No Refrigerant Left Behind
recoolit.com
recoolit.com
(Yes, my AC units broke and the time to even get a technician to look at them, was so long I researched how to diagnose them and do the easy fixes, ran into the EPA requirement, studied the material and got my EPA certification, bought a bunch of gear off Amazon and refrigerant from a “good old boy” at an exorbitant price (global shortage, plus most is sold in palette quantities), and fixed my own unit in half the time it would have taken to get an appointment with a professional company. The first unit is working. If I succeed at the second unit I’ll even be money ahead. Of course if my yak had already been shaved maybe it could have tolerated the heat.)
Venting refrigerant is illegal in most of the world but it's almost impossible to enforce and compliance is typically quite low (good data is, as you can imagine, difficult to find). CARB in California now requires owners of large refrigeration systems (>250 lb of charge IIRC) to report all refrigerant recharge to the state so at least there's some efforts underway.
Note that the vacuum pump is often a free rental from the auto parts store, I don't know why they can't/don't rent the recovery equipment.
When you put it back together you can pull a vacuum on it, close it off and make sure it stays that way overnight. But you may still want to have a professional shop test with higher precision than whatever gauges you use.
1. Methane is 1900 ppb in the atmosphere[1], refrigerants overall are ~12.5 ppb -- so a lot less out there to detect. 2. I think methane leaks tend to be from single, continuing, large point sources -- coal mines, oil wells -- whereas refrigerants are usually from these distributed small point sources which happen once. So by the time you detect it it's too late to intervene.
[1] https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/increase-in-atmospheric-me...
So what if they are picking too-low-hanging fruit initially? As long as their process can in principle scale to a point where genuine reductions are possible. And they do actually enter a legitimate certification process fairly soon. The certification authority will then become responsible for proper accounting.
In the mean time, they are asking for investors' trust without verification. Not ideal, but not unreasonable for a PoC / MVP.
A lot of the newer refrigerants are much safer for the environment, but you are still allowed to recharge and buy older refrigerants. Only the manufacture of new refrigerants is prohibited.
So the EPA cert by itself isn't usually enough to work professionally (unless your repairing home refrigerators).
It can not be too onerous, because people need the work, and people capable of solving systems of differential equations have better opportunities than work on them.
A little repetition is good for the monkey brain.
I don't think that's what the drills are for. You do drills so that everyone is familiar with an organized process of exiting the structure, so that an evacuation can occur quickly.
In the absence of drills, everyone will still know where the exits are, but they'll form giant traffic jams that block people from using the exits.
If you came away knowing not to vent, to use the right refrigerant, not to vent, to take your waste to the reclaimer, not to vent, to leak test with nitrogen, not to vent, and that you can be fined $43,000/day for not having your paperwork in order… then it worked enough.
There are no standards on how many pieces of thin walled pipe a vechicle can use. It's usually a spiders nest of hoses.
You need to change you blower motor, or do anything that involves the dash, radiator, you are taking a calculated risk. Most mechanics might have a recovery system, but it's usually in the corner of the shop covered in dust.
It might help if the federal government standardized parts for the AC system?
I'm very careful, but the last time I changed my blower I borrowed a recovery system, but still made a mistake, and released all the gas. I was going to recharge it, but the generic evaporator core outlet to an ac line was 1" short. I had to go genetic because I couldn't find OEM.
And no don't make a mechanic's life harder with a bunch of regulations. They are already over regulated, and it's a hard job.
You will need something under $1000 of gear and supplies to get going, half that if you can rent an evacuation unit. (I can't find any near me.) You need to store your refrigerant outside where it won't get over 49°C, 120°F (assuming R410a) So it rates pretty high in the "pain in the ass" factor.
For modern home units, the circuit boards and motor controllers seem to be a common failure point and these are crazy expensive from the manufacturers anyway and hard for you to buy as an individual. If you have an older unit before variable speed compressors and fans then you can probably get commodity parts to replace them.
So many questions. r/BrandNewSentence
Though depending on your local vernacular and what "yak" might mean to you I can see room for confusion.
I used to go to a town named "Knob Lick" which my English acquaintances found quite an amusing town name.
The requirements seem extreme, though I did break a fan blade in my indoor air handler while checking its temperature, total noob mistake. If I were hiring a trusted contractor I'd want someone better than me!
Ideally there might be room for a grade of lightly trained technician which can handle the easy stuff and do some of the time consuming diagnostics then just throw in the towel and say "You need a better man than I."
I hire a contractor because they have the parts needed on the truck, or know where to get them fast. I also hire them for their insurance in case they screw up - I've hired someone saw them screw up and not paid for their mistake.
I agree with them if that’s what they meant :)
The other day we bought an indoor tent for our toddler. The frame is composed of wooden sticks with some having an aluminium tube glued at the end to connect it to another stick.
One of the tubes was slightly damaged, so the other stick wouldn't go in.
Fortunately the ceramic base of a (broken) LED bulb is harder than aluminium, so after some twisting I managed to file down the tube to size.
