A hot topic in the world of refrigeration and air conditioning continues to swirl around refrigerants and what refrigerants will take hold and be used now, besides HFCs, and what will supplant HFCs in the future.

Amidst all the talk about refrigerants such as HCs, HFOs, and CO2, the vast majority of contractors are still working on HFC and HCFC systems. With that in mind, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, contractor Brian Baker of Custom Vac Ltd., offers some perspectives on the familiar refrigerants of R-410A and R-22. 

The concurrent 21st International Compressor Engineering Conference, 14th International Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Conference, and 2nd International High Performance Buildings Conference showed how dramatically the issue of global warming is impacting the refrigerant aspect of the HVACR industry and how complex the issue is.

When it comes to industrial and commercial refrigeration, high on the research radar screen are low GWP alternative refrigerants for everything from small bottle coolers and freezers to entire supermarket systems.

When the EPA’s  Greenchill’s Keilly Witman spoke at the Food Marketing Institute Expo last spring she said so-called natural refrigerants  would dominate the conversation and begin to appear in supermarkets in North America. Was she right?

Each year the DOE petitions Congress with a “Congressional Budget Request” to continue financing the projects that show promise and are deemed worth pursuing. What has the DOE been up to in the name of renewable energy and HVAC technology?

In anticipation of a greater reliance on reclamation, those providing such reclaim services have been looking at ways to serve contractor customers faster and more efficiently. An example is the announcement from Airgas Refrigerants Inc. of what it calls “a new approach and new technology for its reclamation business.”

Added to the Compute-A-Charge® brand is a wireless RF scale. With accuracy of 0.05 percent of reading, it is calibrated to strict NIST Standards at the factory. Compatible with high pressure R-410A, the unit is temperature-compensated over the entire operating temperature range to maintain charging accuracy.

A major concern in our industry today is the careless promotion of hydrocarbons, or hydrocarbon-based blends, as drop-in refrigerants. Even though HC’s do have many positive attributes, in their pure state they are classified A3, and therefore if misapplied can be very dangerous to use.

ICOR International has developed Tech Tools, a mobile application that will supply refrigerant knowledge and resources for anyone that carries an iPhone®, iPad®, or iPod touch®.