How to legally degas a freezer FAQ

Then its not losing its gas. It's lost its gas,.

I wouldn't bother.

You could take it to a car aircon place. And get charged to remove a nonexcistent charge (see what I did there?)

Plenty of car aircon compressors around.

Or small 'shop compressors' for e.g. airbrushing.

No. Ditch the whole fridge at the junk yard or order a replacement with an extra £5 for taking yourr old s*it away and save up your pocket money for a unit that does what you need.

Given that the compressor runs, but it doesn't cool down, this suggests you would be opening the stable door long after the horse has gone to the knacker's Yard. I admire your scruples, and wish more people took your approach - but I don't think they are needed here.

It's a truth, universally acknowledged, that, twenty-four hours after being flytipped, a fridge may have a broken coil but it won't have a compressor.

Nick

This talk about fridges and opening the (stable) door reminds me of a friend from university. She'd got an first in physics, so she wasn't exactly uneducated about scientific things.

Some years later she posted on Facebook that she was having problems getting her fridge to stay at a cold temperature. Various people chipped in with questions and suggestions, trying to be helpful.

Then she just casually replied, after a couple of days "Does it matter that there's no door on the fridge?"

There really needs to be an emoji for "jaw dropping with amazement", "are you f-ing serious?" and "of course it f-in matters", because she'd have been bombarded with those!

It turns out that the fridge door had fallen off (there's more to *why* it "fell" off, but that would be disloyal to her) and she was using bottles of lemonade propped up at the front of the fridge, where the door would go, as a makeshift barrier to try to keep the cold air from falling out (being more dense than air at room temperature it would sink as it came out of the doorway*).

To this day I cannot work out why someone with a degree in physics was in any way surprised that fridge without a door would be unable to retain its cold temperature.

(*) That's why open-top freezers in shops work: the cold air remains in the "well" of the freezer and doesn't escape and allow ambient air to enter. There are probably still losses by conduction to the ambient air, but those are deemed acceptable if it makes it easier for shoppers to remove things to but in their trolleys.

Oh it does cool, just not to the set temperature so there’s obviously some gas left.

Tim

That's got to be a sense of humour getting an outing. Winding up people on facebook is probably the only good use for it.

Degrees ain't what they used to be and academics are notorious for being dim bulbs when it comes to Real Life.

Hmm, I adjusted the stat yesterday to be higher than the level it was achieving to see if it could maintain that but by today it was already failing to achieve it.

Looks like all the refrigerant will be gone soon anyway. ;-)

I had forgotten that I had a power monitor on the freezer and it’s easy to see that all is not well! (Numbers are kWhrs).

Maybe this is a feature of a dumbed-down modern degree, where dull-witted children are spoonfed what to answer in online exams.

This has been suggested already, but are we sure that the OP just failed to catch a joke?

nib

De-gassing is required here. HVAC people have the kit to do it. ( They have recovery cylinders for the various F-gasses, plus a vacuum pump to pull the oil out as well. ) The cylinder absorbs the gas for later recovery. I don't think they run the same cylinder for multiple customers, as it might be difficult to determine when it is "full".

There is now only one company that takes home refrigerators at the street level. I don't think they do pickup, and the operator is a bit cranky. I expect he is making a go of it, via the scrap value of the copper.

The HVAC guy who was at my house last, saw the refrigerator I had sitting outside, and he offered to take it away for me. Saving me the fifty it costs to haul it away. And he has the kit to degas it himself, so he would then pocket some money for the copper recycling. The steel is worth something, but not likely to be all that much.

At one time, the F-gas could be refined and re-sold, but for R12 that's no longer allowed. Other gases could be on the destruction list as well. Only that gas that is a thousand per recharge, is likely re-sold :-)

On the pentane refrigerators, I don't know if there is a recovery cylinder for that. It might be easier to burn that and make CO2.

