NEWS
INCORPORATING COLD CHAIN
Rapid Recovery for
refrigerants is real
By Ilana Koegelenberg
A
fter hearing about the Rapid
Recovery service for so long,
I finally managed to arrange
a site visit to see for myself if it really is
possible to recover such large quantities
of refrigerant in such a short period of
time. It seemed too good to be true.
But it wasn’t.
On Tuesday, 25 September, I headed
to site to meet the guys from A-Gas
and Cool Tech who had been tasked
with removing over 1.3 tonnes of R134a
from an old chiller plant to facilitate
maintenance. The Cool Tech team had
found 27 leaks on the system and had
to completely pump it down before
they could start repairs.
The chiller plant, that comprises two
350kW York chillers, was commissioned
in 1995 and had been giving problems
for a while now. Cool Tech was called
in to sort out the maintenance of the
massive, double-storey plant room in
Johannesburg, but it was quite the task.
Micah Kupfer, operations manager
of Cool Tech, was on site with some
of his technicians to oversee the job.
Their company does the maintenance
on a variety of large commercial and
industrial HVAC sites, and refrigerant
recovery is a huge headache for them
sometimes, he explained. For a job
such as this, it would easily take a few
weeks to just get the refrigerant out — a
huge waste of time and capacity, as
someone would have to be on site the
whole time to oversee this slow recovery
process. Not to mention the hassle of
purchasing recovery cylinders and
trying to get rid of the refrigerant once
it was all recovered. Needless to say,
Kupfer, too, was excited to see if this
would work.
The sad truth is that recovering
refrigerant is simply just too much of a
hassle for many contractors who end
up (illegally) venting the refrigerant
instead. Definitely not ideal for the
environment and very risky if they
get caught with huge fines and even
possible jail time on the cards. What is
the alternative, though?
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1. The two York chillers charged with over a tonne of R134a that needed to be
recovered.
2. Only one technician was needed to set up the entire Rapid Recovery system.
3. Lifting the 1-tonne cylinders onto site to be filled with the recovered refrigerant.
4. All set up and good to go. All the refrigerant was recovered that same afternoon still.
5. The plant was built in 1995 and had become in desperate need of maintenance.
COLD LINK AFRICA • November/December 2018
www.coldlinkafrica.co.za
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