As the world’s leading innovator and manufacturer of HVAC tools, our team has a wealth of tips, tricks, and insights to help guide your contractors in proper evacuation practices.
There have been many changes in the industry over the last ten years, and our team of HVAC professionals enjoys supporting technicians in more effective and efficient vacuum practices, helping them to work smarter and achieve better results in less time.
As tools continue to evolve and improve, many innovative best-practices have emerged in the HVACR field. But while technology sometimes improves rapidly, changes in technicians’ actual practice tends to comes slowly, so many of these more innovative practices are only currently used by a small segment of the industry. Many of NAVAC’s HVAC tool customers have not adopted these practices, and we relish the opportunity to bring these insights to contractors.
NAVAC’s goal isn’t simply to design, build and sell the best professional HVAC/R tools on the market – ultimately we hope to raise the technical caliber of contractors & technicians in the field. We’d like to help equip HVACR technicians with both the best professional-grade HVAC tools and the best practices in order to help elevate the entire industry to be more effective.
In this two-part series, we will cover an overview of NAVAC vacuum pumps, including: ranges, features, capabilities and application. We will explore beyond the bullet points of typical literature and product overviews, with the goal of filling in the gaps to important information that is simply not being addressed.
Evacuation: What is it?
Any time a sealed refrigeration system is open to the atmosphere, whether for a repair, replacement or outright leak, that system must be evacuated.
Evacuation accomplishes two things:
- Degassing of the equipment: removing non-condensable gasses.
- Dehydrating of the equipment: removing all moisture content.
In the HVAC industry, it has been a generally accepted standard that equipment be evaluated down to at least 500 microns, though due to advances in equipment, we are starting to see manufacturers demanding even lower numbers, often between 2 and 300 microns.
Once these levels are achieved, it’s important for the technician to:
- Shut the vacuum pump off
- Allow the system to equalize
- Show that the vacuum level achieved reflects an acceptable “decay rate”, AKA “rise test”: this proves that the system is dry, devoid of all gasses, and that it’s tight and leak free.
Changing the HVAC Status Quo
In part two of this post, we’ll examine the long-standing industry practices for evacuation, the weaknesses of those practices, and discuss a modern and improved approach to HVAC evacuation.
