Okay, so we are now live on youtube everybody who can see us on youtube. Just keep in mind that i cannot hear your questions. I cannot, or i should say, of course i can't hear your questions. I can't see your questions on youtube.

The only way for me to interact with your questions is within the zoom meeting, which i've been uh promoting now for the last few days, so you should be able to go in your email. If you are a member of any of the uh any of the groups or if you are have signed up for the daily tech tips, it should be in your email, the link for the zoo meeting. If you want to ask questions participants as you come in, i see you all kind of filing in now uh. If you want to introduce yourself, tell us where you're from um, we have john pasterello on the line, so uh thanks for joining us, john thanks for having me again brian, it's always a pleasure.

Now we always uh have a little bit of lag um. It seems like initially with the guests, so just keep that in mind. John. There may be a little bit of dead air, but that's okay, because once you get talking it's hard to stop you anyway, so we won't have any problem with that.

Okay, great great! It's! It's good here that i'm getting the uh the feed coming through yep, absolutely answer any questions all right, so i see we've got a yep, so i see we've got brandon here good to see you! Brandon ricardo has been coming to a bunch of these thanks for being so loyal ricardo. Already 121 of you in here. That's pretty, that's pretty awesome. We got lewis from south jersey thanks for coming in louis jeremy.

There are a lot of jeremy's. We got tim bagnall still working as usual. Tim works too many hours, but we we love him anyway, and we appreciate you always coming by tim um. So it's always exciting to have a a legend here.

So john john being here is a lot of fun. If you haven't listened to the previous podcast that we did on this topic, um, you can go back in the podcast archives and listen to uh john and i riff on leak detection. But today we're going to go through. Essentially, what is in the leak detection guide on refrigeration technology? So if you go in the refrigeration technologies website, what tab is it that people go to? What section is it where they find this guy john, i'm trying to remember.

I believe you can just go to the website and um click on information. Uh leak detection manual will pop right out because it's one of the most requested documents. We have yeah, it's a great document, um what we have today. Some of it is directly out of it.

Some of it is new stuff new stuff i've added um. We go a little bit more deeper into the prevention of leaks, a little bit more about different types of leak detectors in this presentation, but i would strongly suggest that you go check out that guide. It is a free guide and one of the things we love about refrigeration technologies is how how committed they are to education and have been for so many years. So i know you've done it many times before john, but if you wouldn't mind we're going to be talking a lot about uh leak detection and obviously that was your first baby, big blue.

So if you want to quickly tell the story about how you came up with big blue and how that led to the start of refrigeration technologies? Well, um, i was a service technician. But before that i was a chemist and i worked in a lab and you know i found myself out of work at a point in time. Um and i got a job with a ac installation company, and i did that for six months or so, and they trained me to be a tech um and i went on to be a tech. Later i turned into my own contracting business and i was out there on my own doing repairs just hustling work, mainly refrigeration, lots of air conditioning, but mainly refrigeration, and i was pretty disgusted with kind of the chemical products that were being sold in the hvac wholesalers And so one of one of the problems i had was with their leak, detectors or bubbles because back early 70s, basically we relied on bubbles.

Electronic leak detectors were just coming to fruition and they didn't work too well, but the bubble solutions were very, very poorly formulated. Uh, most of them couldn't even make a bubble. Uh you they all came in dauber bottles and if you suspected the leak you'd have to soak that dauber and press it against the fitting and trying to try to get a bubble to form. So i decided to start making my own bubble solution and what i would do is, as i came home from a day of servicing, i would start putting together chemicals, foaming agents and whatever, because i had did a lot of research in libraries and did some patent Research on um elite detectors or just foaming compounds in general uh, so i think we came up with a formulation i really liked and it was just going to be basically for my own use.

But then i started giving it out to some of my service buddies and they said you know john. This stuff is really good uh. You know we should start selling to wholesalers and eventually we did - and i did a ashrae trade show in 1987, where we set up a little 10-foot booth and showed how big blue worked and compared it to other bubble leak detectors. And it was a big hit and word spread, and here we are 32 years later 33 years later, almost and that what started refrigeration technologies and eventually branched out in to other areas of hvac chemicals, and that is refrigeration technologies.

As we know, the company today, which is uh a brand that makes incredible products uh. So today, we're going to talk specifically about leak detection and that entire process, which comes from this guide, was written out of your knowledge being a technician out in the field and then a lot of feedback from the field, both being a technician chemist and then having Your own chemicals company, as well as being a contractor, so i think that's that's where we're coming from. Obviously i'm a contractor, i'm a technician, so we're going to be talking specifically about practices that work in the field. In fact, some of the stuff that we're going to talk about today is so practical that some people may uh question whether it's uh, whether it's absolutely the right practice.

But i'm going to tell you that what we're going to talk about today is the best practices for the field tried and true methods, uh that are going to help you find leaks and at the end of the day, that's what we're looking to do is find Leaks prevent leaks from occurring in the first place, so we're going to go ahead and move ahead to our first slide um. I want you to talk a little bit about this john, which is this idea of a system being leak free or having no leaks, because that's a common misunderstanding. No all systems leak every fitting every weld, every gasket surface leaks and the leak may be so small that your three or four hundred dollar electronic leak detector, while picking up. But if we did helium leak testing, we can pick up leakage everywhere, and most of this leakage is on a molecular level.

