The following episode of the HVAC school podcast is made possible by our sponsors carrier carrier comm. We are now members of the carrier, ductless dealer program. If you haven't taken a look at carrier ductless in a while by golly. Now is the time to do it, find out more by going to carrier calm and take a look for the ductless dealer program, also: refrigeration technologies, at refrige tech, comm makers at the pan and drain spray nylon, the big blue Viper products, many more! If you don't at least use big blue in dialog, those are kind of the entry products for using refrigeration technologies.

You need to try them out. Dialog is a great product as an assembly lubricant for putting together threaded connections, and actually we talked a little bit about nya log today when it comes to making flares. Also, air Oasis air Oasis is an ia Q company right at a good old, Amarillo Texas, the west side of Texas. When I was in Austin, I thought well maybe I'll just swing on over to Amarillo and say hi to the guys in their oasis.

Texas is a really big state and it's like 4 hours. I mean even more than that. It's a really long way from Austin to Amarillo. So I haven't gotten a chance to visit in person at the air oasis HQ yet, but the Bennett's are really good people.

They make really good products right here in the old US of a out of parts sourced from the United States of America. Is that good quality products? We have had literally zero issues with the air oasis products, both the Nano and the bipolar find out more by going to air oasis.com for /go, that's air oasis.com /go fill out the form so that you can find out the best place to buy it. Get your pricing all that kind of stuff for your company and then finally, and obviously nav a can navigable comm. This episode is gon na be kind of surrounding one of the educators at nav AK, Kevin mayor and navikev aking pumps and our p8 DI we're talking today about their flare kit.

Both their flaring blocks, typical flaring blocks, kind of traditional flaring blocks and then they're battery-powered flaring tool, and you can find all of those by going to true tech tools, calm and just type in a vac in the search bar or you can just look for nav And one of the dropdowns used get schooled for a great discount at checkout. This is the guy who used to buy Turtle Wax with his own money and wax condenses on every maintenance. Brian, hey. This is the HVAC school podcast, the podcast that helps you remember some things that you might have forgotten along the way as well as helps you remember some things you forgot to know.

In the first place, I knew you were expecting that so I just said it quick, get it out of the way, and today we're talking about making flares. This is a kind of a full look at making really good flares that don't leak. So if you work on ductless or vrf or refrigeration, then you've run into a lot of flares. If you don't worked on any of those three things, and you probably thinking well, why do I care about flares but either way you're gon na run into them? At some point I mean ductless has taken over the world and so you're gon na run into some flares and it's important if you're gon na make flares that they don't leak, and you may say to yourself: well what wouldn't I know if they leak well, the Thing with flares is is that when they leak, they leak small in a lot of cases, and so a lot of technicians leave leaks on flares, believe it or don't, and today we have Kevin Maher on from nav act, to talk more about it without further ado, I don't know what it is about podcast.

We always feel the need to say without further ado, like that's not a word, we normally use so with no more delay. Here's Kevin thanks for coming back on Kevin. My pleasure glad to be here alright. So today we're gon na talk about flaring.

I've actually learned a lot about flaring the right way to make flares in the last couple years and obviously there's some new products that have come on the market and we'll talk about some of those Kevin's. The expert he's the man from nav act, man with the plan, so, let's start with before we even get any further into it, introduce nav acts flaring product and how it works. We have several different products. The first is a manual clutch type flare tool.

That is all heavy steel construction. It has a sliding depth gauge, which makes us a little different from everybody else, because the biggest issue with making flares for 410 a systems is consistency on the depth of the Bell. Because the difference in bill depth between an r22 flare and r410a flare is only one, a meter or a 64th of an inch. It's critical that we have exactly the right depth in order to have a flare, that's going to seal and hold the kinds of pressure that we're talking about with 14a applications.

Along with the depth gauge for the correct depth bail. We also have an elliptical orbiting cone that will also burnish or smooth the flare as you're, making it in the clutch. That's built-in prevents over spreading the tubing and making too big a flare. The other tool, which is our flagship tool for flaring, is our battery-operated flare tool.

