X and Y on my pressures typically.

And when I start talking to other technicians, and you really see this in guys. Been around a little bit longer or maybe who are newer into it and just have less experience. I don't know. You'll see that they, they talk in in pressures a lot. You don't hear a lot of conversation about temperatures. And what I mean by temperatures, I do mean saturation.

Now this doesn't mean that the, these guys aren't actually taking temperature readings and actually trying to check things. But one of the first things they'll do is before they start checking their temperatures, like the super heat and subcool, so the pipe temps, before they actually start that process, they will just sit there and they'll see what their pressures are, and then they'll start to kind of get an idea of, okay, well my suction looks a little low here, my highest side's a little low.

Or maybe I. A little bit high pressure on the high side. My low side looks a little low on pressure compared to what I'm used to seeing. Maybe that's some kind of indicator that we've got whatever issue going on. High pressure restriction on the liquid line. Dryers a common one. I hear. Uh, there, there's, there's a handful of reasonings behind those pressures specifically, and then at some point they will start to dive.

Once they feel like they have a, a kind of an entry level understanding as to what's happening based off of strictly the pressures. Me personally, after I got into school and I began to, you know, actually study refrigeration, process principles and all the proper things about it, that's when I learned about using, uh, super heat subcool and actual saturations.

And I, I learned what those things were. So obviously that's not what I do today. Been following me for any length of time. So the, the second line of thought goes to, we are gonna look at temperatures only. Essentially, you know, instead of when you hook up gauges instead of your eyes going to what the pressures are doing, instead you hone in more on what the temperatures are doing.

And this is one good thing about, say, digital gauges. While digital gauges do give you, uh, Uh, a, a saturation temperature or, or, I mean, a pressure, your eyes get attracted to the saturation temperatures more naturally in my experience when you're dealing with digital gauges. So it's, it's easier for somebody that's using that to, especially if they're training on that and they're, that's where they're getting their experience to kind of think of it in that way.

Whereas, you know, the alternatively, obviously, analog would. Would be the other choice. When you think of a system from a saturation perspective, you're looking at strictly what the temperatures are doing, and that's gonna directly correlate to your super heat and subcool. But even let's say you take a similar approach and you walk up and you've put your gauges on, you haven't even started checking temperatures yet, and you're just strictly looking at what are my saturations up front at the end of the day?

Doing the same basic thing. So, you know, I challenged the thought, what is in, in today's refrigeration process and refrigerants and all the different options we have on the table, what does pressure actually mean anymore? My stance on this is pressure is nothing more than just relative to the refrigerant.

What I train is that you only need to know pressure to know saturation. Now, obviously I'm kind of cutting to the chase a little bit here. Id. To the, uh, monitor saturation and monitor temperatures first, not necessarily pressures, but I don't think somebody that that looks into pressures is necessarily wrong.

But I think there's a margin of error that you have to be careful with. Now, in my last podcast, there was a comment that made a, that made mention of, you know, people that are strictly looking at pressures, so aka people who use analog gauges over somebody that uses a digital gauge. You know, they were stating that somebody with analog gauges, it gets more honed in on pressure over temperature or anything.

Which could be very true if you're dealing with somebody that doesn't, uh, properly use a PT chart or hell today an app, you know, just use your, um, uh, the Danfoss, uh, was it ref tool? I think it is. Or you can convert pressure to temperature. So it's really easy to do that. But this is my point today, you know, and sometimes maybe guys aren't doing that because usually analog.

We'll have at most three saturations built into the gauge, and most of the time we're working with a lot more than just three refrigerants. And that's saying if they have a newer gauge, that it has more newer refrigerants. So the overall premise to that thought was that, so, okay. You know, because of the limitations of analog, that the analog people don't pay enough attention to saturation and trying to troubleshoot things via pressure.

Is a problem. You know, they, that leads to systems being overcharged. And I think a lot of the guys who are undertrained or don't, just don't understand this industry well enough, end up relying so heavily on the pressures that they're used to, that they can't even, they don't even start to recognize what those pressures are relating to in terms of temperature.

