Alright, I'm gon na do this quick video to talk about basic refrigerant manifolds, or we call them often gauges. The gauges are actually these two components here. These two parts here so we'll often call them gauges, but really we should call it a manifold. This part here is the manifold body, and these come in a lot of different types.

I've had this set of gauges or this manifold for many many years. I think I don't know, probably in the the ballpark of 1213 years, something like that and I haven't cared for them because I don't use them very often, so I kind of pulled these out and it's either they're not in great shape. The covers missing on this one, but the first thing to note is that these are what measure the pressure and then we can convert that pressure into temperatures in order to calculate things like superheat and sub cooling. These scales on here on the inside show different temperatures for different refrigerants and when the needle points at those temperatures, that's what we call the saturation temperature that goes along with the pressure that's listed on the outside same thing.

Here, on the high side, you see that the gradiation change, so it's from 0 to 50 here and here 0 to 50 - is a much wider range. So you see this goes all the way up to 250 psi before it goes starts to go into overpressure. This one here goes all the way up to 500 psi, which is pounds per square inch gauge. The first thing is we calibrate these to atmospheric pressure, which is why it's psig pounds per square inch gauge as opposed to pounds per square inch.

Absolutely we had these calculated or calibrated to pounds per square inch absolute. Then we would have to set them to 14.7 PSI a at sea level in order to measure that pressure. So we are calibrating the zero at whatever altitude we're at or whatever barometric pressure Rhett. So you can see right off the bat that this one right here is a little bit off and I've already got the lens off.

So we're gon na go ahead and adjust this to zero it out. You can also see my needle here's a little bit bent. So it's not the best when I'm going to zero this out to atmospheric pressure and the process, I should take these off the Parkes to just to make sure that it's totally open to Emma sphere before I do this calibration right. I made the common error there of using a term that I didn't explain first, so these are our hoses and these here or what we call parks.

These do not actually communicate into the manifold at all. These actually are blocked off inside and it's just a place for you to thread your hoses on to so that way. Dirt and air and moisture doesn't get inside your hoses when you have them stored. You want them to be on these parks to prevent that, because we don't want any dirt or anything getting into these hoses.

This is what we call our high side. Gage high pressure gage the hose is red, for that now again is the cover of the hose mater, not really, but we use the standardized color so that that way we don't accidentally get them on the wrong side. The center port here is for our charging and recovery, and that's we use yellow for that, and then our left side is our low side, our low-pressure side, and it feeds up into this gage right here now for somebody who's brand-new to looking at a refrigeration manifold. The first thing that they assume is that these handles somehow have something to do with what you read on the gage and the fact is that, as soon as I connect this to a source of pressure as soon as I thread this on, it's going to measure The pressure on the gage this handle doesn't have anything to do with pressure being read by the gage.

This is open through here, regardless of how this handle is turned. What this handle does is it allows communication from the center to the other side and we'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second, but, like I mentioned, the first thing that we got to get straight is make sure that our we are calibrated Out to zero on both sides on this one over here on the low side, you can also see that this one has also a bit miss calibrated so before I were gon na put this in you, so we want to open this up. Make sure that it's open to atmosphere and then dial this back to make sure that it's exactly at zero, so that way, we're gon na read appropriate pressure. Let's talk about a couple other things here that are very pertinent to this.

I'm, like I mentioned already, you want to make sure that you don't get any contaminants inside the system and most systems are gon na, come with something called a Schrader core. If you've ever looked at a bike, tire port or a car, tire port, you'll notice that there's a little pin in there and you have to depress that pin in order for pressure to go in or out our fridge. My manifold is similar in that regard. It has a depressor, which you can kind of see there, that pushes down on that pin that's inside most service valves, especially for air conditioning.

They have the Schrader cores inside there and this pushes down on that pin and allows flow through the port. But it's only that way on one side if I were to open to open up and show you the other side here that connects to the gage you're gon na notice that it's wide open inside here, there's nothing inside this other side. That depresses a Schrader. So you can't connect these hoses backwards, otherwise they won't work when you have a Schrader in place.

The other thing to know about this, and this comes up when you're doing an evacuation, which means pulling a vacuum or a recovery, these little core depressors that are inside these hoses that are designed for valves that have Schrader ports in them. They do cause a restriction to flow, so there's not going to be as much flow through this because of this little core depressor that sits in the center of that hose, which is fairly obvious. But you want to make sure that the open part is what connects to the manifold and the part that has the core depressor is what connects to the service valve on your piece of air conditioning equipment. Now there are types of equipment that have what we call adjustable back seat, front, seat, type valves that don't have straight errs in at all where they actually open and close.