The advantages are speed and making flares it's about four to five times faster than using a manual flare tool and that, along with the various type, are sized tube holders and dye assemblies have stops to keep the tubing depth correct and keep your flares consistent. Each tool will come with four tube holders, so you can be working with for tubing sizes at any one time, and you also get two other die sizes that allow you to make flares from 1/4 inch to 3/4 of an inch. It's very simple operation. You tighten on the tube holder at the right depth, attach the flaring tool, which again also has the elliptical orbiting cone to the tube holder, run the tube cone into the tubing until you hear the clutch click after running the Fleur cone into the tube.

Until you hear it click you reverse the trigger and pull the cone back until you hear it. Click three times remove the tool from the tube holder, then remove the tube holder from the tubing and inspect your work and make sure your flare is correct. What this does is it allows you to get a lot of consistency in your flare. The other advantage is, you can attach both tube holders to different sized tubing, make your flares at the same time, and again it greatly speeds up the time it would take to remove the manual flare block from one size to being put it on the other set.

It up and make your flower again tool also comes with two batteries for all day use because you'll get about 150 to 170 flares out of each battery, comes in a nice plastic case with a deburring tool and tubing as well. So it's a very handy tool and we really have had a lot of positive feedback from a number of companies on using this tool. It is a very interesting tool I mean it makes perfect flares again and again very quickly. I was shocked at how easy it was to use I've done a video on it a while back that you can find on our YouTube channel the model number for that battery power tool is the NE f6 li.

You can find that as well as the clutch type manual flare tool at Tru tech tools comm, so I wanted to get that out of the way so that you know why we're talking about this. There are some really good tools for making flares, but then there are some good basic processes and procedures that you want to follow. Some of them are reduced by this battery power tool makes it a little bit easier, but there are some basic principles. So, let's start with what is the first step that you need to take in order to make a good flare and, let's start with the cutting? The first thing is, you need to make sure that you've got a good square cut, using the correct sized and well balanced tube cutter with ball.

Bearing construction will help that you also need to make sure that your cutting wheel is sharp, doesn't have any Nicks and that the tool itself is actually square. I have seen flaring tools that will literally walk down a length of tubing, so we need to make sure that our tools are correct. The other thing is when you're cutting the tubing with today's very thin line sets make sure you tighten the tool in increments. So you don't deform the tubing.

If the tubing is deformed, it's going to be very hard to make a good flare, so we always want to make sure that we don't become overly aggressive when we're trying to cut our tubing. Another thing that I'd recommend is always keep a spare cutting wheel or a spare cutter so that you're not again running off to the local wholesaler to find parts. When you should be working on your job yeah, it always starts with the cutting cutting it square. Using a sharp cutter, I see guys use cutters that have Nick's in the blade for that matter.

It makes all sorts of a mess which brings us to our next point, which is the reaming or deburring of the end of the tube. A proper deburring actually starts with properly cutting, because if you have a cutting wheel that isn't sharp, then you're going and unnecessarily large BER, which is gon na, be more difficult to remove. So talk a little bit about deburring and what you look for there there. What we're really trying to do is smooth the tubing to a consistent edge, it'll open it back up, no matter how careful you are, you are going to push that cut edge in just a little bit and that presents some resistance to flow, especially in the smaller Tubing diameters, so it'll open it back up to a full diameter.

We will also smooth the edge so that we get a nice round flare when we get to that point, we'll take out any thin spots in the tubing, making our tube walk consistent. All the way around the other thing that happens is that burrs can interfere with the flare sail. We want to remove the burrs that could interfere with the flare seal. We want to square up the tubing.

We want everything to be smooth so that we have a consistent flare and it'll, make it much easier for the flare fitting itself to seal, because we're talking about the ability to seal molecules from leaving, which obviously are very small. So we can't afford to have any kind of gaps at all and we have a nice tight flare. I think it's important for us to recognize kind of at the root. What it is that we're trying to do here, we're not ceiling at the threads, we're forcing copper against brass and expecting that to keep molecules from leaking out, which means that we've got to have a very consistent coverage and it has to be the right pitch.

And it has to be the right size and it has to have the proper amount of force in order to prevent there from being leakage at the molecular level, like you mentioned, which is why flares improperly made are such a challenge now I do want to point Out real quick on this deburring side is that you can deburr too aggressively on two fronts. One would be to deburr and allow the birds to drop inside the copper tubing, which is a giant no. No. You got to be really careful to make sure that your burs or any of your shavings, or even when you're sanding, the copper cleaning it before brazing or any of those sorts of things, make sure you never get crap inside the lines I mean.

