Hey good morning, this is the HVAC school podcast. It may not be the morning where you are but where I am it's certainly early in the morning and heading in to work, and I thought I'd talk to you a little bit about hard, copper versus short, copper in this short episode. But before we do that, I want to thank our sponsors carrier and carrier comm. We, our carrier factory, authorized dealers, which comes with a lot of extra perks if you're interested in what it means to be a carrier factory authorized dealer.

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So if you're, a residential service technician, you've probably not worked with much hard, copper and if you work in commercial refrigeration, you're, probably like. What's the big deal, we work on this stuff all the time, but here's the main thing that I want to point out that they're both good for different things. Soft copper is good. If you need to work it, you need to bend it by hand or with a bender.

You need to be able to swedge it or flare it than soft. Copper is the way to go, but soft copper does not hang well and it is not very structurally sound. Obviously it's soft, and so I see a lot of residential companies use soft copper where they ought to be using hard cover. So as an example, let's say: you're gon na be running, copper and you're gon na be hanging it through a space.

Maybe it's a light commercial space or maybe even it's an attic and if you're gon na be running copper through an attic or through a crawlspace. Over any amount of distance, then you really should be using hard copper for that hard, copper is straight. It's more rigid. You can strap it up more easily, a lot of residential guys, don't really think about how to strap copper.

They just sort of hang it with regular duct, strap or something, and that's not the way to go. You want to use yoona, strut and special clamps, there's several different clamps that are made for hanging hard, copper, refrigerant lines that are insulated. So that way, the insulation isn't crushed. There's clamps: maybe that company called hide resorb that we use a lot and many others beeline make some clamps that are designed specifically for copper, and you want to make sure that you get the ones that allow for the insulation and don't crush the insulation.

There's saddles that are made that you can hang on the underside. Let's say you're hanging some strut via all thread. Then you can mount them inside the saddles. If you look inside grocery stores, look up in a grocery store motor room or in the back room of a grocery store.

You'll see this a lot. That's the kind of the typical way and again, like I said for those of you who work in refrigeration, you're kind like what's the big deal here. The other thing is: if you are working with hard copper, you can bend it and swedge it and flare it, but you have to heat it up. First, you got to kind of heat it up to that cherry-red temperature and then let it cool.

And then you can work, it, that's called a kneeling, and so if you need to flare or swedge or bend copper, you just have to anneal it first heat it up to that temperature and then let it cool down, and so you can work it in that Way the main reason I think that most companies don't use the hard copper is because you can't really fit it in your vehicle. They generally come in 20-foot lengths, it's sort of the standard and carrying that around in a service vehicle. It's very very difficult service, install vehicle, and so a lot of companies just don't think about it. But if you are going to be mounting copper along a wall on the outside, well, you should mount the strut to the wall, use the straps anchor it.

Let's say you're going to be running it, where the copper has to fly for three feet from a wall to a condenser, it's better to use hard, copper, not only because that hard copper is gon na, be straight. It's gon na look a lot nicer, but also because the hard copper is much more structurally rigid. Let's say a kid comes along and steps on it. Kid comes along and steps on some three-quarter inch.

Soft copper well he's gon na bend it steps on a three-quarter inch, hard, copper, it's not gon na do a thing you can probably just stand on it. Maybe buddy jump on it for that matter, and it's not gon na Bend, and so the point of this short podcast is really just to get you thinking about the applications of when to use hard, copper and when to use soft, copper and again, I understand that Residential technicians love their vendors, and so they love bending the soft copper not and that's fine you're running the line say you're going into a condenser or whatever that's great, but if you need to run straight over a long distance or you're gon na need to hang Copper or you need to make copper, look, really neat and square over a wide range say. You got a whole bunch of condensers that are lined up in a row and you need to feed each of them with a line set well hard covers the way to go. You're not gon na make soft copper look really nice in that application.

So there you have it that's really. All I had today is just kind of opening your mind to using hard copper versus soft copper. Obviously, if you are working with hard copper, you got to haul it on top of your vehicle, so you got to be set up for that. The other thing with hard copper is that hard copper has often these rubber plugs.

That kind of go on the inside and a common mistake that guys make when they're assembling hard copper is forgetting to take those rubber plugs out, because you can actually put a coupling over top of them and that's a big no-no. So be really careful of that. With any copper that you're working on you don't want to work with open pieces if you're fitting up a line set or whatever you want to make sure that you're keeping them plugged and sealed until you're ready to use them. So first you purge nitrogen to remove all the air and atmosphere, and then you flow nitrogen, while you're brazing.

Those are absolute rules, no matter what type of copper you're using I get in residential. Why we primarily use soft copper, but the encouragement is to think about applications if you're running over long distances through an attic if you're running overhead - and you want it to be strapped properly hard. Copper is really the way to go if you're running it along a wall and say you know, multifamily those sorts of applications, then hard. Copper is the way to go in my opinion, and you need to look at the right way to strap it.

So it looks really neat. Alright, there you go. That's it thanks for listening, we'll talk to you next time on the HVAC school podcast.