Now it’s probably fair to say that /r/HVAC isn’t a completely representative sample, but at least it gives me a good feeling that the situation probably isn’t as catastrophic as this article indicates (in the states at least, it’s probably worse in Indonesia like in the article’s example)
Unfortunately, my r410a units regularly vent to the atmosphere because flare fittings suck.
Please write more or make a video or something. I have been thinking very seriously about doing exactly this.
HVAC is an absolute racket in my area, and nothing is ever a single-visit fix. If you don't sign up for their "maintenance plan" the fix mysteriously doesn't last very long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene
Interestingly the best option for a refrigerant may be CO2 itself, which if collected from the atmosphere has no global warming or ozone depletion issues. The only drawback is CO2 refrigeration equipment has to operate at relatively high pressure, but this isn't a major problem:
https://www.rsi.edu/blog/hvacr/carbon-dioxide-refrigerant/
Getting rid of the chloro-flouro stuff makes lots of sense, but not producing any of it in the first place would be even better.
In principle you could also go without phase change refrigerants with the reverse Brayton cycle, essentially running gas turbine cycle in reverse. But AFAIU these are not competitive with phase change refrigerants in the usual temperature ranges used for AC's and refrigerators.
The only drawbacks are that it's flammable, and that for the blend, if there is a a slow leak, the blend ratios change due to different partial pressures of the two gasses. So to recharge, you basically have to vacuum the system and refill with the proper blend.
Ammonia also works for industrial applications (the local ice rink uses it) but due to its toxicity it's not ideal for household applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanethiol is used for propane (usually) but for the small amounts in a recirculating setup they may skip it.
I wouldn't be very concerned with 100 grams of propane. Your kitchen has probably 20kg of air. You ain't going to get even close to the flammability limit releasing a 100gm of propane into it.
So not nothing, but not very worrisome either.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007964251...
Science doesn't work like that though. You can't study something until it does exist. However, we just don't study something long enough (we just can't think of everything to test against) to see what the true long tail effects will be.
Yes, there's lots of things that would be amazing if we could un-invent them. But wishing won't make it so. We just need to be much more ammenable to the fact that somethings don't work and just STOP using them rather than shrugging shoulders and kicking the proverbial cans down the road
So far it has been a problem for scale. There are very few consumer appliances that use CO2 as a refrigerant. I can think of 1 right now - and it's 3x the price of it's alternative that uses traditional refrigerant.
They’re also more efficient, but more expensive. So I wonder how much of the price differential is the refrigeration loop, and how much is using more expensive processes to offset the lower tonnage for the system.
Hopefully the recent pro heat-pump moves across Europe and the US Administration's invocation of the DPA to support domestic heat pump manufacture will push this stuff out to the mass market instead of just in the houses of the wealthy.
EVs are just now breaking out of that pattern, only after competitive pressure from companies like Hyundai, Kia, VW, and GM who have made nearly affordable EVs.
Also good and cheap!
Regardless they are very widely deployed in existing equipment which can't be upgraded, so a program to collect and burn these gasses is a very good thing.
This seems like a better place to point out (rather than editing the original to say something different) that this actually undermines the argument: stainless steel is only about 6kg CO2 per kg, and a gallon of gas burned is around 8.
That number for steel is a lot lower than I expected, but here it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy#In_common_mate...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifluoroiodomethane
https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=93007...
Both of those mean specialized factories, supply chains, and labor. AKA higher prices unless it becomes the dominant option.
Also, in larger systems higher pressures is a safety concern.
None of that is a showstopper. But those are severe hindrances for a technology. A government can just fix every one of them, but then it would require government involvement.
They had to shut it down and redo all of the welding (I don’t recall if they fixed existing welds or pulled the whole thing apart). Afterward they still got complains about the smell, swore they’d fixed the leaks and the neighbors were imagining it. I suspect some esters were coming out the end of the pipe, and/or the dust everywhere around the place was saturated from the pilot project and every time the wind shifted they got another nose full.
It turns out running a business where you give people money in exchange for their junk is suprisingly harder than you would think.
In fact, now that OP has jogged my memory, I might start using this as an interview question for junior marketing people. If given a budget of $10K, how would you deliver me enough people willing to sell me 1000L of 10+ year old refrigerant? I bet the answers would be revealing and almost all wrong.
I hope you fire yourself soon, because you'd fail your own interview.
My point with saying "almost all wrong" is that this is one of the questions where you have like, 50 different ideas that seem like they could work and wouldn't work if tried when you try it and maybe 1 or 2 actual strategies, not a question where you have 30 different things that all work with different pros and cons and you need to compare between them.
But you said yourself that you don't know what will work and what won't.
You say that the answer at the end is largely irrelevant, but then claim that there is only a couple of good solutions in the problem space, implying that people that don't pick those good solutions will be rejected.
Either your position is not coherent, or there is a communication deficit here.
No, you're implying that.
Definitionally, I don't know the answer to the question. If I knew the answer, I wouldn't be interviewing you, I'd be off making millions buying R12. And if you knew the answer, you should be off making millions buying R12 instead of interviewing here. That's clear to everyone at the start of the interview.