It may be added per atom, but we can't find leakage and, astonishingly enough even silver cellular joints leak, mostly you'll find leaks at every threaded connection, every gasket connection, and so it it is really incorrect to say that you walk up to your unit and say it Doesn't have any leaks? Well, it has hundreds of thousands of leaks, except for the fact that the leakage is so small, maybe one ounce every 10 000 years or one ounce every 100 years. It will not affect system operation. So keep that in mind that there's no such thing as a perfect machine or a completely leak free machine out there. Your tires are leaking on your car right now, but the leak rate is very, very low, etcetera, etcetera, pressurized system.

So everyone should have that money and that's what i want everything does: okay, yeah, i'm showing the i'm showing the uh image that you actually took from your guide. That shows how tiny um some of these leaks can be through a silver solder joint and then just backing up a little bit. This is a text directly from your guide that talks about how you know our goal is to keep a system clean, dry and tight. That is our goal: to get it as tight as we possibly can.

But it's important for us to recognize that our our goal is to limit leakage and in fact we see that when we're pulling a vacuum on a system that you know once you pull it down to a really deep vacuum. Because you're measuring in that really fine scale that micron scale and you valve it off you'll see that it still rises, because when you're measuring in that really fine scale, you can you have the resolution to see that every system does leak, even the best of systems And, like you mentioned silver solder, if silver solder leaks, you better be sure that we have leaks at all of our connections. Um all the all of our threaded connections, and so we want to reduce those leaks as much as we can. When you see this uh image here, you know that we're showing here this is obviously an unacceptable, unacceptably large leak here, but we sometimes even leak through our pressure switches um - and this is a just, a quick tech tip if you ever find a having a really Hard time finding a leak check around the top of your wires, where they go into a pressure switch or a transducer, sometimes you'll find that they're leaking there, where the wires are where the electrical connections are sealed through.

So we can have leaks in so many different locations and our goal is really just to reduce the amount of leakage that we have it's the needle in the haystack. Every time you walked up to a leaker trying to find that needle in a haystack. But you know we have the uh leak detection equipment out there nowadays, where you can do a good job at least find 90 95 of all leaks out there. So here is a leak detector that was before the electronic, and i want to see i'm going to give everybody a second here in chat to uh.

Tell us if anybody remembers this leak detector, i'm sure i'm sure you remember this type of leak, detection right! John! Yes, i have uh still have this. The burn marks on my fingers and arms yeah, and that was the old halide torch and you would actually see the flame color change to a greenish color. You also uh might smell a little those gene gas. If you get on a really big leak - and they actually still make these - i think they still sell them.

I think uniweld actually still sells this particular halide torch. So that was what we used when we had chlorine bearing gases. So cfcs like r12 and hcfcs, like r22, you could actually use a ally torch and you would connect it to a you know: a propane bottle or a map. Gas bottle and you'd create a little flame and you'd move the tube around.

And if you picked up any chlorine bearing gas, you would see it burn that greenish color and that would be your leak detector and it worked fine. It didn't it wasn't super accurate, probably not probably not going to be any better really than bubbles honestly, but it was a way that it was done for a really long time. Nowadays, you can't use that anymore on refrigerants, that don't have chlorine in them because it won't work, but as we move into this next slide, i want you to talk about this john, because this is actually really the innovation with big blue was that you could create These uh these cocoons, these tiny little bubbles um. That would create these.

It almost looks like a cocoon, and it shows it here, on top of the uh leaked leak, vial the leak reference bottle for a h10 leak detector that we've seen for years. Um, if you place it on top of that, you'll actually see that little cocooning. On top of that, and that's really what sets uh big blue apart as a leak reactant as a soap bubble to other other products out on the market that you were dealing with when you came out correct. Yes, the whole ball game was getting greater sensitivity out of bubble solutions and getting the foam volume to build to a point where it's visible and it may be just a foam spot or a foam.

Cocoon. That's the size of a bb to a size of a dime, but if you ever see that, on a joint that you've sprayed or any type of surface that, where you sprayed a big bloop, give it time, because these bubbles take several minutes. If not even up to 20 or 30 minutes for a formation like that to become visible and the reason why is gas is escaping at such a slow low rate, it takes time for the bubbles to accumulate so yeah experience. I was going to say so experienced leak, detectors.

People who find a lot of leaks know that you can't rush this process. This is something that takes time, whether you're using an electronic leak detector, whether you're doing a nitrogen standing pressure test or whether you're using soap bubbles. Now sometimes you get lucky and it's a big leak and you can hear it and it's in the audible scale or you see a big oil spot and you spray some soap bubbles on it and it makes big bubbles. Those ones are fairly easy to find.

It's the ones that create this cocoon effect that require a lot more patience. Patience and observation are the keys to successful leak detection. If you don't have patience and you don't look, look everywhere, get out a mirror look everywhere, then you will be more successful at leak. Detection and it's these small little micro leaks a little baffling for years yeah.

