Hey this is Brian, sometimes I kind of yell when I say that hey part, it seems like I'm talking to you right. I mean I'm talking to you right here coming out of your speakers, but the truth is I'm actually sitting in a padded room in my office at work at the kalos offices, the microphone literally probably three inches from my face and somebody's hard to get the enunciation. Just right something: that's like hey, you know, okay, a little inside the curtain. All right! This is episode, short episode, number 18, and it is all about.

Can you make ice in a vacuum, because this is a thing that comes up a lot? A lot of technicians want to know how fast of a vacuum is too fast. How big of a pump is too big? How big of hoses are too big and so we're gon na talk about it, but before we do, I want to remind you about our great sponsors, the ones who pay the bills, keep the lights on and make this podcast possible and hopefully is good and/or as Bad as it is depending on your perspective, I guess big thanks to the makers of VIPRE cleaners, refrigeration technology, refresh techcom, great great company, also uei and their wrs digital wireless scales. You may think to yourself what do I need to wireless scale? There's no point in that. Well until you try the UE iwrs scales.

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No, it is Jim Bergman. Anna hi talking all about whether or not you can freeze water in a vacuum. We're going to address a single question. One of the most asked questions that we get one of the most argued about questions on social media, which is that does pulling a deep and fast vacuum with big hoses and a good-quality vacuum pump.

Does that results in ice being built in the system? That's question. One and question two is: is that a problem, and so instead of me answering that I've got mr. evacuation himself, Jim Bergman hair so have at it. Jim know, Brian.

You have to know, no, I mean no, it doesn't so. Oh the answer is just no. It doesn't yeah, it's just know if you want to expand on that a little bit, if you could, please give us a couple minutes of expansion on that. Okay, a couple of interesting things.

First of all, in order for water to freeze in a vacuum we have to have water. If you have water near your conditioning system, you got a bigger problem than that, because how the water get in there first place. Now. I do know of a company that they had their installers hydrostatic test the refrigerant lines.

They meant to have them hydrostatic test the drain lines, but in an up hydrostatic testing, the refrigerant lines and they had water in their systems and if they had pulled a vacuum. On those systems they probably could have frozen the water in the pipes provided a couple things that happen number one. It have to be pretty darn cold outside because when you go back and you hear about water freezing in a system - well, a lot of that comes from refrigeration right, because you have multiple evaporators in a case and it's already 30 degrees or below freezing and a Refrigerant case and you're pulling a vacuum on the evaporator coil. If there's moisture in there guess what it's going to freeze we're talking about air conditioning air conditioning, it's seventy five.

Eighty degrees, outside the odds of freezing moisture in an air conditioning system during regular service and report, evacuation are almost non-existent again. You have to have moisture in the system. Number two is: it has to be enough moisture in the system that, when it's boiling away because it's changing state, the mass that's left behind - is starting to cool down and it actually gets to the freezing point. So, yes, you can freeze water in a vacuum and it's completely possible, but in this case, what we're talking here is.

Typically, you throw a teaspoon of water on a 300 degree. Skillet, the water is just going to vaporize. Okay, it's not going to have this chance to actually heat from the pipe surrounding it and actually freeze in the system. It's just not going to happen.

This goes back to theoretical versus practical now. The other thing is is if you're, using a really good rig. Like true blue and you can achieve a deep vacuum, even if we did freeze drop of water in there, we can sublimate it off very quickly because we have a very, very deep vacuum, achievable with those types of hoses again. I did a system just yesterday, pretty big multi Cities, product wet system, we're able to pull that thing down.

We had a finishing vacuum is 72 microns and boom. It was clean, dry and tight. So we didn't freeze the moisture in a system. We did a ridiculously fast evacuation, it's just not going to happen.

It just doesn't happen. So bad information has been passed around for a long time. Don't let that slow you down in your evacuation now all that said, if you're, using a blue back any of the blue back gauges that have the graphing plotting trending on there. You valve that when you isolate your core tools and you watch what's called your decay? You'll see the line go up and it'll start to tail off right.

If it keeps going straight up, you got a leak, but if it goes up and starts a tail off, which means it starts to curve around over time, that's your vapor pressure, your water building up. So if you pull down like I had system the other day, I pulled down to 300 microns and I fouled it off, and then it went quickly up to a thousand microns. I started a tail off 1500 microns. Well, that's indicative of moisture in a system hold it down again for another 10-15 minutes valve it off again, this time it curved - and maybe he went around 800 600 microns pulled it down again same thing happened to get the sawtooth effect, but it keeps going down And down and down in vacuum: that's because we are removing the moisture, and so, at the end of the day we got the system dried out, we're good to go and that moisture did not freeze in the system.

So it's again one of those things that can it happen. Yes, does it happen very, very rarely, 30 years in this business, I can tell you one time where I had to deal with a moisture problem and it was winter and they had a chiller barrel running two chillers in parallel left one open pulled in moisture from The air - and it was so cold outside that I didn't have any heat to help vaporize that moisture and it just took forever to get the evacuation done. So can it happen? Yes, does it happen not very often alright, summarize here it can happen where you have very low temperatures like where you're working on a freezer or something like that where you have very low ambient temperatures where it's really cold outside in both of those cases, you're gon Na be battling that anyway, like what can you do, you can add some heat you can use it gun. Whatever turn on your defrost heaters on your evaporator is what you do right exactly so you adding heat to the system in order to solve that problem.

You're dealing with that anyway, the thermal mass of a system when the temperatures are above freezing when it's warmer outside makes it nearly impossible for that to occur. When you watch videos like the one on my channel, that shows that you can do it in a glass jar. That's totally different, because you have a very very small volume and very small thermal mass. So it is theoretically possible, but even if it does happen, even if you have ice buildup, that ice will sublimate, which means it turns directly from ice to vapor.

As long as it's left under a deep vacuum, long enough, yeah it'll sublimate, it's not even about a vacuum. I mean if you were, to hang your clothes out on top of a mountaintop, eventually they're going to dry out, it could be below zero outside and your clothes are actually dry on the line below zero, because the ice will eventually sublimate out of the clothing. It's just a fact: sublimation is just a natural evaporation. It's just going from a solid to a vapor.

Same thing happens. You have ice in your refrigerator. If you have ice around long enough, like in the old days before we had ice makers, we actually had ice trays, it sometimes pull out an old tray ice and the ice would be rounded off and have those sharp edges are gone and it gets these funky. Looking old ice cubes and they taste like horrible, because they're sucked up all the taste from refrigerator to, but that ice is just sublimated.

It's just evaporated right. It wasn't the fact that was under a vacuum. It was the fact that it's water, vapor and water vapor travels from high vapor pressure to low vapor pressure, and if it's drier in their freezer, then the ice is it's gon na sublimate away and that's all that is so very, very low chance of that happening. Quit worrying about it and do your job and you can sleep well at night, pull a deep vacuum, stop using the excuses of building up ice or that you're somehow gon na damage the oil in the system.

Those things aren't gon na happen, just pull it deep vacuum, isolate it watch for decay and then be happy yeah yeah, that's the name of the game here, all right, Jim thanks for hosting this short episode, we'll talk to you again soon, all right Brian talk. You later bye.