And in that case it wouldn't matter. You wouldn't need a quart of pressure at all. But most standard refrigeration hoses have core depressors. Another thing here is this: is this is a hook this hook hooks on to your equipment generally to kind of hang your gauges? One thing to be really careful with this hook is: do not poke this into your condenser coil.

I see a lot of guys beat up units by jabbing this into the condenser coil. You want to be very thoughtful about where you attach this hook, so you don't damage anything. Something else to consider is you're gon na see some gauges that have a sight glass, that's what this is, and the purpose of this is so that when you are charging or recovering, you can actually watch the refrigerant flowing through. This doesn't have a whole lot of practical use other than that you can sort of see the flow, and you can know that it's flowing, but it does have one use, which is that when you're charging a system in its liquid phase, which you have to do With many types of refrigerant like r410a, for example, you have to charge it in its liquid phase.

You can watch and make sure that you're not over feeding with liquid and possibly slugging or flooding a compressor, because you don't want to overfeed the liquid, and so that's something that people will use that sight. Glass, for is just to see how much refrigerant is being fed through here's. The key thing that I alluded to earlier - that we want to just make sure you're completely straight on with this gage manifold. The reason for these handles is to feed refrigerant through the body either to the center hose or to the other side.

So if I were to open this one - and I were to open this one now - refrigerant can flow from this port to the center port and to this port. So all three of them are all mixed. Now let's say I had this connected to the park so that that way now we're only feeding from one side to another. We could use that, for example, if I had a low loss fitting on here and I wanted to feed my liquid back into the suction side of the system say I had the suction side still connected to the equipment, and I had shut this off with a Ball valve, I could feed the liquid refrigerant back into the low side of the system from the high pressure side to the low pressure side by opening both of these, but in most cases, you're only going to open one at a time.

So, if we're charging a system, we're gon na take this one right here, this Center hose off the park and we're going to connect this to a refrigerant tank, that's full of virgin refrigerant new refrigerant that we were wanting to charge into a system. I can connect that to the tank and then I open up this gage a little bit and it's gon na feed refrigerant through here and then into the system. Remember these have nothing to do with whether or not your gage reach pressure. Your gage will read whatever pressure is on the hose on this on these ports here this port here in this port here, regardless of whether or not these handles are open, but as soon as you open this up now, it's going to allow refrigerant to flow from This hose here through the body of the valve of the manifold and then into the low side of the system.

The opposite is true for the high side, if I were to connect this to a recovery tank on an operating system, and I had high side pressure on here. If I open this valve, it would feed refrigerant out of the system and into the tank, because on an operating functional system, you're going to have lower pressure here and higher pressure here and tank pressure is going to be somewhere in between. So when you open up from a tank to the low side, it's going to flow into the system, if I shut that off - and I open up this one - then it's going to flow from the high side back into the tank and they're different types of tanks. Charging tanks don't allow flow, both directions.

The new you know, modern charging tanks only go out and recovery tanks are designed to take in. There are some applications where you can use recovered refrigerant and put it back into the same system that you took it out over. For the same customer, but largely speaking, we're going to be charging out of a new tank, putting refrigerant into the system by opening this knob into the low side. And if we have to take some out we're gon na put it into a properly designed recovery tank.

We're going to take it out of the system and put it back in now again, I want to state this very clearly, just like we put in the disclaimer at the beginning. This is for trained professionals only. You are not to do this as a homeowner, as somebody who has no experience and no training, you need to have an EPA certification with the Environmental Protection Agency to handle most of these types of refrigerants. So it's important that you go through all of this, but this is one of the very basics when you first start off in the trades and things you need to know about how a gauge manifold operates.

Finally, what I want to say is: don't over tighten these knobs. So when I, when I turn this valve shut, I'm only finger tightening, that's tight enough. I don't need to put a wrench on it. I don't need to crank it down.

If you do that, you're gon na run the chance of damaging your seals inside of the valve and then they're gon na tend to leak. So whenever you're open and close you're just doing it with finger finger tight. The same thing is true: when you attach these on to the system, you don't want to over tighten them because you'll over compress the seals inside here and you'll notice that you have to replace your seals more often be very thoughtful about the seals and your equipment. Also, don't overheat these, so if you're brazing on a system, you want to make sure to keep the valves cool, so you don't overheat.

The rubber seals inside otherwise you're gon na find that you go through a lot of these seals and on most gauges. These are replaceable, so there you go. That's the basics for the analog refrigerant manifold, stay tuned for future videos for us to talk about the differences between this and some of the more modern gauge manifolds. Thanks for watching you.