This is an image. What we're showing here this little uh gif video, is an image that daniel anderson posted in the hvac school group he's a a really great uh air conditioning, refrigeration, tech out of north carolina and a good friend um, and he found this. This is actually a pretty good size leak, because these this isn't even foam. This is, this is bubbles that are emerging pretty quickly, but you can see how easily somebody who wasn't paying close attention could miss this, and this is one that's on top of the joint and it's making pretty good size bubbles.

Now. Imagine if this was on the bottom side of the joint, where it's more difficult to take a video and much smaller to the extent that it's actually creating a foam. There's been many technicians, ulysses palacios, neil compareto, who have done videos of that foam. I just couldn't find them when i was putting together this presentation, but this is a little better anyway, because you can see it, but one thing i want to note here because again we're not only talking about finding these sorts of leaks, which again, obviously this one Is is found by spraying, big blue on being patient enough and looking carefully with a flashlight in the mirror if it were around the bottom, you'd need to use a mirror, but in addition to that, this joint clearly did not have the solder pulled into it properly And i can't fully see exactly what type of joint this is.

It looks like it actually might have a port connection on the side, but regardless, when you don't pull your solder into the joint properly you're, not using a nice ductile, ductile alloy, i always say solder, but it's really just a brazing alloy. If you don't heat up the entire joint and pull it into the joint appropriately, this is when you get more of these micro leaks and so from a very practical standpoint. One of the main reasons why i see these little micro leaks in uh braised fittings is because technicians aren't heating the entire joint and drawing the alloy into the joint versus just doing a cap around the outside yeah, or else you know, um, there's no venting on That pipe when he was soldering - and there may have been you know - maybe a half a pound or a pound of pressure on there and the leak would not seal, would form a donut because the gas wants to escape. So he might have himself a little donut hole there.

Yeah. That's another really good point so making sure that the system uh isn't under pressure when you're brazing you want to flow nitrogen, which requires that you have the lines open, but that flow should be at a tiny, tiny flow rate. You know when we talk about. In fact, this is it's funny, because tim bagnall's here in the group and tim was one of the ones who corrected me, because at one point in time i think i said two to five psi uh rather than saying two to five scfh and so that's cubic Feet per hour of flow, which is a tiny, tiny flow rate that we should be moving with nitrogen.

So you never want to raise or solder under pressure, because you can, they can result in this, and you can also find little micro leaks and micro fractures that happen due to over temperature and vibration, especially near things like a compressor. So if a compressor is running really hot and it's you know - has a lot of vibration - maybe it's not mounted properly or maybe the internal suspension is starting to go on it. Uh. That's also a reason why you'll start to see some of these little micro fractures begin to appear.

Yes, it's always important when you use a bubble type leak detector to apply it as a flat liquid. You don't want to spray it as a mist, because that is just going to cause bubbles to form, and you can't tell the bubbles from the spray or is it bubbles from the leakage, so always apply your bubble solution as a flat liquid free of any bubbles Or foam and you will be more successful at pulling up these micro leaks, very trust, troublesome microwaves, and you make a really good point. That's how the big blue bottle is designed is, rather than spraying it all over the place and making a bunch of bubbles um. It's designed to go on on a nice on a nice uh, laminar stream, um that you apply nice and close you're, not spraying from this huge distance you're, getting as close as you can to it and you're applying this flat uh bubble solution over it.

That's a a trick that i think all technicians who have had to find these small leaks know is that the worst thing is to take a dauber or take a spray where you're making a bunch of bubbles in the process of trying to find bubbles. Yeah. You know your leak. Detection tool is only as good as your knowledge of how to work.

It yeah, absolutely true, which is definitely true of bubbles, but definitely definitely true of electronic leak detectors, which we will talk about here in a second. So i'm going to let you go through. We've got this on the screen. We've got the six different classes of leaks, and i just want you to give a quick summary of each one: standing, leaks pressure, dependent leaks, temperature, dependent leaks vibration, dependent leaks combination, dependent leaks and cumulative micro leaks.

I don't know if you came up with these terms or if they predated this guide, but it is a really comprehensive look at the different types of leaks in terms of what it takes for us to find these leaks or under what conditions these leaks occur. Yes, i'm guilty. I came up with this and it's amazing how it's been republished in other league detection guides, and you know no copyright infringement as long as it's not one of my competitors using it, but starting with uh number one uh standing league is basically you know. 90, 95 percent of all your leagues can be detected just by pressurizing, the system and scanning with your electronic and then verifying with bubbles.

Now number two would be pressure dependent leaks. You may see an oil spot on a condenser, but if you put electronic up to it, you're not going to get a hit or even, if you use bubbles, you're not going to get a hit. And that's because the unit may be off and the pressure is at an equalization pressure rather than an operating pressure. So there are leaks that only occur or open up at a certain pressure and then, as the pressure is backed off, that leak closes up, and so that is a pressure dependently.