You seem to be attaching a moral valence to the word wrong, that people are somehow failures if they come up with the wrong answer to a question. The opposite is true, most of the things we try in life are wrong, we try something, it doesn't work, we learn from it and we try again.
edit: The reason why I think it's a good interview question for marketing people is because it's a business that seems like, if the customer acquisition piece is figured out, the rest of the business is relatively trivial. But empirically, it's not a common business so the customer acq piece must be pretty hard to figure out. At the same time, it seems like there's at least a few businesses so it also doesn't seem like it's impossible to figure out.
If I hire you, I'm going to constantly be asking you to do things that, as far as you're aware, you're the first person in the world to have ever done. If I'm asking you to do it, it means I don't know if it can be done or not, I don't know the "right" answer to the problem. Most of the time, the answer back is that the thing I want done looks impossible and probably isn't worth pursuing which is a great answer in the context of a job but not very illuminating in the context of an interview.
This question looks that hard but there's also a proof point that it can be done which means you can't give a "this isn't possible" as an out and are forced to explore deeper into how someone could actually do it. At the same time, it's a question with relatively little context which means I can explain all the relevant facts in the span of an interview.
That's why I think it's a potentially great interview question. It's not designed as a trick brainteaser for you to figure out the answer. It's designed for you to exercise the same parts of your brain as you would when I come to you with any other crazy request that probably can't be done.
The degree to which not screwing up the environment has become partisan for some people is really quite depressing.
Recycling is something the oil companies came up with to whitewash their image, and justify single use plastics, it doesn’t work, has never worked and it’s hard to see how it would work. This is the real “Inconvenient Truth.”
If you really wanna “do your part to fight climate change,” you’re better off trying to live like someone out of 1890 before plastics was a thing, and people repaired/patched 100x before even considering replacements. You’ll have less time for arguing with idiots like me online but you’ll be much happier and actually be making a positive contribution.
> Recycling is something the oil companies came up with to whitewash their image, and justify single use plastics, it doesn’t work, has never worked and it’s hard to see how it would work.
No, it's because he's an idiot whose brain is turned to mush from obsessing about culture war politics.
The plastic recycling history is vaguely interesting for some plastics and completely irrelevant for glass and metals which are profitably recycled due to the economics of recycling them vs. creating them from scratch.
In any case, the local waste plant recycles what they can and then burns the rest for energy so I'll let them make the call on what's profitable to process.
All fired silicon materials are more stable when they have been fired at least twice. If you make ceramics, you save all your failures to make grog, which is basically ceramic sand or dust. Mixed in with fresh clay it reduced the expansion ratio and the internal stresses.
Bottles with recycled material are more sturdy than those without. I don’t know how the process of bringing a bottle plant online works, but if it doesn’t include either buying grog from a supplier or feeding all the glass from the test runs into a hopper I would be very surprised.
I have never heard a physicist explain this phenomenon, but if you crush something it tends to break along the weakest points, so crushed silicon has selected out many of the weakest grains and left the strongest ones. Then either they continue to grow or they just increase the ratio of strong to weak.
Plastics like PET and HDPE are recyclable but sorting recyclable materials from non-recyclable ones is costly which meant a lot of recycling does end up as waste.
We need to start penalizing manufacturers and retailers for single-use plastics. Laws like those passed in Maine banned most single-use plastic bags and mandates that anyone offering them must also provide recycling a drop off bin.
Consumers mostly do not have a choice about how their products are packaged so the onus must be shifted onto retailers and manufacturers who make those decisions.
Things such as refillable water bottles are simple examples of this as well.
Of course MAGA country is a laggard so this will probably take another 5-10 years to become adopted after it becomes the norm in the left cities->suburbs>rural.
The plastics era is slowly ending and being replaced by ideas that used to work fine.
Perfect example of an unnecessary vile comment.
Most rural people already reuse and repurpose many things, they don’t have trash pick every week if at all and like to have a clean area for their children and grandchildren. It’s in their blood to find innovative ways to use something again in a different way. Your hate is coming from somewhere gross and you should consider some introspection on why you have so much of it in your heart.
It was necessary to me, thats why I made it. Whether or not you consider it necessary has no bearing on me. Just downvote and move on.
>Most rural people already reuse and repurpose many things, they don’t have trash pick every week if at all and like to have a clean area for their children and grandchildren.
I think you are not descriptive enough when it comes to the term rural. I specifically said MAGA country. That does not encompass all of rural.
And to be clear, my point with "left cities->suburbs>rural" was to indicate that the concept of "stores that sell refills" as a concept is still a niche idea (in the US). It will begin in the cities and then once it becomes the norm there, it will expand to the suburbs and eventually become the norm in rural as well.
You saw this same concept in the adoption curve of many things such as electricity, internet access and well, even single use plastics (The rural areas were the last to ditch the milk man)
Again, this comment is filled with vitriol and hostility. This is not a healthy way to live, I strongly encourage you to seek outside council on how to process these destructive feelings.
In fact some cities offset the price of trash service with the money from recycling. Which is part of the impetus to fine people for not separating. You’re costing the city money.
There's also a few good ones for moving away from ICEs: (1) I'd rather make things out of oil/plastic than just burn it up (2) national sovereignty and (3) resilience in case of war or disaster.
Relatedly, I don't think I've every heard an environmentalist use these points. Any idea what that is?