That's like rule number, one don't get crap in the lines, so you got to think about that which means generally, when you're deburring. You need to hold the tubing down when you do that and then kind of tap the copper as you go, and the next thing is you don't want to over ream or over deburr, where you actually thin out the walls and kind of make them a point. At the edge make them sharp at the edge, because then that's gon na lead to cracking at the edge of your Flair's, and I see that quite often, when guys are a little over-ambitious over aggressive with their deburring. Absolutely we don't want any cracks.

We want to have good, solid Flair's and it, like you, said nothing inside the tubing. We want everything to be clean, tight and dry all right. So now, let's talk about the height. Where did the copper actually meets that flaring block where you actually attach it into the block itself? Obviously, it's a little different with the cordless flaring device, but talk about the importance of that height above the block.

The thing about r410a is that the molecule is very, very small, and we have to have the right depth of flare or it will not hold the refrigerant inside the system. The height of that flare can actually depend on the type of flare tool that you have. The thing about a lot of flare tools is you look at them and they say: okay, especially the old yoke type tools. You raise, the copper up to the height of a quarter or you raise that copper up the height of a nickel.

Well, when you're eyeballing, something like that, you're not pulling a coin out of your pocket, you're going to be kind of guesstimating and the advantage to a tool that has a depth stop is that it will give you a consistent height for all of your flares yeah, Which is critical, I mean, and I think it this is a point where we got to stop, because this is where old, timers and I've only been doing this. I guess 18 years and I still kind of consider myself an old timer. This is where old timers start to get their hackles up, but they're like geez. I mean I've made flares for all these years and I never had any trouble.

But something to consider is that we are dealing with higher pressures than we used to we're dealing with different types of refrigerants, and so it's not as easy as it once was, and it's also easy to make a flare that doesn't leak like a sieve. It's hard to make a flare that doesn't leak at all and that's a key distinction to make there it's not a matter of it pouring out. Are you even getting leaks that are large enough, that you can see significant bubble, but you want to make it so it doesn't leak any significant or appreciable amount, which is a big challenge, because we don't want to go back to a ductless system four or five Years later and find that it's low because of a poorly made flare, which is what we see every single day out in the field, absolutely - and one of the things are the flaring of four four ten a first came out was well all refrigeration. Flaring tools are forty-five degrees.

Now one important distinction is to note that flare tools that are made for propane or made for oil fittings are typically not 45 degree flares they're somewhere between, I think 35 degrees and about 41 or 42. So we really need to have a true 45 degree flare tool, also we're talking about refrigerants. Now, back in the day when we had our 12 we're talking head pressures of 125 pounds or so say on a nice machine application or something like that with today's heat pumps, our normal operating pressures during the heating season can be between 650 and 700 pounds. And that's a whole different ballgame than 125 pounds.

So it's really important that we have the right tool with the right depth flare so that we can, as you said, force that seal closed. If we have a Fleur tool that isn't correct, we are going to be leaking and we're talking leak rates of half an ounce a year that can make a difference depending on the line length of the tubing. So it's really critical that we have the right tool to do the right job, just as it is with anything else yeah where we see flares. I think it's also important to recognize that there's some segments of the industry, some people who work out in the field who almost never see a flare, and so they just don't get what the big deal is.

Whereas if you work with a lot of ductless, vrf, vrv or even refrigeration systems, you know that there's a lot more flares out there and the likelihood that you're gon na have leakage does depend on the operating pressures of the system. Let's have a system that it is that i've -- refrigerant that it is, it does impact it in the case of things like vrf systems, it's a matter of having so many flares. You have such a high quantity of them that, if you're not making consistent flares that don't leave, then you're gon na have a big problem down the road. And so it's important that you kind of identify that there are segments where it becomes very mission.

Critical to make sure that every time you make a flare you're, making it right and then there's segments of the industry where guys are like. I don't even get the why they're talking about flares like I thought those went away with the dinosaurs, but there are segments where there are a lot of flares still made, and it's important that, if you're in a position where you're gon na be making them or Having to repair them that are out there, that you make them well, I'm gon na take a quick opportunity to mention, because we're talking about flare angles and that sort of thing there are some varying products out there and the reason I'm even bringing it up is Because I know the questions are gon na happen, so I want to just sort of nip it in the bud. Almost every product that I've seen out there requires a reasonable amount of skill, the NEF 6li, which is the cordless one made by a vac. That is the one that takes the least amount of skill to make a consistent fire of anything.

