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Page 12 — Property Management Quarterly — October 2017
Maintenance
R 22 refrigerant is being
phased out and property
managers and building
owners are likely going to
be caught off guard. The
problem – good for the environ-
ment, bad for operating expense
budgets – is that the Environmen-
tal Protection Agency has begun a
phase-out program for R22 refrig-
erant set to completely eliminate
new production and imports in the
marketplace by 2020. This issue
is coming on the heels of several
other recent initiatives affecting
building heating, ventilation and
air-conditioning systems such as
Energize Denver. Most owners and
managers see this phase out as just
another impending expense that’s
out of sight and out of mind. Unless
owners and managers have the in-
house expertise or a trusted vendor
partner, the waters of “what to do
with my R22 system” can be tricky to
navigate.
The most immediate effect is the
sheer cost of R22. In 2013, a pound
of R22 refrigerant might cost you
around $11 per pound retail. Today,
the cost we are seeing in the mar-
ketplace can be as high as $37 per
pound retail. That’s a 300 percent
increase in cost and when some sys-
tems carry over 200 pounds of refrig-
erant – a catastrophic loss will be a
costly expense. Supply houses have
begun to stockpile, but the demand
simply is outweighing the supply.
There are companies claiming
“drop-in” style refrigerants at a
lower price point that are made to
be added to R22 in current systems.
However, we’ve seen ill-fated results
in compressors,
valves and other
components due
to the different oil
properties that cur-
rent systems don’t
account for.
What’s more,
due to the spike in
cost, we are see-
ing an uptick in
unfamiliar brands
advertising cheap
R22, among sev-
eral other refriger-
ant types. Buyer
beware, these brands may be coun-
terfeit and contain compounds such
as R-40 and other contaminants that
often come from countries outside
the U.S. Simply dropping counterfeit
refrigerant into existing systems can
cause major damage to components
within the refrigerant system, cause
premature replacement of your over-
all systems and injurious equipment
failures. It is good practice to stick
with familiar brands from reputable,
reliable sources if you plan on pur-
chasing or stockpiling yourself.
The first step in preparing is to
identify if you have a system that
uses R22 refrigerant. If your system
is more than 10 years old and sits
on your roof (air cooled, not water
cooled), chances are that you do.
The second step is to determine how
large your system is. This will deter-
mine your overall strategy of simply
adding more leak checks to your
maintenance program, engineering a
conversion or replacing your system
all together.
For smaller systems that are 5 tons
or less, we recommend increasing
the maintenance visits to include
at least four leak checks per year,
repairing leaks immediately, and
recovering, recycling or reclaiming
refrigerants.
For equipment larger than 5 tons,
we recommend the same strategy
of increasing leak checks but also
recommend exploring the potential
of a refrigerant conversion to an
alternative refrigerant. Alternative
refrigerants such as R438A and oth-
ers are recommended for equipment
15 tons and less that do not have an
effective means to drain oil. Alterna-
tive refrigerants such as R407C and
others are recommended for equip-
ment larger than 15 tons with an
effective means to drain oil.
Either way, there needs to be some
engineering performed on a system-
by-system basis. This practice is
needed to determine if converting to
an alternative refrigerant is a viable
option given that such a conversion
will impact the energy efficiency
and cooling capacity of the original
system. In some cases, other tech-
nologies such as evaporative pre-
coolers for condensers must be used
to ensure the system will operate
adequately after the conversion.
Deciding to pay for a refrigerant
conversion obviously will depend
on the age of the system. You don’t
want to sink money into a system
that is approaching or past its use-
ful life. ASHRAE gives packaged
unitary equipment a median lifes-
Matt Koenig
Sales manager,
Haynes Mechanical
Systems,
Greenwood Village
AllTemp Solutions, EPA
The amount of virgin R22 production from 2012 through 2020 in millions of pounds.
The production has greatly decreased, and production will cease all together by 2020.