Stop arguing with abstract concepts, benefits for society, and dishonest framing (people are really allergic to anything they perceive as being lied to). Show the immediate, direct, tangible benefits they get.
So what does that leave us? Cult deprogramming techniques? Lithium in the water?
Show me the techniques that work, and I'll do it. I've studied and tried them all.
Meanwhile, I've given up. Absolutely refuse to talk news or politics with friends and relations. Not even with people I agree with.
Now I just practice radical empathy.
I fear the only way to win is to not play.
They might be less stubborn if you were less condescending and spent more time actually trying to come up with good arguments to convince them. pretty clear that being arrogant never changes anyone's mind. inclined to believe that you don't actually care about convincing, just judging
Another relative, after one of the recent shootings, said there was nothing we can do about gun violence. I immediately named off a few modest proposals that don't involve mass registration or confiscation, and he immediately said "yeah those don't sound bad".
Both my parents were conservatives for a long time, but were not angry, bitter, finger-pointing people about it until they had a traumatic event happen, AND a black Democrat became president, AND they got access to high speed internet and Fox News in the same year - 2008.
Now they watch four+ hours of Fox propaganda per day, my mother more because she goes onto bona-fide hate and misinformation sites and prints out articles on how Ukraine is the hub for US bioweapons labs and World Order money laundering because Ukraine is literally the most corrupt government in the world. With bylines of made up names, whose biographies are empty when you click the hyperlink. But that is more trustworthy than the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times, or gasp NPR.
I've had experience in these conversations. I know that the approach is to get them talking about what matters to them first, and find common ground. Believe me, I'm not "doing it wrong".
Doing it, even doing it correctly, is exhausting, full stop.
Happens with other topics, like transgender treatment for kids.
Some people just hate change and being told how they should live.
They keep advocating for things that won't really help the environment - or actively hurt it. As long as those things pass some kind of "purity test".
For example:
Being against nuclear power.
Plastic straw ban (the replacements are way worse for the environment).
Banning natural gas in homes (using electricity for your stove, water heater and dryer has greater emissions).
Plastic bags vs others types - study after study has shown this helps litter, but is worse in every other possible way.
Recycling plastic rather than burning it. Burning it is better for the environment, but "sounds bad".
Burning plastic isn’t better for the environment than recycling. It is better than landfill, assuming you're using the heat to displace fossil fuels though.
You can check out the waste hierarchy on wikipedia if you care about being well informed about stuff:
Go read a study on the energy and water costs of recycling plastic. But I'll give you a quick summary:
Plastic has two energy components. The energy embodied in it because it's flammable, and the energy to manufacture it.
It takes more energy to recycle plastic, than it does to manufacture it. So why do people want to recycle it? Because they want to recover the energy embodied in it!
But if you burn it, you get that energy back, AND you got to use the plastic for some productive purpose. And since recycling it takes more energy than manufacturing it new, burning plastic is always better than recycling it.
Different countries, different methodologies, different assumptions but recycling being better than burning which is in turn better than landfill across a range of environmental impacts is fairly consistent.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/10/5340/pdf
> Overall, this review found that for all the studies which aiming to compare waste treatment technologies, mechanical recycling comes out as the environmentally preferable option in most cases
Hopefully this:
> And once people do find out how badly they have been mislead they tend to have a backlash and turn completely against anything an environmentalists suggests.
also applies to you finding out that you've been lied to by people who have a vested interest in generating exactly that backlash against environmentalist.
> Similar discretion is needed while comparing the results obtained for the WTE [waste to energy] option by the four studies. It is known that the incineration process emits greenhouse gases, but it also generates thermal energy and electricity which can be used as an alternative to fossil fuel consumption. However, the results indicate that overall, the WTE option contributes adversely towards the global warming problem, with all high positive impact values between 50% and 100%. However, all four studies indicated a negative impact value for AP, indicating that the incineration process is advantageous in reducing the impact of acidification, making it the second most environmentally friendly method of disposal, and suitable for disposal of the residues discarded by the MRF process.
The key point being, if you can get your heat or electricity from a non-fossil source, then it's preferable to do so. Because releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is bad for climate change.
But luckily for WTE, the are other aspects that make landfill even worse. Still not as good as recycling, just like all those environmentalists have been saying, correctly, for years. How boringly non-contrarian of them.
That would imply they somehow manage to emit double the CO2 that the plastic actually contains. Or they burn it and don't capture any energy at all, so there is no substitution taking place.
And the negative GWP for recycling? That's impossible. Recycling something does not remove CO2 from the air - rather it costs CO2 to do the recycling. I suspect they are subtracting the embodied energy of the plastic to get that figure, which is dishonest.
Sorry, but this "study" is worthless. But it's an excellent example of the sorry state of environmentalism.
That seems unlikely.
I've never even seen this specific meta review before, I just knew that's what they all said and grabbed the first link I found to a recent one. Feel free to check others, they will all broadly agree because this is fairly boring stuff.
This is why I started this thread with "Because environmentalists have a truly terrible track record.". And this is also why so many people are so distrustful of what "experts" say about this topic.