I've ever touched. I've done a lot of work, as some of you may know, with the spinning flares both of the different brands that make those types they're good products. They work well, but they do require skill. There is a skill associated with making those properly.

You generally have to form own, while they're still warm in order to make them form to the right angle. There's a lot of different pieces to that puzzle, whereas with kind of the traditional cold forming flares that are made by both of these nav actuals, those are sort of the tried-and-true method. That's been done for a long time, they're just by using stops and by using the battery-powered device and the clutches, and all that you're taking out a lot of that guesswork that you would have done previously. That me may find to be ineffective in today's flaring market, where you're working with these higher operating pressures and potentially leak rates.

So I just want to get that out of the way there do you have any comments on that if you have access to a flare gauge that'll, give you a really good idea as to your ability to make flares. There is one that is marketed by one of our competitors. I think Dyken actually has a part number for it. It's that really nice dusty rose, pink color for 410, a and and our 22 flare will slip right through it, but the 410 a flare will fit like a glove.

So it'll really give you the opportunity to see your skill in making the flare. I keep one all the time because I like to double check my flares as well, and I've worked with this tool for over a year now, as you said, it's really very easy to use. There still is a little learning curve I mean before I went on a job to use it for the first time. I would certainly practice on a short piece of tubing and make six eight ten flyers, because you do need to be able to get the tension.

Correct on the tube holders, but pretty much everything else is pretty straightforward and, like I said you practice on a few flares and you'll be ready to go yep in that flare gauge, I'm glad you mentioned. That is available at true tech tools. It's a model number of FTX SG and that is a nice tool to use to help confirm that you're making flares the right way. Another thing to add is that whenever you're assembling flares, you always want to sort of press them up against the cone that they're gon na made against and just take a look at it.

Just look at that flare and make sure that it's not deformed and then it matches up and then it's properly rounded, that's also another good thing to do after you make your flare and what I always say is it's one thing to make a bad flare. It's another thing to leave it that way. So if you make a bad flare, all you got to do is just cut it off and try again and having a gauge like that is a helpful tool to have my next question, for you is, do you have any opinion on assembly lubricants? A lot of guys use virgin oils. Some people use nylon.

What are your thoughts on that? I think my log is a great product as long as it's used correctly, the biggest thing with any assembly lubricant and you have to use them well. I guess you don't have to, but you certainly should, because it'll cut down on any chance of leaks the assembly lubricants. Let you put the fitting together a little more smoothly, so you're not torquing the tubing as much. They also help seal the flare.

Now log is really good for that, because it's a really thick slick, but very what's the word, I'm looking for here brain Thank You viscous. Maybe it's a very viscous sort of thick lubricant and also, of course, it's made of refrigerant whales. So it's not going to harm the system, which is why I've always used it. Absolutely that viscosity will allow it to stay on the fitting, while you're assembling the fitting it'll also be a lubricant in case.

It ever has to be taken apart again, because there are other assembly substances out there that will harden up over time and make it extremely difficult to get the parts apart if they ever have to be taken. Apart again, as you said, you can use r410a APOEL. The problem with that is that it becomes very acidic as it absorbs moisture out of the air. Another thing: if you don't have anything else, you can always use vacuum pump.

Oil. The biggest thing is: don't assemble the fitting dry. You lose the lubrication for putting the fitting together and you lose the lubrication in between the flare and the face of the flare fitting that you're attaching the tubing to. So what would be some incorrect ways of using an assembly lubricant if you had a say, a tube of oil and just dribbling the oil all over the face of the flare or down into the tubing? We need to keep the oil out of the actual tube, because we don't want that oil to mix with p OE oil.

If we're not using that as our lubricant, the biggest thing is, you just need a little bit. It just needs to be a thin coating, because we're talking about very, very tight tolerances here, just make sure you don't overdo it make sure you put some on the inside of the bell on the outside of the bill. That's all you really need yeah with the traditional flaring blocks. It can also be helpful to put a little bit on the cone when you're assembling it just so that way, it helps prevent galling a little bit on the back of the flare itself.