And that used to be a real thing. Honestly, it, it's not. It's not gone in by today's standards in the trade. I think the trade has come a long way in that it's not as hung up on that type of thinking as it used to be. I think a lot more people, because of exposure of social media and otherwise have gotten a lot more used to using, uh, actual saturations and super heats and so forth anyway, but he is, he is correct in the fact that yeah, a lot of systems, it's very easy.

Walk up to a system that's having, say, an airflow issue, for example, and your first impressions when you see that is it's a low charge because everything in the system in terms of high side pressures and and low side pressures are relative to how much load is being added to the evaporator at the core fundamentals of refrigeration.

The less load you have on the evaporator, the lower the overall system readings are gonna be. The more loads you have, the higher your readings from the high side to sub cooling, to super heat to EVA saturation, go down the list. Everything is proportional to load. So if you have a, uh, Eva that has a low input heat, meaning it's got an airflow issue, you end up in a situation where it can look like a low charge.

If you, if you, if you don't understand how to. Saturation well enough to start to interpret what's happening. Your, your first instinct will go to low charge and typically somebody like that isn't checking super heat because, well, one of the first indicators that would, uh, contradict that is you would have a low super heat with your low pressures, and that would immediately tell you that it's not a charge issue.

Anyway, that's a whole nother, so yes, that technician ends up making the decision that because of both high and low side being low, I'm just going to make a quick charge adjustment. Looks like we're just a little low. I've seen this, you know, a hundred thousand times customer, trust me, you know, I am an experienced guy.

That's fine. And then he dumps, you know, five, 10, whatever, how much refrigerant he gets in there. Uh, maybe gets the high side up a little bit, right? The low side, barely budge. Uh, and then the high side might increase slightly because he is just dumping extra charge in that doesn't need to be there. And then he feels like he accomplished something and, and then the callbacks happen and that leads to somebody else getting called, or a different technician maybe same company, different tech, uh, goes out, looks at it again.

And checks it properly this time, and then finds the overcharge, da da da da da da da. We gotta fix that and then fix the airflow problem. Welcome to the news time. So you asked for it, we voted on it. Everybody almost unanim unanimously agreed that they wanted a, uh, news time added or a news segment to the podcast.

So here we go. Here's our. Very first news segment. Aon has apparently announced that they are committing to a uh, R 4 54 B refrigerant. That's gonna be their product lineup that they're gonna be launching with as their four 10 a replacement per their release. They're gonna be saying that, you know, sometime in the third quarter of 2023, Uh, a select group of their product line is gonna start to see that roll out.

And as they do, uh, we will start to see that more and more in the field. So be looking for that. That's actually a podcast topic that I'm probably gonna get into is some of the refrigerant standards and changes and the seer changes and how just we've got a lot of standards kind of shifting. Uh, this, that's, I've got it in mind to do some good research on that and try to help bring that as an educated topic to y'all.

Item number two, we had a, uh, there's a rumor that started a while back about, uh, jci possibly beginning to implement some kind of, Um, locks on their software versions, and we've seen some of this kind of stuff over time when o Carrier has done something similar with their, uh, newer, uh, control modules that they're putting in.

And heck on some of these cases, they're not even asking the customers for permission to come back and install these modules. A lot of times they just show up and, and just stick 'em in. And then we find out after the facts, you know, when, when nobody's really paying a. How do I know this or how do I get to make this claim?

Well, this literally happened to us on one of our chiller installs and where now we have to go through this special thing. They asked, not a single person permission, they just showed up and the doors were open one day. Put the stuff in regardless York. In their newer micro boards in the firmware for them, they have USB drives.

And I've gotten some feedback from, uh, guys out there in the field that those newer boards with the firmware, they have started to lock technicians out of it. So the original access codes that we used to be able to use to punch in and, and we would have, um, we'd be able to get to the service settings and the.

That is apparently gone for some of those machines. And so unless you're a JCI employee and able to plug in with a thumb drive, that is no longer an option on some of the newer stuff. Uh, I do just warn being careful. If you have a machine that has maybe an older firmware, be cautious to upgrade the, update that firmware because you could end up getting locked outta your machine and your ability to log into service.

As I said, this was a rumor for some time. I've heard this in several different places over time, and now we're starting to get reports that this is a real thing. This is happening. So you have been warned. So number three, given nav, a shout out for winning the innovation award at the A H R. Uh, expo. So their battery powered flaring tool, which has been, uh, a massive help for a lot of people out there.