It depends and only leaks while the system is operating at high pressure. So that's what i mean by pressure dependently. Moving on to number three. A temperature dependent leak is a leak that it, as it says, is associated with the heat of expansion.

If you get especially to similar metals, let's say a threaded fitting: you have constant heating and cooling of that joint and it's when it heats up. Let's say on a high side: the metals expand and you get seepage then again, you're not going to find that type of leak on a unit. That's turned off and pressurized and equalized you're only going to find that leak. Actually, when the temperature of that particular joint or point of leakage is heated to where it expands and opens up, and that is probably the only way you're going to find a temperature independently now on the number four vibration leaks and vibration leaks first one i ever Found was actually on a vibration, eliminator and it while the unit was off.

I could not. Finally, i saw oil on the vibration eliminator, but wasn't able to pick it up with bubbles or a electronic, but as soon as that compressor kicked on the vibration caused. The leak to be observable so temperature vibration moving on to combination where maybe heat and vibration and temperature, all three of those factors, are going to be needed for a leak to surface and be detectable because knowing where a leak is or suspecting where a leak is Because, maybe you have an oil spot, you need to verify it. You need to make sure that that really is a leak and not oil that was originated from some other source, such as a motor or a pump and combination dependent links are very, very rare.

You know the classes two through five are very rare, but you know maybe they're two or three percent of the leaks out there. Now six is what we call cubital micro leaks. There's too small of leaks that can be detected with your electronic. You could probably only detect these types of leaks with a helium leak detector which we don't have in the field.

Some manufacturers will use them and they will pick out leakage at solder, joints and threaded fittings, but they'll have a acceptable limitation of leakage for that threaded. Fitting and as we explained in the beginning, your system is not totally 100 percent leak. Free there's going to be leakage all over, but the total loss over many years of operation is not going to be able to read on the gauge or pick up with your electronic leak detector. It's just going to be an acceptable amount of leakage and that unit could probably operate 20 30 years without ever needing any topping off a charge.

So that's what we call cumulative micro, leaks and i'll add a couple things to that. One is: is that there's another type of leak, that's not on here and that's called the uh dumb technician who vents refrigerant every time he hooks his gauges up and eventually the system's low. Because of that. So that's that's what i'll add in there and then the other thing to kind of note here, just as a general summary of even this summary is that you have these leaks three four and five that really show up or even two through five honestly.

They show up when a system's operating, and so there is some advantage to checking for leaks while the system is operating, and this is why, when i walk up to a piece of equipment that isn't flat, it's still running but may be low on charge, i i Generally am going to do some of my checks before i go ahead and you know shut the unit down, i'm going to do it. While it's still running i'm going to take a look at it and i'm not saying that i'm going to stick my hand in anything, but i am going to just take a look, and i may even you know if that condenser coil is showing a spot on It i may go ahead and just spray some bubbles on it, real quick, while it's still running while it's under a little bit higher pressure. Now again, it depends on the circumstances um. Obviously, sometimes it's not safe to do so, or sometimes you may make the situation worse, but that's using your common sense to say all right: where is this leak located? Is it located in a place, that's likely to be leaking when the system's operating more so, which would be a case like a leak on a you know, maybe on a compressor head at a gasket or uh, some anything in the discharge line or anything in the Condenser that are going to be under higher pressure and higher temperature.

So those are things to always think about, and a good experienced technician is always thinking through uh plausibility, so not just all of the possible places that elite could possibly be, but thinking through what is most plausible in this type of system, based on what i'm noticing From oil and those sorts of things yeah, i would add that you know about five percent of the leaks out. There are leaks that go undetected and they go undetected because, in order for those leaks to be detectable, the unit needs to be operating yeah. The technician is going out, they're, shutting it off and then attempting to find leaks and they're, just not finding them. The next section that i want to go into here are some some leak types, and this is really in terms of causes.

So what caused the leak in the first place? Um, and it is good to understand some of the differences here. One of the one of the big ones is galvanic um. That's what we would you know typical, rust and corrosion that you would see in a coastal environment when the dog pees on the side of the condenser coil, that's a common form of galvanic corrosion and the dog's urine isn't greatly increasing that galvanic reaction. In fact, galvanic.

While it looks really bad um generally isn't in normal operation, some of the biggest leaks that we're seeing um under normal conditions, formic or formicary leaks, are getting more and more common and those are the ant nest style leaks that we saw so many evaporator coils leaking From and those happen because of chemical interactions, they happen more so nowadays often because of the way that the coils are being manufactured in the thickness of the tubing. But they also happen because we have more and more vocs all to organic compounds which are reacting with the metal and are causing these little ant. Nests and and formic area really literally just means ant. Next corrosion and they're all these little paths that go into the coil.

They don't necessarily have one pinpointable leak, that's easy to find they kind of go all over the place and make them a little trickier to find, and have you seen that i wanted to ask you this question. John, have you seen an increase in formicarium formic leaks because i've heard that and - and i it seems like i'm experiencing that, but i wanted to see your thoughts on that uh. You know when i was doing service. It was not one of the excuses used by the coil manufacturer, but but what we're looking at here is uh.