So that way, it slides into the nut a little bit easier again. You're gulling is when you have friction in between these surfaces, these metal surfaces, and then you tend to lose some of your tolerances. Due to that, and so a little bit of assembly, lubrication helps with that. The one thing that's worth saying here: when we're talking about assembly lubricants, even dialog, which again I'm a refrigeration technologies, loyalist and I love night log - is that if you use too much of it and you get too much of it on the threads, especially it can Change your torque spec.

So if you're using a torque wrench, you have to recognize that using some lubricant is going to change your torque spec and you're. Definitely gon na want to stay on the low side of your torque rating. When you are torquing down that fitting, because the torque ratings are designed without lubrication on the threads themselves, because they don't know what type of lubricant you're gon na use and obviously that changes the torque spec, I think that's a little bit overstated, sometimes because I've heard Some guys freak the heck out if you get a little bit of it on the threads, I personally don't mind putting a little bit on the threads, but you do have to recognize that you're gon na be a little more prone to over torque. When you do that - and I think that is an important to at least consider the other thing that I firmly agree with - and I had forgotten to mention before is, as you said, between every flair, you should be putting some sort of lubricant on the cone of Your flare tool, it's extremely important.

It prevents if there's any variations in the tubing, it'll prevent it from. As you said galling, and that's really important, it also makes it much easier for the cone itself to do. The actual flare only caveat to that being. If you're using a spinning flare device at high rpm spin player device, don't put oil on that, because I've seen guys try to do that.

You're gon na hit the smoke point of the oil and that's not gon na work good. So that would be the only exception, but for all of your standard blocks, including any f6 li yeah, put a little bit of oil on it, a little bit of assembly lubricant, that's the one kind of downside to dialog is that because it is very viscous, it's Also, very sticky, and so for that purpose I think I would prefer to use a little bit of oil rather than nylon when it comes to the actual tool itself, because otherwise it's going to tend to pick up dirt. That's the one thing with niya log. Is you do not want to put my log on something and then drop it in the dirt, or have it in a dirty environment and for a tool that makes it kind of tricky? So I probably recommend maybe using a little bit of mineral oil or maybe a little bit of vacuum pump oil, like you, mentioned just a small tiny amount on that tool itself in order to help prevent that galling.

All in all, I think. That's probably the one thing we started to do, and this has probably been. I don't know three four years ago that really helped us with making more consistent flares, probably almost more than anything else. Absolutely.

It also prevents wear on the cone and, even though the cones are replaceable, it's still not a fun job to do, and it's certainly not fun to be on a job and being unable to make a correct flare, because your cone is damaged absolutely so. I kind of alluded to it, but let's talk a little bit about the actual assembly of the flare itself, so we've talked about how to make it reaming cutting assembly lubricants some of the different tools, but now when it comes to actually torquing that thing down and Assembling it, what are some things? I look for the first thing. I always tell technicians and classes that I teach is make sure that you're following the manufacturers specs, there are actually several different specs for height of flares, depending on the type of flare nut you're, using which surprised me when I found that out. But typically, when we're talking about torquing Flair, nuts and again, this is something we've really only done since about 2007.

So in the overall HVAC history, this is really a pretty new thing: we're going to want to torque like a quarter inch tubing somewhere between ten and thirteen foot-pounds three-eighths is 25 to 30. Foot-Pounds half inch would be thirty six to forty two and now we're starting to get into some significant torque, where we're looking at five-eighths at 54 to 58 foot-pounds of torque. Now, if your torque wrench actually uses Newton meters instead of foot-pounds, that's got its own values as well, so you need to follow the manufacturers specs. The other thing that I found that was kind of interesting as I was going through.

Some manuals was don't forget to torque the access valve caps to the proper torque specs, to which I thought was really interesting. Now you need to make sure you use a backing wrench, otherwise you're, going to end up twisting your tube and you'll have all kinds of problems and be probably having to start over to a certain extent, so make sure you use a backing ranch. Make sure you use a torque wrench and make sure it's got the right size fitting in it, for the flare nut that you're using yeah? And that's where you having a little bit of assembly lubricant on the mating surfaces, is helpful because it does help. Some of that twisting, but when you're talking about in the 50 foot pound range, I mean you're dealing with a pretty big wrench now and a decent amount of force.

And that's one thing that we notice is that in some cases, technicians tend to under torque the larger sizes and they tend to over torque the smaller sizes, because it does change pretty drastically a lot of guys joke about having a calibrated wrist and all that. But I guarantee you, you don't do most technicians out there use torque wrenches currently on Flair nuts and of course the answer is no, they don't should they. The answer is yeah. We do need to get better at using the proper tools.