Environmental research is so dependent on assumptions it's basically impossible to do it honestly. Usually an author will have a goal in mind, then write a paper to reach that goal, and he'll have no trouble doing so - just change an assumption here or there, and you'll be successful.
If you want a way to cut through the nonsense just follow the money: Resources cost money, the method that is cheapest, to a rough approximation, is the one that uses the fewest resources.
Nuclear power should be obvious.
Plastic straws take FAR FAR FAR less energy than metal ones - don't forget the hot water to wash the metal one. Paper straws are usually coated with stuff, the paper takes more energy that plastic, and the coating doesn't break down - so you don't even get the compost.
So long as we are burning natural gas for energy, it's better to use it directly in your home, vs have someone else burn it, make electricity, then use that.
Plastic bags are good for litter, but you would have to use reusable ones hundreds of times, and never wash them - ever, for them to be better. Not to mention people reuse around half of them for garbage bags, so if you ban them, people still need to buy them.
Only if you're using resistive heating. Heat pumps run on natural-gas-produced electricity can be at least as efficient as direct natural gas combustion for heating, and they automatically transition to cleaner sources of energy as the grid does.
> you would have to use reusable ones hundreds of times, and never wash them - ever, for them to be better
I understand that this is the case for cotton bags, IIRC due to high water use in cotton production, but for other types of reusable bags the threshold is lower.
> people reuse around half of them for garbage bags
This estimate seems like it's significantly too high. I do most of my grocery shopping at places that don't provide free plastic bags, and yet I still end up with far more single-use plastic bags than I could ever use for garbage. I would guess that no more than 10% of single-use bags actually get reused for trash.
Your oven also uses resistive heat. Induction can work well, but is underpowered if you are cooking more than 3 or 4 things at once (especially if you also use the oven). You need around double the electric service most homes run to the range (there is no standardized plug for it).
Induction is only a replacement for causal cooks, people who make full course large meals will not be happy with it.
>>but I specifically mentioned hot water and dryer.
I've never in my life have seen a dryer that runs on gas. Is this a thing?
>> Heat pump do not work well for those applications
What's wrong with heat pump dryers? They are awesome, as long as you aren't putting them in an unheated space like a garage. They use much less energy than condenser dryers and considerably less than vented ones, while being pretty quick.
Nearly everyone has gas furnaces here in MN since it’s significantly cheaper to heat with natural gas in the US, and it gets very cold here.
> like(yet again) another US only problem
I don't think Europeans realize how they sound when they say stuff like that. Especially when your stove would be considered low end in the US.
A good stove is around 5 kW, and each burner is 2.5kW = 15kW to run everything at once - basically double the service you have. Unless you want to wire the range and stove separately (which might be an option).
> I've never in my life have seen a dryer that runs on gas. Is this a thing?
Obviously it's a thing, otherwise why would I say it? Is this a European thing not to have them?
Gas dryers cost a bit more to buy (15% more maybe), but much much less to operate (half to be exact). If you have gas service in your home and you buy your own appliances you'll almost always pick that.
> What's wrong with heat pump dryers?
They are very expensive, and save about half the electricity - but gas dryers also save about half the energy, so there's no point in going for the heat pump.
Even if you have no gas service, they cost around double a non heat pump, and it would take 10 years to recoup the money. It's not worth it - all you are doing is generating emissions in the dryer factory instead of your house.
Environmentally the gas dryer is better, at least as long as we still burn gas to generate electricity.
And don't forget the heat pump dryer takes much longer to dry clothing - at least for my house the dryer is always the bottleneck for laundry, I would never buy one that takes longer!
There are similar problems around wind/solar, which tend to just be green washing natural gas peaker plants, many of which aren't even combined cycle. So the easy back of the envelope here is, that if your not getting ~50% of your power from a nuke its likely that burning the gas in your house is more CO2 friendly (the places with lots of hydro also have nukes, so 1rst order approximation).
And the plastic bag thing, is again feel good because those bags both have a very short time to degrade (despite all the environmentalist misleading people into thinking they last decades, which is true when they are buried in a landfill, but that isn't the case they then talk about which is finding them in the open environment where UV destroys them in a few months to a couple years).
The plastic drink bottles though? Those are much more robust, but just about no one banned them in favor of recreating the commercial bottle washing systems we had before and that exist in mexico/etc. But again, one had to be very careful about total system costs, which is how we get back to nukes. We have to shift the energy curve away from CO2 sources, and the only way to really do that is to find a significantly more energy dense mechanism. And we have one, which is somewhere in the ballpark of 7 million times as dense per Kg and instead of arguing about the CO2 being emitted to move or manufacture things, we could basically zero it out with 40 year old technology and likely gain another order of magnitude of efficiency if we built energy systems with modern technology that actually burnt the entire fuel load rather than calling it "waste".
Most environmentalist are just as uninformed as the climate deniers, which is why we are stuck.
PS: once you start to understand much of the above you can also see how premium electric cars can frequently be worse for the climate than econobox gas. The numerical systemwide advantage isn't so overwhelming to wipe out the disadvantages in places that get a lot of power from coal.
Emitting a bit more carbon now is worth it if we can significantly reduce emissions long term
Straws and plastic bags in developed countries with working waste disposal systems are another example. Each time someone pulls a half-dissolved paper straw out of their drink, you've just made a person that is less willing to support environmental measures.
