Gabriel Murcia – HVAC Training Video | Sanford Workshop Sept 2025

Hey everybody, my name is Gabriel from HVAC Technical Academy right here in Sanford. Today we’re going to be talking about the recovery process, what it means, and we’re also going to be diving into some EPA. We’re going to go ahead and recover this system for Mrs. Smith.

Now, whenever we recover a system, we want to make sure that the system is off. And also, a disclaimer — we’re not going to be doing the actual process because we don’t have this system hooked up right now, but we’re going to be going through the process for educational purposes.

Right here, I have all my equipment already laid out. We have a Fieldpiece recovery machine. We have our recovery tank. We have our scale. We have our Fieldpiece manifold gauge set. And of course, we have our system right here. Before we do anything, we want to make sure that the system is off.

For our recovery tank, you never want to go above 80%, because you want to make sure that you have 20% or less room left in this tank.

Right now, I want to talk about the hoses that we have connected here. On my manifold gauge set, we want to put our suction side, which is the blue side right here, on our suction valve. Make sure that’s tight. We also want to make sure we get our discharge hose on the discharge line, which is right there. Make sure that’s tight. Right here, I have my service wrench ready to open up the discharge side. We want to make sure that’s open. We’re going to do the same process over here on our suction side, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

First thing, you want to make sure your gauges are on. Make sure everything is tight, all your hoses are on tight. I have my refrigerant hose line connected to the “in” on the recovery machine, and on the “out” side we have an external hose connected to our recovery tank.

Just to show how this process works, we’re going to be opening up the system through both our discharge line and our suction line. Once that’s open, it’s going to flow refrigerant from these two lines into our manifold. We’re going to make sure that we open up both our discharge and suction lines, make sure that we have our refrigerant line open, and then that’s going to open over here, flow through the recovery machine, go in, then go out into this external tank.

Before you do anything, you always want to make sure that the recovery tank is filled with the type of refrigerant that you have in the system. If we look over here, we have R410A. We never want to mix refrigerants. This tank is R410A. We want to make sure we see the tare weight on the tank, and this one says 17.6. So, 17.6 — we’re going to put this on our scale. This one comes with a Bluetooth scale, so we’ll set it over here. Always take a picture before you begin the process, because you want to make sure you know how much you have in this tank.

You want to make sure that all your lines are open, everything is open. Before you do anything, you want to make sure that you purge your hoses. Right here, we’re going to purge our hoses. It’s going to be a quick 4 seconds — you’re going to hear a hissing sound. That’s good. We do this because we don’t want any air going into this tank. We want to make sure everything is clean, because when we hook up the gauges and the hoses, we have air in there, which is a non-condensable. We don’t want that in our tanks.

Then we can go ahead and turn on our machine, and it’s going to begin recovering the refrigerant from the system, through the recovery machine, and into the tank.

I just want to bring awareness that this tank, depending on the ambient temperature outside — right now it’s kind of cold — but once you start feeling that this tank is getting hot, you want to ask Mrs. Smith, “Hey, I’m going to need to use your hose to cool down my tank.” We want to cool down this tank because when it gets hot, it actually slows down the recovery process. When we add cold water to the tank, it speeds the recovery process.

Right here, we want to make sure that our pressures on both sides — right now it shows zero on our low side and zero on our high side. That’s telling us that the process is done. You want to make sure that it goes to zero psig on our recovery machine. Then we can go ahead and close off everything, and then we’ll click self-purge on the unit to make sure that we get all the refrigerant that’s trapped in these lines.

Then you want to weigh the refrigerant that you recovered and take a picture of that. Once you’re done, make sure that you close off your hoses. Make sure that you close off your service line and your discharge line.

And there you go — you’ve recovered the machine. Thank you, guys.