When you are looking into purchasing refrigerant recovery units for your air conditioning shop or for your auto mechanic shop, you sure want to know what type of refrigerant recovery machine to get. In this article, two types of modern refrigerant recovery units are compared and contrasted. The two types are low pressure refrigerant reclaim unit and high pressure refrigerant reclaim unit. Regardless whether you are looking for refrigerant recycling units, refrigerant reclaim units, refrigerant disposal units, or Freon reclaim unit, by the time you finish reading you should be better prepared to see what type of the refrigerant reclaim equipment will suit you best.
Low pressure refrigerant recovery unit
To see what low pressure refrigerant reclaim units are used for, we need to look into short recent history of refrigerants.
Most air conditioning systems work on a principle that compressing gas heats up the gas and expanding gas cools the gas down. By repeating such compress-expand cycle we can effectively transport heat from the expander to the compressor part of the air conditioner.
When we look at the history of the modern refrigeration systems, we find that initial electricity driven air conditioners used refrigerant gases that were relatively easily compressible. The gases used initially include ammonia, methyl chloride, even propane. These were easily compressible but toxic to the humans. The next, very successful wave of refrigerant gasses was based on the gas Freon and many of its variants, called CFCs, or chloro fluoro carbons. The various variants, or blends, got names such as R-11, R-12, and the most famous, R-22. These appeared non-toxic to the humans.
Unfortunately, in the decades 1970-1990 it was scientifically established that the release of CFCs, including Freon, to the atmosphere, was detrimental to the Earth's protective ozone layer, and it turned out that each chlorine atom from a CFC can effectively remove tens of thousands of ozone molecules from the upper atmosphere.
The laws were passed in the early 1990's that prohibited the release of CFCs such as Freon to the atmosphere, while still allowing the use of CFCs in the Refrigeration Unit Suppliers and AC units. So the new type of a product, a refrigerant reclaim unit, was born. It enabled the transfer of Freons and similar CFCs from one, perhaps aging, unit to a new one.
Since Freon and similar CFCs are easily compressible, one needs a low pressure refrigerant reclaim unit to recover the Freon from an AC device.
The search went on for a non-toxic refrigerant which would not harm the ozone layer to replace Freon. The best we found so far is a refrigerant called R410A. However, that refrigerant is not as easily compressed as the Freons, which brings me to:
High pressure refrigerant recovery unit
High pressure refrigerant recovery units are required primarily for the recovery of the newest refrigerant, R410A, also known as the Puron refrigerant. In addition to changing the entire air conditioning system, also most refrigerant recovery units had to be changed to include Puron. Puron, while being ozone layer friendly, and non-toxic to humans, is simply not highly compressible. So it requires higher pressures to run in air conditioning units, more powerful compressors in refrigerant reclaim units, as well as stronger refrigerant recovery tanks. So if you are considering recovering Puron in addition to having a CFC recovery unit and a Freon recovery unit, you must get a high pressure refrigerant recovery unit.
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