I see stuff all the time on, uh, just social media in general where people love this tool. I think it's a great, uh, reward for them to get. I just wanna recognize that they, uh, they've, they've got a, a pretty good thing there. It's not something that I necessarily use myself. Really good folks out there have benefited from this thing, so just giving them a shout out for.

Number four, DeWalt is rolling out a impact connect system. And so what this is, is it's a attachment setup that's going to hook to your, uh, DeWalt, uh, impact drills. So from what I saw, Their first two main items that they're releasing with this, there's going to be a, uh, automated pipe cutter that you just attaches to it and it will cut it.

Much like the, I think this is kind of a response to some of Milwaukee's tools they've had for a while where, you know, they had the, uh, battery powered pipe cutter and then, uh, the other one is a flaring tool. Now, DeWalt historically has had like a pex flaring. Now we don't necessarily use PEX on our end of the industry, but it is part of that tool package.

Uh, and I know that DeWalt is looking to expand this as, as time moves forward. These are just kind of, Uh, probably two most popular products that they expect to sell and kinda get the system launched and started. This is something we see a lot of the tool manufacturers switching to are modular drills and headsets and various things, so this is pretty exciting in my opinion.

To see this type of product come out and just be a, a less, we have to carry on a regular basis and more tools into one. I I, I'm all about having a, a multi-tool type set up where things are condensed and consolidated into a more unified product. So I'm doing a lot of talking to get around the fact that, uh, there's, there's these two main mindsets.

The reason I prescribe to looking at everything through a lens of saturation is ultimately the pressure other than to be relevant to the, uh, to the, um, refrigerant means essentially nothing at the end of the day. And I train that way because in my opinion, you should have a much greater grasp of, uh, the, the temperatures and what those mean from saturation to super.

And forget about the pressures because here's what I've seen happen is when young guys especially, uh, they start dealing with refrigerants they're not familiar with. So I saw this very heavy with four 10 A in the early days. Heck, I struggled with this with four 10 A until I began to understand refrigeration better.

And then as things like 4 0 7  for example, have become more, uh, prevalent in the industry, I still see this today with some guys that they. They, they get spooked by the, by the refrigerant because they put too much stock into, well, I know. Okay, if I'm working on a four 10 A system, then I know my pressure should be between X and Y.

That's almost always how that conversation starts, and I ha I immediately stop the conversation, God, okay. At the end of the day, I don't care what your pressure is, what is your saturation and the, what that leads to is if you can stop worrying about the actual pressure and understanding that. Okay. Uh, 40 to 45 degrees of saturation is between, you know, x and y pressure of any refrigerant.

Instead of worrying about that specific refrigerants pressure, if you instead focus in on that refrigerant's temperature, then it doesn't matter what the refrigerant is, refrigeration principles apply across the board. I have to be careful what blends you have. So glide is when the boiling points between condensing and, uh, evaporation are different depending on how the blends of the refrigerant are.

Uh, I, I, I could, I've done entire classes on Glide before, so you can go check those out if you wish. Uh, but at the end of the day, as long as you use Glide. Uh, the, the principle of refrigeration is the same, regardless. It's not any different, and that's where I think that understanding saturations and understanding temperature over trying to memorize pressures per each type of refrigerant.

It's going to take you a lot further and maybe even help make refrigeration troubleshooting easier. I've seen several times where guys just get hung up on the pressures thing. They get very nervous because they're seeing a refrigerant that they don't, they're not familiar with how the. The pressures interact and why the pressures are the way they are when ultimately it, it doesn't matter what the pressures are.

I would like to hear a lot of thought on this. I would like to engage in a conversation and, and for you that. You know that? Yeah. Maybe you do the pressure side of it and that's where you put a lot of focus and weight and stock. You know, I'd like to hear your feedback and thoughts, you know, hearing me make my case about stop using pressure, focus on saturation.

Other than it being a change of mindset for you, why do you feel it is more efficient? To still pay attention to pressures instead of just talking in saturation. Now, for a lot of guys, I can absolutely recognize that at the end of the day, what are we actually arguing? Like what are we, maybe it's not even arguing.

