REFRIGERANTS
On the road with rapid recovery
A-Gas Rapid Recovery operations manager Jake Matthews explains how his teams recover refrigerant and help return it to market.
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Recovery also removes any temptation for rogue contractors to destroy the gases illegally.
o day is the same for our A-Gas Rapid Recovery teams. The growing demand to recover refrigerants and use them again means that our
jobs are always presenting new challenges. Reclaimed gases are quota free – and refrigerants saved from disposal and returned to the market have th added benefit of reducing raw material usage, energy consumption and the unnecessary transport normally associated with virgin production. All of this fits in well with the F-Gas Regulations and low carbon business frameworks. At Rapid Recovery we operate as single, two or three- man teams depending on the size of the job. We travel anywhere in the UK to recover refrigerants as we know how important this is to prevent ozone depleting gases escaping into the atmosphere. Supermarkets, data centres and buildings with large VRF air conditioning installations feature among the big jobs we tackle. Typically, you will see our personnel working high up on
the roof of a supermarket or office block. Using a Rapid Recovery team can be up to ten times quicker than the contractor removing the gases themselves; we can attach the hoses to up to four outdoor units at a time. On the road it’s more than likely to be a retrofit job we tackle where the end-user is switching to a low ozone depleting gas and wants the high GWP refrigerant removed and available for re-use. Supermarkets now want to make the switch to zero GWP or lower GWP refrigerants. They cannot afford much downtime on the hard-working fridges and freezes they use in store. We're often called in to remove R404 or R407 to replace with R448A or R449A. Our help allows on-site engineers get on with other key jobs – so keeping downtime to a minimum is crucial. We arrive on site in a flat-bed truck or van, depending on the nature of the job, with the Rapid Recovery equipment on board and all the cylinders, hoses and adapters needed. Ideally, we will recover directly from the vehicle but we also have a mounted crane available so that we can move the mobile recovery machines from the vehicle and use them around the site. We capture the gas and the vapour in the Rapid machine. Some jobs can take
18 March 2023 •
www.acr-news.com
a little as two hours while others can last as long as two weeks – but whatever the size of the job, we’ll stay on site for as long as it takes. Awkward jobs are very much a speciality. In these cases contractors are unlikely to have the length of hose available to recover the gas. If a supermarket pack is on a roof or tucked away in an inaccessible corner you need long hoses to match. Our lines can reach up to 100 metres and with the mobile nature of Rapid Recovery this gives us a lot of versatility. We can recover any volume of gas and on one particular occasion removed as much as seven tonnes from a single site. Typically, we can recover 100 kilos in two hours. Bear in mind that this work could take a contractor up to two days to complete.
In instances where the contractor wants the refrigerant
removed from the system to allow them to carry out a repair – and then return the gas to the system – our recovery team can also help. The contractor will not have to worry about providing
receiver cylinders to store the refrigerant while the work is going on, Rapid will take care of this including all aspects of the paperwork.
Compliance is important and we are often working in
unregulated environments. We are regularly exposed to outside environmental risks like working at height. In other examples members of the public could be near to the site. We have to ensure all the risk assessments are completed and the on-site safety policy followed. We always ensure we are wearing the correct personal protective equipment. The low GWP properties of flammable refrigerants mean that they are growing in popularity. A-Gas Rapid Recovery teams are fully ATEX trained and certificated to ensure that when we're removing flammable gases all is safe and sound. We can recover A2Ls such as R32 using an ATEX-standard machine. Although risks associated with A2Ls are very low we still have to take all the precautions necessary.
Many of our customers will keep the recovered
refrigerant to use again and we will supply the cylinders to store the gas in. HFCs are our main market at the moment
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