You know we have the dog peeing on the condenser. It's acid and acid is going to accelerate the galvanic and galvanic, basically we're creating a a battery. We're causing um a slight electrical current there between the uh fins and the aluminum fins and the copper and the rusting over here is, is pretty much. You have galvanized end cap there and it's going to rust just like that.

Um formic formaldehyde breaks down into formic acid again, and so we have a an acidic condition there. That's causing that and of course, oxygen to catalyze the whole reaction, because that's all iron oxide, there yeah good old, good, old-fashioned, rust um. So these are, these are ones where we use dm. You know on coils and that sort of thing, but then we have the ones that um we can do something to.

We can really do something to prevent. You may be able to prevent formic and galvanic in some cases, but the bottom three are three: that you can really prevent: one being abrasions when you have you know metal tubing, that's rubbing up against something. We. We saw this on many brands where uh, where the tubing would go through the uh to the plate.

It would rub up against because of vibration or be you have tubing in the front of an evaporator, coil or inside of a condenser, where you had your tubes running rubbing together so or even wiring. That's rubbing across tubing. That was a common one, where you'd have either low voltage or even high voltage wires. That would drape across the uh across the copper and that would cause shorts on the electrical.

But if on the high voltage it could actually cause a blowout there. So that's a that's a potential cause and we can prevent that by taking our our tubing and separating it and maybe using a little foam tape and you know, do some zip ties and getting everything tight, um, poor, braze or solder joints. We already talked about that. If you're brazing under pressure soldering under pressure, that can cause it, it can, if you're, using you're, not using enough heat in the joint, so you're, not drawing the solder in and then pour mechanical connections so failing to torque them down properly.

Failing to. In the case of flare fittings, we're gon na talk about this a little bit in the case of flare, fittings, failing to deburr, properly or cutting it square or using a a good tool and making a nice. You know again a lot of this just comes down to good workmanship. You can tell when the surface is properly burnished and it's made properly and they fit together properly, but we already have the question: why? Nylog? Because i'm a fan of nylon, that's a refrigeration technologies, product, one of john's babies and one of my favorite products on the market.

I use a little bit of nylon mechanical connections and it does help reduce uh leakage for several different reasons. Uh, although these connectors don't rely on the threads to seal, there is just the reality that you do get micro leaks that do go through the threads, so it helps seal those, especially under vacuum, but in addition to that, it is going to help those mating surfaces. Just come together, much more snug and fit together better, and so we use nylog small amount of nylon on all of our mechanical connections, whether they're flare, fittings or chat, lift or air equip or whatever. I know quickly, because i know i'm going to get the complaints.

I know some manufacturers tell you specifically not to use it and i'm not arguing with your manufacturers, i'm just telling you that i've used it with those very same manufacturers for 15 years now, in my own business, installing many many doklas systems and regular unitary equipment pieces Of unitary equipment, as long as it's used properly as a assembly and thread lubricant, where appropriate, it's not going to cause any damage whatsoever. So i'll, let you comment on those last three uh quickly, john well, you know uh nylock has been around since 1993 and the whole idea behind it was when i learned refrigeration. I was told that the only thing that should go on a gasket or thread is just oil, and you know your nylon. Blue is poe oil and your nylon red is mineral oil.

So, in essence, all you're doing is putting a very high viscosity, sticky tacky oil and using that to lubricate the threads and seal the threads. So, if any gets in the system, it's completely miscible with the refrigeration oils and miscible in compatible with the system compatible with all the system components, it's not going to cause any corrosion or react with anything, because it's just oil. Now we have manufacturers that tell us or tell technicians not to use nylon, and i think they kind of just group nylon in with all the other adhesive type gasket and thread sealants, which were not. They don't realize that nylon is actually just an oil and then you know we have more and more oems coming on and saying yeah use nylon.

We recommend it, so it takes a while in this industry for word to get around and for oems to catch on. To uh products that are out there and slowly but surely we're always adding new oems to the nylon family, yeah and one of the martin um asked a question he said: can you put an nylog or pipe dope on rotor, lock, connections, roto, lock, connections and that's A good example of grouping two things together: pipe dope and nylog are not anywhere near being the same thing, so i would not use leak lock or pipe dope or or uh teflon tape, or anything like that on a roto lock. I absolutely would use a couple. Drops of nylog - and i have done so um for 15 uh, 15 years now in my own business.

So and again when i say that um i say it publicly. You know, like i say it publicly, knowing that certain manufacturers, even manufacturers, that ideal say not to do it um and this is we do it in grocery refrigeration. We do it in residential, we do it in commercial, we've used it over and over somebody said. Is this an ad for nylon again, i want to be really clear, as i i think most of you understand this.

I work with companies that i already use and love. Refrigeration. Technologies is a sponsor of the podcast, but it's because there's a fit between what it is. We do every day and the products that we love and the training that's provided, and so, when i talk about nylon, i'm not talking about it as like: hey there's, nilog and then there's other products like it.