What are we discussing? Aren't we discussing literally the same things? We're talking saturation to pressure, but isn't saturation pressure and pressure saturation? Yes, yes, yes. Is, yeah, this is exactly what we're discuss. Saturation is pressure, pressure, saturation. One of the things that has stood out to me is as an industry, I don't think we have a deep enough understanding of the relationships between the different theories in this industry.

And what I mean by that is, uh, take psychometrics and refrigeration principles, how many guys would equate the two side by side and the fact. They're one and the same in a lot of ways, and I'll take that a step further. How many guys understand that refrigeration principles are built on top of psychometrics?

I'll take that a step further. How many guys understand that psychometrics is the foundation that our entire industry is built on? You don't have air conditioning without psych. But yet I would, psychometrics is probably one of the least understood principles in our entire industry. You know, I see a problem with that.

I see that as a, as a major negative draw to what it is we're trying to do. That's one of the things that I would, I hope that this channel and this brand and everything about it. You know, this podcast will help some of you begin to rethink how you think about specific things in this industry. And the psychometric side of it is why I really push the importance of, you know, really learning the temperatures and not getting hung up on the, the pressures or the rules of thumb or any of the other things.

We have such a tendency to do because those temperatures live inside of that psychometrics chart and heat, you know, there's two types of heat and there's, there's, there's so much to what feeds into that. If we're not careful with how we think about refrigeration theory, we will, we will always struggle with understanding the troubleshooting that we're doing, and we'll always wonder why.

You know, we sometimes have a hard time giving the customer a proper answer as this is your. , this is all it is and this is what you need to do to fix it. It's not always gonna be that straightforward, and I think a lot of you have that problem because of the foundation laid. I've been through trade school, I know how they're taught to teach it, and I've been, I've read all those same books myself and it's not, I don't think it's a trade school problem.

I don't think the trade schools are wrong in how they're teaching, but I think there's a higher level of understanding and thinking about. Than most technicians take the time to read deep enough into, but at the same time, how many of you actually understand that there is a higher level to begin with, and that's.

If you take anything from this, understand that what you learned in school was basically step one of refrigeration principles in theory. And one of the things that didn't really happen, at least that they don't in, in my experience, what I've seen in all the trade schools I've worked with, they don't really marry psychometrics and refrigeration very much.

And that's something that if you really want to become the highest end technician that you want to be, uh, you need to develop. S a lot of guys have probably developed that over the years, naturally, and they just didn't realize the correlation. Nobody put labels to what that correlation was. And I am here trying to create maybe a label that doesn't exist.

I don't know, I don't, I don't know, maybe not. Maybe minimum. Trying to bring awareness to something very specific and important. A big question that I do get from several people is how have. Advance the way that I have in the industry for as young as I am, and honestly, this is one major way. It was, I started with my foundations and you'll be surprised at how much more clarity you have as to how things in this industry work and function when you have an extremely solid foundation.

Because so many trivial things just mean there's so much easier to understand and they, they, that's, that's how they become. They truly become that trivial because your foundation is solid enough to where the basic principle of what it is is just that simple to you. At the end of the day, check out true tech tools.

If you guys haven't, it's HVAC time. Uh, it's the promo code that'll get you 8% off. I really appreciate all the guys that go out there and do that. That does help support the channel and it, it gives me the resources I need to just kind of keep this thing going. And it's not a small. Keeping something like this moving forward and functioning and just whatever, it's, it's a lot.

It is a lot. If anybody is ever interested or if you're in a weird spot where you need some support or anything of that nature, go to my website, hvac time tx.com. I do offer, you know, tech support service. I offer consultations. I also offer personalized trainings. If you ever need any of that kind of stuff, please go on there.

Check it out, let me know if, whatever help you need, I'll try my best. Yeah, I get to you and give you a hands. A lot of it does get done either like over my lunch breaks or just after hours as I get home in the evenings and so forth. Or you know, a phone call conversation on the drive home for whatever situation you got going on.

So just the know that that resource is there to you if you ever need it. With that, I appreciate y'all. Hope you enjoyed the podcast and mtt guys, we'll see you around.