The 1-2% that get caught and punished are acceptable breakage from the broader picture.
1. Scrappers likely don't have the skills, equipment or inclination that AC technicians do.
2. Those self-contained units typically have a lot less refrigerant than the split AC systems (or large chillers) we see, which require venting in order to remove once installed. A refrigerator might have only 30 grams of charge, vs a split system with 2-3 kg.
1. Already operates at negative pressure with a high enough temperature and long enough residence time 2. Alkaline environment neutralizes the HF and HCl that are produced when the refrigerant burns. 3. Already consuming massive amounts of energy so the marginal energy use is negligible. 4. Allows use to use an existing facility instead of building our own -- great for developing countries where building infra is harder (but cement plants are everywhere).
[1] https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/TEAP-DecX...
1. A trial burn done by an independent lab to make sure that under normal operating conditions, when destroying refrigerant the levels of those + other chemicals are below certain thresholds
2. automatic monitoring and shutoff mechanisms if the kiln deviates from normal conditions
The tax deductibility and employer gift matching means you could go a lot farther for each dollar a donor is willing to spend.
Edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=charity+retire+carbon+credit... has plenty more
Thus I am absolutely in agreement with recollecting, reselling, and reusing, but in strong opposition to destroying what would otherwise be useful. The latter only encourages the replacement of equipment in a continued cycle of forced obolescence, which might be far worse from a CO2 perspective.
I've always found it a little amusing that R152a, which is a pretty good replacement for R12, you can buy in "gas dusters" and legally vent all you want to the atmosphere, but it's technically illegal according to the EPA to recharge an R12 system with it.
This is from the viewpoint of someone who restores and repairs old appliances. Environmental considerations aside, I'd never vent deliberately, just because of how expensive and rare these substances are now --- and not surprisingly, there is an underground market for banned refrigerants too.
Thus, "you're throwing away money if you vent refrigerant" is probably going to have a much bigger effect than mentioning "climate change".
Old designed for R12 were not engineered to meet those guarentees. R152a can be huffed to get high, and doing so can be lethal. Thus we know that prolonged exposures to high enough concentrations of R152a can cause fatal cardiac arrhythmia.
So it is fundamentally a safety concern. Just an unfortunate one, considering how good it otherwise is as an R12 replacement.
R12 on the other hand is used a fire suppressant on submarines.
I don’t think banning the use of a high flammable gas in systems originally designed to operate with a fire suppressant is a bad idea.
I think it’s quite reasonable to assume that designers of R12 systems didn’t worry about accidental leaks into enclosed environments with ignition sources, on account of an R12 leak being completely safe in that situation. R152a on the other hand, that’s just an explosion waiting to happen.
I knew the unit was into EoL based on age, but when something seems to work fine it's really hard feel like preemptive replacement is the right choice or priority.
At least in the US R-22 is so expensive and people still repair and recharge units not infrequently. Wonder how reasonable or possible capturing leaking refrigerant would be. I was watching it leak and vaguely wondered if it would be possible to catch in a large umbrella.
That said, ‘reduce, reuse’ comes before ‘recycle’ for a reason. If the unit still worked and was reasonably close efficiency wise, it’s just a waste to replace it when it still functions.
Generally this kind of failure was a couple hundred dollar fix. Pull the compressor, braze on a new one, flush the system, vacuum it down, and refill.
Only now, the refrigerant can cost a grand, the markup on a $200 Emerson scroll is 4x, the fact that you need a license to work on the system means the tech charges $200 an hour, and it all adds up toe selling someone a new system, that is likely going to last 1/2 as long because R410 runs at 2-3x the pressure, the major manufactures have penny pinched every gram of metal out of the condenser/compressor tubing so its as thin as possible, and a half dozen other factors means that the 30 years a good R22 system would run for is unheard of now.
Definitely the cost of replacement coolant was a big driver of how things played out (in concert with system age).
I looked into an R134a conversion for my 1990 car about 10 years ago and found that any remaining R-12 would need to be vacuumed out of the system and collected for re-use. I elected to just live without A/C for a few more years and let the junkyard collect the refrigerant when I ended up scrapping the car.
Many companies are certainly looking to buy the cheapest credits they can find but there are promising indications that things are changing, led by companies like Stripe and Shopify.
I winced a bit at their attacks on low quality carbon credits because the very idea has been under sustained attack by climate change deniers for decades.
Oh, rich people just paying money for carbon credits and still flying around the world, that's not real it's all fake, like climate change.
Obviously some are better than others, but the concept itself is useful and worth fighting to improve, not write off.
So a regular home refrigerator has about 60 grams of R600a in it. It has a global warming potential of 3. That means if you illegally vent it to the atmosphere, you are doing the same environmental harm as venting 180 grams of CO2.
However, if you hire a trained technician to extract the gas for you, and he drives 10 km to get to your house, then his van (a brand new average van getting 158 g/CO2 per km) will emit 1580 grams of CO2.
Considering this, it seems crazy to bother regulating this stuff.
I often hear that r12 cools better but that's not true at all according to thus Perdue study. There may be other factors though.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D...