There aren't other products like it. There aren't other products that are truly just a high viscosity, sticky, refrigerant oil that are okay to put on the threads that on a refrigeration or air conditioning system. So i'll be really clear about that. Anybody who knows me well anybody who are you know the really good technicians out there.

Tim bagnall already commented on it, um the really good techs out there who have used it swear by it um. So that's that's. The two things ask somebody who's a really good technician who has used it and you'll you'll find that they swear by it, because it's not going to contaminate anything as long as i mean again, if you're taking bottles and bottles and dumping it right into an expansion Valve well, who knows, but that's not what we're saying here, we're saying a couple drops on the threads and on the mating surfaces, and it works really well, and it fits here because we're talking specifically about mechanical connections, which are some of the highest leak rate items Out there you know, flare fittings, chat, lift air equips anything. You know male pipe thread, anything that has threads on.

It is likely to leak threads and gaskets, and that's where nylon comes in really handy and and is extra insurance uh and it just works. It just works. Well, that's all! That's all i can say i used it before. I knew anything about refrigeration technologies.

I just saw the snake and saw that it was made from refrigerant oil, so i tried it actually. First time i tried it was on a grocery store air conditioner. I remember the first time i ever tried it and uh, and it worked so great. I thought man i need to.

You know see what what this is all about and that started my journey with that particular product. So anyway, that's enough yeah, it's a product that solves a problem, age-old problem, leaky, thready fittings, your rotor locks, uh. You know, i put it on the mating surface. I lubricate that little nylon or teflon o-ring with it and torque it down and you're ready to go, and i get you know a lot of people.

My trade shows come up and tell me um that you know if we didn't have dialogue, we'd have leaks all over so uh yeah, that's kind of rewarding yep, oh yeah yeah, i mean again. I can't imagine that anybody would have a problem with it. Having actually used it out in the field, all right so now, let's talk about the required tools to do the job. This comes straight out of the guide.

First off electronic leak, detector i put in there infrared or heated diode capable of 0.5 ounces per year detection. That's just a good kind of baseline. There are other technologies out there, but none of them are really proven for what we do there are. There are some variations on heated diode called heated, pentode um, which is of course fine.

That's just an advancement on heated, diode technology, but infrared and heated diode are the two primary technologies and they are a little different. We'll talk a little bit about that in a second you're, obviously going to need a nitrogen tank and a regulator to do leak. Detection regularly now you may walk up on a system - that's already charged you're, not going to take nitrogen and put on top of that. It's just that nitrogen is a tool in the arsenal to pressure test and to bubble test pieces of equipment, especially during that initial phase.

The one thing that probably, if we would do better than we do right now, that would result in a lot fewer leaks. Is that new installers? You know when you're, when you're, installing a new piece of equipment or a new line set or whatever, that you pressurize it, and you do that standing pressure test. You watch that delta p and make sure that you're not dropping and in addition to that, you bubble test all of your joints with using a mirror with using a light source, a flashlight being the easiest and just checking around it really carefully and looking for uh. That foam buildup, you know because that's what you're! That's what you're going to see! That's what you're looking for! Obviously, if it's a big hisser and it's a giant bubble well that'll be even more obvious, but it's more than just taking a quick look.

It's spraying it on there, nice and flat under pressure, making sure you're not having pressure drop on your nitrogen and then letting it sit and watching to see. If you get any of that foam building up on it anything you would add to that. No, i thank you for adding these extra little bullet points because um, you know, i can't think of everything but you've, you've added the nitrogen and regulator leak, reference and um. You know i i when i first wrote this uh manual.

It was in the early 90s and the best uh electronic out. There was 0.5 ounce per year as the first pull-up point, um recommends, but gosh. Nowadays they have yeah um 0.1 ounce per year. Allegedly, but i mean you know, you're taking you talk, you're telling you're talking five times the greater sensitivity than what i played with out there, yeah yeah.

So one of the things that was stated in the um chat was that that someone said they haven't. Had good luck with their infrared and that comes down to an infrared leak, detector works differently than a heated diode in a way, that's that a lot of technicians find annoying. Frankly, i find it annoying well as well, which is that you have to constantly be moving. The probe, you can't be still now, you don't move it all around, but you have to move it slowly because it's it's constantly recalibrating against itself and the same thing is true: um with all infrareds other than the ones that use um some sort of a filter.

Like the pgmir uses, which i'll show you in a little bit, which is a crazy, crazy, uh, expensive leak detector, but that works great um. So we'll talk about that in a second now. One thing that i wanted to address was this leak reference and the only easily commercially available leak reference. That's out there is this one um, this isn't a great picture, but it's this uh calibrate calibration reference from uh bacharach that came with the h10s.

Now i used to have r11 in it. They say nowadays they're not using r11 they're using something else. That's similar and again, don't quote me on that. I remember a conversation that i had with them, but regardless what we do find is that this leak reference no longer directly correlates with what we most often are measuring, which are hfcs, and so there are some leak references that you can get that actually go onto A tank they thread on i'm trying to get more of them popularized over here, where you can actually buy them in the us.