This is true of a lot of different things: it's not just flares, it's torquing down lugs on contactors and then disconnects, and all that there's torque specs on all this stuff and getting used to using torque, screwdrivers and torque wrenches is a really good discipline. One little quick tip is that you can get the really expensive digital torque wrenches or there's some out there that are actually adjustable wrenches that have torque specs on them truthfully. I would almost rather you you a specific Flair type crowfoot wrench on a traditional clicking, torque wrench in a lot of cases, because it's gon na tend to grab that flare nut a little bit better than using an adjustable wrench. It's kind of funny to me sometimes how we make these very expensive torque wrenches, and then we attach these sort of inexpensive, old-school Crescent wrenches to the head of them and maybe they're not always gon na grip very well.

What we generally uses a traditional torque wrench with a crows foot that I might've said crows head before. Sometimes I say weird things, but with a crows foot flare wrench on the side, but with it at 90 degrees to the wrench, which means that when you keep it at 90 degrees as you're tightening it's not going to increase the torque. You don't want to add a crows foot on it, that's straight out directly out from the handle 180 degrees from the handle, because then that's going to change the torque spec. But when you have it at 90 degrees kind of off to the side left to right, then that's going to maintain the same torque spec.

The other thing is: when you use a torque wrench, you got to make sure to hold it on the handle, because if you place your hand anywhere else on that torque wrench you're gon na change, the torque spec, you need to actually apply force to the handle. Where you're designed to apply force to make sure that you get that proper torque and as always, if you put some assembly lubricant and some gets on the threads, try to stay on the lower side of that spec range because you don't want to over torque. That can cause a lot of damage absolutely because at that point you can start twisting the tube and create a leak where you wouldn't have had one if you had tightened it to the correct spec. Definitely alright! So now, let's talk a little bit about the pressure testing side, which in my mind this is one of the most important things.

So what do you suggest from a testing standpoint? Non-Players, you always use dry, nitrogen and again pressure test to the manufacturer's specifications. Pressure tests can vary from anywhere from 250 to about 600 pounds, depending on the application make sure you follow the manufacturer's instructions. Remember that in heat pumps the pressures can easily get up to 650 700 pounds under normal operation and, of course, much higher in an overcharge system. The other thing that I recommend is do not do an overnight pressure test, because nitrogen, just like any other refrigerant gas that we use, will change the pressure based on temperature.

So if it's say here it was nearly 90. Yesterday I pumped my system up to 600 pounds. I come back this morning and it's in the low 60s. I may well think I have a leak when I really don't so make sure that when you do your pressure test, that your pressure test is done during basically the same outdoor and ambient temperatures.

Otherwise, again, as I said, you can think you have a leak when you really don't one thing that I always recommend is make sure you relieve the pressure before you hook up your vacuum break because otherwise you're changing your vacuum pump oil, whether you want to or Not yes, the old oil explosion, as we call it. I want to note on the nitrogen thing that you mentioned on things like vrf systems. In some cases the manufacturers want you to do these long-term pressure tests when you are required to do that, I have a nitrogen calculator at HVAC, our school comm that you can put in your before and after temperatures. Now again, you got to pay really close attention.

You can't guess at this, and sometimes that's challenging because part of the nitrogen is inside and part of your nitrogen is outside. So it's not always so straightforward, but you can use a nitrogen calculator to see what the acceptable range of drop is. Some manufacturers even have some guidelines to go on, but we do have that calculator in case you are in the position where you do need to do an overnight pressure test or where you have some sort of significant change in ambient conditions during a nitrogen pressure test. That's a really great tool which I had access to one.

What you do now there we go, can just go in HVAC our school and get it right there. So there you go. Let me type that in right now before I forget yeah, it's really important, because you need to know whether you have a leak or not yeah and a lot larger systems that could be an overnight test. It could be a 24 hour test could even be 48 hours whatever it is.