I think that came about as a result of people filling old R12 systems with R134A and then complaining that it didn’t work as well as before, back in the 90s.
I heard they're switching next year away from R410a to something new. But... not propane?
He definitely had a bottle of nitrogen on hand because he used that when pressure testing the new system. And it was just a replacement of the evaporator coil and the condenser, so the line set was reused. Your explanation makes perfect sense, thanks!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
"The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income."
We never pay our partners more than the market price of new refrigerant, removing any possibility of a perverse incentive. And because we use well-studied industrial processes, as approved by TEAP at UNEP, there’s no science risk: no carbon is going to bubble back out in 5 years, like you might worry about with soil, forestry, or other nature-based processes.However, in a fridge/freezer the refrigerant circulate in metallic tubes, usually made of copper which have great conductivity. And what do you think happen when you leave copper tubes unattended at night? Copper thieves come and scrap the fridge with no regards for the refrigerant being released to the atmosphere…
It was a huge political failure, which was completely focused on the "ozone hole" rather than making wise decisions. Just banning CFC's as propellants, and all the other uses which basically dumped huge quantities into the atmosphere and putting licensing requirements around their use, and enforcing the recapture (aka AC techs are tracked for how much they buy vs return), and not filling leaky systems would have solved the immediate problem. But the legislative bodies were also convinced to legislate a change in equipment/refrigerant to these newer compounds which had a huge positive effect on many manufactures and AC installers bottom line. And now we have to do it again because the people warning about the dangers of these new (frequently patented) refrigerant compounds were ignored.
Like the story about American democracy, this is going to be one of those cases of trying all the wrong approaches before doing the right thing.
Pro tip: there are certain advantages to living in a place where not everyone is an engineer in high tech.
It's HFC-152a[1]. Looks like it's a much "friendlier" refrigerant than 134 (and of course vastly better than R-12)
In any case, it's still amazing to me how restricted these are when used as a refrigerant, but then they're sold to consumers to spray on whatever they want. It really undercuts the environmental impact of these chemicals.
This raises a few questions in my mind. TFA makes it sound like the refrigerant boogeyman is a problem of fixed quantity. It sounds like after we've destroyed all the refrigerant, it can cause no more harm, but clearly these refrigerants must be manufactured on a continual basis?
Can refrigerants not be recycled? What materials go into the creation of refrigerants? Is anything of value lost in destroying refrigerants, besides the energy that went into making them?
The organisation at work here are targeting developing countries who've been much slower to migrate to less harmful refrigerants, but old units are being cycled out for new ones, so new demand for janky old refrigerant (from failing units, so likely contaminated) is lower than you might think.
So it's not required that it's CO2 or R290, but rather than you can use any refrigerant that has a GWP of 1 or less.
R290 seems an ideal refrigerant, especially since the technology to use it as a refrigerant is so old/mature. The challenge is that it's /highly/ flammable. This is true of most refrigerants with a GWP less than 1. R1234yf partly exists because of a desire to reduce flammability.
The rule only affects newly manufactured vehicles as well, so there's no requirement to phase out R410A.
Or coldness I guess.
I believe R-12 and R-22 were phased out because of their ozone depletion potential. In the states R-134a replaced those.
R-134a was great! No more ozone layer damage!
But its global warming potential is still too high[2] to comply with various climate change pacts and laws (I think California has a law that will limit refrigerant GWP to 750 in 2023 [3] ).
It's a bit weird for consumers though because if you're buying an air conditioner/heat pump right now then it's probably still R-134a.
Who wants to buy hardware that will last for 15+ years but could cost a significant portion of the original unit price to refill in the event of a leak or installer error?
[1] https://us-ac.com/usac-news/r410a-phasedown/
[2] https://www.daikin.com/corporate/why_daikin/benefits/r-32
[3] https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/January%2...
I'm confused about this remark about price. Isn't there a market of buyers and sellers? Why would one sell carbon credits below market price?
I have a startup in this space but we mostly do MRV, always looking for solutions like yours to link to our clients and contribute to this new economy. Send me an email (check profile) to get in touch!
If you just want to get rich, work in finance.
And honestly: I find it very arrogant to think that you can show up and propose this “crazy idea” that “hey what if you guys made more money you could do more good”, as if that hasn’t been considered…
It’s your usual market pricing adoption curve. And frankly, their solution is more effective than paying to not cut trees down.
"Our plan is simple and has zero technical risk" What do you see as the biggest risk? And what is your assessment for why no one has pursued this approach before?
Eventually the gas will leave the system from a leak, unexpected damage, shoddy technicians, or the unit being destroyed
In theory, reclaiming gases that are still unrestricted for production/import is at least as good as destruction from a climate perspective. However, virgin refrigerant is really cheap until import bans take hold -- so there is never a point where it is both economically worthwhile and impactful for climate. In theory you could use credits to boost the economics around reclaim but you end up with a very messy additionality story. My sense is that most reclaimers are very low-margin or even loss leaders for the companies that produce/sell the gas!
Anyway the short answer is that it's harder for us to figure out in this first push, but we do intend to look into it more closely as we expand.