There's a british company that makes them it's a product that i really wish people would make, and i keep telling different manufacturers. You know. Please make a leak reference that you can just screw on a tank and open up that has a very tiny leak to make it easier, but a lot of times we're kind of left with either just just barely barely barely cracking a tank or maybe just barely Depressing a schrader and then letting it air out a little bit and just checking our leak detector, but it is important that you know that your leak detector is working with tools like the h10 pro, which is one of my favorite leak, detectors out there. It's nice because it has the little bead that you can see the airflow and you can check against the reference.

So at least you have some indication that your leak detector is working properly. A lot of the problems that i see associated with people saying they're having a hard time elite detection is that they don't even know if their electronic link detector is working and that's a really big reason. Why i put that in there with the leak reference is you've got to know your tool and you've got to have some way of reliably testing that tool in a replicable way. Good techs find ways of doing this so that way, they're doing at the same time.

So they can tell if their sensors are starting to drift and maybe they're not working as well as they used to. But it is a point of frustration for me with a lot of technicians. They'll call me up and say: hey, i don't think my leak detector's working, it's like gosh, you know, we've got to have. We've got to be testing our leak detectors regularly so that we're not guessing whether they work.

We actually know whether or not they work. You know if you've been using a heated diode leak, detector, all your life when you go to use an infrared, it's a different ball game and i think that's where people are having a lot of trouble. It's like when i first started to braise, copper, copper, copper, brass. I always use 15 sill floss and oxy acetylene torch and you develop a method.

Now, if i got aluminum elite, i'm going to take the solder weld product and i have to use a different method to make sure that that solder is going to stick to the aluminum. So it you're always in this trade, constantly re-educating yourself and always finding new uh techniques to learn in order to work with the tools out there that we have yeah. That's that's big! So, knowing the tool that you're working on and practicing with it and being very familiar with what the manufacturer says about it and the maintenance and the repair and all that, that's really big and elite detector, i'm i'm gon na i'm gon na go on a little Monologue here so bear with me. Lead sectors are one of the most expensive tools that you're gon na buy and so their care their maintenance, knowing the manual knowing how to get replacement parts quickly.

If you need them, knowing where you can send it in order to get it repaired, a lot of people throw this back on their company and i think that's perfectly fine. If that's the relationship that you have, if the company provides it but either way the one you're using all the time, you still need to know, because otherwise you're going to be the one stuck out there, not knowing whether or not your leak detector is working. So let's talk about electronic elite section in the process and then in the next slide, we'll talk about the two different types of leak detectors, first step when you're doing an electron and leak detection, you pretty much need to shut the system down and allow it to Equalize, and the big reason is, is because in most cases, you're going to have air flows that are going on both in the condenser and the air handler fan coil furnace, whatever you're working on, and you need that you don't want any airflow in the areas where You're working with leak detection - that's actually your enemy is airflow, so you want to shut it down, but also recognize, depending on what you're measuring on shutting it down, may either increase or decrease the pressure. So if it's an evaporator coil leak, then shutting it down is going to increase the pressure and help reveal that coil leak.

If it's a condenser coil leak, shutting it down is going to make that leak less prominent, because now your pressure is dropping. So that's something to always consider you can use heat to drive pressures up and an example of this would be if you've got a refrigeration unit. You can put it into defrost beforehand to make sure that everything you know your pressures are the highest they're going to be before you do your leak detection. If it's a heat pump, you can run it in heat mode for a short period of time.

Obviously, you don't want to run the thing in heat mode for 20 minutes if it's 95 degrees outside for a lot of reasons, but you can run it for a few minutes just to kind of build up. The pressure in that evaporator coil and you know, help to increase that leak rate. In some cases, i've even done that with the blower on the off position. Again, you don't want to do that too long, because you don't want to create any damage, but you want to think about ways of increasing uh, increasing your pressure heck if you're in a real bind, you can actually use a heat gun like we talked about for Leaks that only are showing up with heat - and you know, get the area hot and that will help show up some leaks that happen due to expansion and contraction in some cases again, that would be an edge case, not a normal practice.

But again you want to you want to shut it off. You wan na drive pressures up where you can uh you wan na work, slowly and don't rush when you're working with an electronic link detector. This is not a race, so many people will do tests where they say. Okay, i found it it's in the evaporative coil moving on well, just because you found that there is one in the evaporator coil and you've gone back to it a couple times.

You know it's there where in the evaporator coil is it? Is it repairable in a lot of cases it may be repairable and that may be a choice the customer would appreciate. Having uh is, are there additional leaks, can't tell you how many times we've we've found a leak, which is not the leak techs get so used to finding leaks in the evaporator coil that they rush in they find that leak. And, oh, that's it that's the leak and then we find out that there's another leak somewhere else in the system, and so you always want to check everything. You want to work from top to bottom, and this comes down to we're going to say this a couple times, but most refrigerants pretty much all refrigerants that we work on and you know, residential, like commercial.

Typical applications are heavier than air, and so you work from top to bottom, because if you start at the bottom, it's going to start going off and now you're not going to pinpoint. But if you start from top to bottom as soon as it starts going off now, you have an idea of at least the level that that occurred at now. Is it possible with some airflow that maybe that refrigerant wafted around - and that does happen? It is possible. But the goal is to locate the exact location of the leak if at all possible - and there are cases where sometimes finding that exact location might not be possible.