You really need to know what your pressures, what you started out, where you are what the temperature was when you started what the temperature is when you ended and make sure that you're out whether you do or you don't have a leak, it's extremely important because it's A whole lot easier than coming back six months down the road when you actually do have a leak and at operating pressures, we lost a whole bunch of refrigerant and trying to find that leak, especially on a vrf system that has hundreds, if not a thousand different Flares yeah a couple things when it comes to leakage, pressure-test, obviously, visually inspect anything that you are connecting making sure that it looks good bubble test all of your joints, while under pressure and then when you get to vacuum, make sure that you pull a very deep Vacuum below 500 microns and then make sure that will hold for the prescribed period of time in that decay test that we talked about so much on this podcast, which again that goes into the vacuum side of things, so make sure that you pay attention to all Those things, if you do all of those steps you follow the process for making a proper flare you're doing a good visual inspection, making sure that nothing strange before you start assembling. You assemble it properly with a torque wrench you're using proper assembly lubricants, you're doing a pressure test, you're paying attention to ambient temperature changes and how that might affect your pressures. Then you pull your vacuum. You pull it below 500.

You do to decay test. I'm gon na be pretty surprised if you have any leaks, any leaks. That matter, I should say absolutely again following proper procedures, it may take a little longer while you're doing it, but I guarantee you it will take a lot less time than coming back and try and troubleshoot. If you do have a problem, so we want to eliminate the problems, eliminate callbacks and we actually will make more money by working, smarter, smarter, instead of harder, like they always say all right.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. For those of you who are interested in the NAV AK flaring products, you can again find those on Tru tech tools as TR you, tech tools, comm, you can use the offer code, get schooled for a great discount. That cordless tool is the NE f6 li and you can find out my video on that by checking out HVAC school on YouTube. Thank you again, Kevin for coming on.

I look forward to talking to you again soon my pleasure Brian take care and have a good week thanks for listening to the HVC school podcast, thanks to Navin sponsoring this episode and for sponsoring hvac school. It's nice! When you work with a brand that gets it and understands the training is the center of sales. If you want to sell your product well, then you need to make a good product, and then you need to train on it. It's been nice to talk to Kevin.

He's a really nice guy and I've had a great relationship with nav AK. So far, so by all means take a look at what they've got and, like I said you can go to true tech tools and find that true tech tools, comm offer code get school down there on the bottom left. I think it's still the bottom left. Maybe it says coupon code, I'm not sure somewhere, but if you use gets gold you'll get a discount on those products.

Another thing I want to mention to you something new new news, new news. You may already know about it, but we've got apps out apps out for HVAC school and you may say why does HVAC school need apps well, a couple reasons one is: is that a lot of technicians, especially don't listen to podcasts, and so they want to listen To the HVAC school podcast and they say: how do I listen to the podcasts and I say: well: first, you go to the podcast app and then they stop listening. So the new answer is, if you don't listen to podcasts and you want to listen to the HVAC school podcast then go to the app store and download the HVAC school podcast app. The other reason that that's handy is because, in the other podcast apps, it's really tough to search, and so we have a smooth search tool so that you can type in any word, and you can search our tech tips.

You can search our podcasts, you can even go in and take a look at some of our tools. We have our nitrogen pressure change calculator. We have our air density calculator, those are kind of nerdy, but we also have a super heat and delta-t calculator. Those are useful right, that's some other things and then we're gon na be adding a lot of stuff.

One thing you may notice is that in the articles, because all the tech tips are in there, they don't have photos in them. Yet that's because we're pulling them directly off the website and handling photos is kind of tricky, but they will be soon. So if you download the app - and it has photos that means we've already fixed it by the time that I recorded this before it came out or before you're listening to it, but otherwise just be patient. We're gon na be adding a lot of new things to the app and making an app is actually really hard.

We've developed this in-house. We didn't buy something off the shelf. We made our own Android and iTunes apps and you can find them by just typing in HVAC school in the Google Play Store or in the AppStore. So there you have it I'd, appreciate you downloading them, telling me what you think and then leave us a good review.

Even if you don't like it just leave us a good review. Be nice be nice okay, so there are two flies sitting on a clock face. One of them got ticked off, that's so awful. These jokes are getting worse and worse.

Alright, thanks for listening, we will talk to you next time on the HVAC school podcast. Thanks for listening to the HVAC school podcast, you can find more great HVAC our education material and subscribe to our short daily tech tips by going to HVAC our school comm. If you enjoy the podcast, would you mind hopping on iTunes or the podcast app and leave us a review? We would really appreciate it. See you next week on the HVAC school podcast.