I've done it with my home office room A/C, a small 12,000 BTU unit. I couldn't believe it when I found out you can do that.
They say R290 is cleaner, purer, blah blah, but the gas from a simple propane tank you can get anywhere works fine. Remains to be seen for how long, so far 2 summers and going strong.
Every time he does this with a single air conditioner, it has the same effect as burning 250 gallons of gasoline, which is more than enough to drive from SF to NY and back
It surely doesn't consume 250 gallons of gasoline equivalent to ship the collected gas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants
It's not a very good one for general space cooling for the reasons others have stated here, at least near typical ambient conditions. Water / steam are often used for space heating, though there the energy conveyed is typically from combustion rather than via a heat pump as in an air conditioner.
Water does work well for cooling high-temperature equipment such as automobile engines and power plants.
Both typically operate at or above the standard atmospheric boiling point of water.
The problem is that if you want to reduce the temperature below ambient you need some kind of expansion cycle, either with a single-phase gas, or something that has the gas-liquid phase transition somewhere in the temperature of interest. Water doesn't really work for common AC or refrigeration uses.
I'm curious whether or not such a cooling design exists, and what application(s) it might have.
For HVAC, I suspect the temperature would have to be between 0 and 8 C (32--45F), which would be about 5--10 mbar of vacuum.
Note too that it's difficult to cool below 0C (32F) with water, though salt water can reach lower temperatures. Other refrigerants function far better down to ~ -8 -- -12C, or lower. Water-based refrigerants would likely require a secondary cascade.
https://www.myengineeringtools.com/Data_Diagrams/Water_Boili...
Edit: where is this 6% number coming from? https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
Chemical & petrochemical (3.6%): energy-related emissions from the manufacturing of fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, refrigerants, oil and gas extraction, etc.
2. That 6% is based on the most recent IPCC report which estimates 1.4 GT from HFCs, and another ~1.4 from CFCs+HCFCs, so 2.8 total. OWID seems to get its data from climatetrace, I haven't dug into their data, but if I'm reading that correctly it looks like that is only energy usage from manufacturing, rather than direct emissions of the gases. Looks like maybe this breakdown just ignores refrigerants, which is unfortunately common.
It’ll be really interesting to what happens as the next gen of refrigerants rolls out. There was a great link on hn recently about them but I’m unable to locate it.
Is it too much to roll down a window?
Why are those who don't use air conditioning paying the "environmental refrigerant tax"?
How much refrigerant would be saved if vehicle air conditioning was an additional expense?
I used to live in Maryland. The summers there are brutal. On hot days, rolling down the window is like having a hair dryer pointed at your face.
I was talking with a friend of mine in Delhi, a couple of weeks back, when they were having the heat wave.
It's no joke. People are dropping dead at their workstations.
They were known as "The Blue Nomads." because their skin was often tinged blue, from the dye on the heavy wool robes they wore.
In the desert, wool actually keeps you cooler.
The people you're talking about are Amazigh, also known as Berbers, and from the indigo, specifically Tuareg.
I'm sure they were referred to as "bedouin" and it isn't wrong in context.
Above 30°C it's actually more comfortable to just ventilate the train instead of A/C.
Although, I'm betting the engineering side of the tram probably avoids needing anything other than the equivalent of the US PE/etc. Its probably a bit tricky because the needs of being able to load/unload people quickly also probably tend to dump a lot of hot air into the car. Either way though, busses, cars, trains all tend to do ok in hot climates because they have massively oversized AC systems and can move a lot of air relative to the enclosed space.
Returning to my original point, I'm betting your trams don't actually have AC, from your description I might guess they have some kind of evaporative cooler.
Come to Texas and drive your car with no AC and just the windows rolled down. Please, I'll let you stay at my house for the duration of the experiment just to watch you bitch about the heat. I'll even record it for your socials so you can just show everyone how amazing your idea was.
As a human, with a normal body temperature of 98.6 degrees F. If the outside air temperature is 100 degrees F, then having your windows rolled down will actually increase the speed at which your body heats up to match ambient temperatures.
This makes driving motorcycles in desert areas where air temp is > 100 degrees especially dangerous as it can quickly lead to dehydration and heat stroke.
But yah, motorcycles at speed are another thing entirely because sweat/etc can just as easily blow off as evaporate. And so, you can't drink/sweat enough to be cooled. Combined with the need to wear protective gear which also tends to stop evaporation is a deadly combination. I ride mountain bikes in 100F+ weather and its another set of dangers, and one of the best feelings is dumping cold water through the vents in a helmet and feeling the burning hot water flush down your face and be replaced by the cool. But again, i'm basically carrying a significant quantity of <40F water intended to be sprayed on my already sweaty self, along with a 32F water i'm drinking not for hydration but as coolant.
But in a decade or so, it will be the prevailing opinion. Some czar of the environment will go around deciding who gets AC, and telling others "You don't need AC". (Generally, this is decided by campaign donations and party support.)
Of course there is some negligible environmental impact that will come out in a college paper some point. But otherwise, the only thing people will notice is the rise in deaths of the elderly.
But this is a small price to pay. The environment is our god, and it demands sacrifice.
An A/C is better for the environment.