But we want to do everything we can to find that exact location and that's where you go back to the highest concentration. It goes off you clear, your leak, detector, let it let it settle down and you go back to that same point again and find out if it's, if it's still picking up and hitting on that same spot, you go around it and make sure that that is The point of highest concentration, and then you use your soap bubbles to attempt your very best to locate that exact location and if you can you've got a phone in your pocket. Take a quick video of it. So that way, you've got that documented proof that it did have a leak there, because you don't ever want to be blamed later on that now another leak shows up and they say well, i don't think there was even a leak in that evaporator coil, because now There was another leak in the condenser or whatever the case may be, and then also keep in mind a false positive.

I i had a guy great guy that i worked with early on when i was when i was brand new in the trade. A really honest honorable guy he wasn't trying to scam anybody, but every coil he went to every condenser coil. He went to had a leak and it had leaks all over the condenser coil. He said you know, i'm picking it up everywhere.

What was happening was. He was hooking up his gauges, which was venting a little bit of refrigerant, then he's going in with his electronic elite detector and sure enough. There's refrigerant that he's picking up everywhere and that's what we would call a false positive because of uh because of the you know just the venting from the ports, but you can also find it in other chemicals. In fact, i've even heard that there are certain um soap bubbles that elite detectors will even react to.

I don't know if i don't know if that's something that you've heard or run into john. Oh, yes, all the time. In fact, just this last ashrae show there was a company fairly large company that came by our booth and said we stopped using big blue and i said well why i said because it sets off leak, detectors, electronics. I said no, i don't think so.

You know what what i asked him: what brand leak detector he was using and um. He phoned in back at the shop and took a picture of a bottle leak detector. He used and and pulled it up on his phone and showed me well. It was a blue leak detector, but it wasn't ours so and he's he was under the assumption that if it was blue, then we pop we were the manufacturer.

So we had to dispel that rumor. Yes, just because the bottle is big and blue does not mean that the that it is big blue, it has to actually say big blue on it, for it to be big, blue we've had manufacture even say: oh yeah, it's exactly like big blue. Just don't worry about it, we work long and hard and we crack their formulation so if they're buying our product they're, actually getting big blue at a better price, i haven't seen them, though, got ta love sales people. Yes, now going back to that um last frame, he had out there uh.

I was more dialectic when it came to leak detection um. I would start at the bottom of a coil because that's where your refrigerant is going to pool and then work upward um, but but if i said something, if i got a hit a coil, i would then get out bubbles instead of tediously work. A electronic wand around every joint i would just just saturate the coil and just wait for bubbles um, the h10. You can show there.

That was my favorite and not only is a good leak detector, but it was a pencil hole and it i think it was the pencil hold and once you get used to that pencil hold when you pick up another type of leak, detector, that's got the flexible Wand on it's, it's kind of like you're fishing with the short pole, and that and i just love the pencil hole and that's that's why i use the h10. I'm sure there's other guys out there that don't realize that they're using an h10 because it's a pencil and more comfortable, so i just thought i'd throw that in yeah. No, that's. That is absolutely true.

You get used to a particular tool and you know the h10 has its things that are annoying about it. I mean the old-school version you had to plug it in and it takes a while to warm up the new one. The batteries have. You know they don't tend to last very long, but i still use the h10.

I still use this very leak, detector right above it and again just to be clear. I've got no relationship with bacharach whatsoever from a business standpoint. I just happen to like the h10 right above it is their pgmir, and that is the super. It's like the most premium portable leak detector out there, and that is an infrared leak detector, but it uses a filter.

So that way, it filters the reference air so that it's constantly referencing to this purified reference error for the infrared. So it not only gives you the ability to find a leak, but it also measures in the parts per million, so it actually gives a readout, and so i used it to find a really hard to find leak that we were struggling with and you can see Uh in this in this gif here, the parts per million are rising and it's actually coming out of the chase pipe. We tried on the inside and the inside. They had sealed it all with mastic and we weren't picking up anything on the inside, but we dug it up on the outside.

This is florida, so in florida, we're goofy and we run chase run line sets underground and we dug it out and we found that it was leaking uh in the chase and and there's a very particular reason why it was leaking in the chase. And that was that the customer had been pouring bleach down their drain line and if you notice, where that drain is draining uh, it was it's draining right on top of the line set and that bleach was just going down into that into that pvc chase. Pipe filling it up with bleach, and when we pulled that copper out i mean it was just all chewed up it looked like an animal got into it all green and nasty because of that chlorine bleach, which is something to watch. For i mean again, most people aren't stupid, like we are in florida and run them underground.

So you don't have as many of these problems other places in air conditioning, but you will see it in refrigeration. Sometimes they run underground, copper or maybe there's you know. Chemicals in the area that are causing reactions always keep an eye out uh for that greening effect and always keep in mind that, if you're, trying to, if you're, really struggling to find a concentration of a leak into john's point about starting low.