At one time, there was government money to grease the wheel and get it done, but that's stopped, and I don't think recycling things is even documented on the city web site any more. That's how "reversed" the situation has become. They will tell you things the tip won't allow to be removed, but they no longer run a registry with "Joes F-gas, takes old refrigerator". All that info was removed. And a few of the recyclers closed as far as we know, leaving one guy who accepts refrigerators left on the sidewalk outside his junkyard. There was one outfit that took all appliances, whether F-gas or not. They would pick up an old washer and dryer for example. There is a bit of copper in the motor on those. They ran a used-parts business, based on the disassembly (could get thermostat for your old fridge, assuming it still worked).

Paul

It's unlikely the individual has seen the inside of a Physics building.

The first clue you're being taken for a ride, is when the individual won't tell you the name of the degree granting institution.

Maybe they don't even know what it says on a typical parchment for such a degree.

And just for fun, I suspect the individual in question, is now present in this thread.

When you're an 8-sigma individual, you stand out. We can spot the pattern, spot the "setup".

The lunchtime conversation is very technical. It's all shop talk. It sounds just like the TV program "Big Bang Theory". Genuine nerd talk. What was missing was eye glasses with tape holding the two halves together. Oh, and asthma. None of them had asthma.

They know how a refrigerator works. They also know the lab setup to get to 50 millikelvin above absolute zero and 25 millikelvin above absolute zero. Obviously, the door has to be closed to do that :-) The liquid helium we used in our course, would only get you to about 4K (two stage cryostat). Using liquid helium is pretty mundane, but you have to do one as a proof of purchase.

The undergrads would also not talk about what the grad students were researching. Even the grad students wouldn't really talk about their research (not secret, just boring). The basement labs were working on SQUIDs. But the undergrads were interested in a lot of other stuff. One of the students was bound and determined to work on MagLev, which would mean leaving the country, as we will never have a MagLev here.

The quiet one in the group, today he is a Lithium Battery researcher. His last project, was illuminating the inside of a battery while it charges, with a synchrotron. Jeff is past retirement age, and continues on. The report I saw, they had not processed the collected data yet, to write a paper.

Paul

Yabbut those are experimental physicists. I can confirm that those are pretty much as described. (There is a retired fellow on another group that worked with physics grad students, and he describes them as "pretty hard on equipment", to put it politely.)

Not sure about the theoretical physicists, though...?

Thomas Prufer

There was a theoretical physicist on the second floor, and I don't think he was on the same planet as the rest of us. And without socialization, it's pretty hard to evaluate their responses to anything. If there was a flat tyre on his bicycle, he would be walking home. At a guess. A Bessel Function will not repair a flat tyre.

Paul

It was a well-known red-brick university in the UK, the same one that I went to. She did a physics BSc and started doing a PhD there before stopping that for some reason. She must have got a fairly good BSc result to be accepted on the PhD course.

When she asked the question about the "fridge that wouldn't stay cold" on her Facebook discussion page, various of her university friends (whom I know) contributed suggestions as to why her fridge wasn't working properly. It sounded a genuine enquiry. When, several days later, she happened to mention casually in a Facebook posting "my fridge door has come off - does it matter?" there was a collective response which can be paraphrased as "WTF! Of *course* it ****ing matters!"

I don't think humour was involved. The woman in question didn't seem to have a sense of humour. I got the impression that it was a genuine serious enquiry.

I think she genuinely believed that a few 2-litre bottles of lemonade standing at the front of each shelf as a "wall" would be enough to keep the cold air in and prevent it escaping to the room and hence being replaced by warm air from the room.

It was a very sad story. I think she wasn't coping with life towards the end after getting divorced. She firmly believed on religious grounds that marriage was for life and she didn't recognise that she was legally divorced, even after her husband later remarried. We lost touch about 15 years ago and I heard the other year that she had died of cancer. I knew that she had a lot of obscure long-term health problems, but I'd no idea about the cancer.

Two thoughts. A science education is only of use if you think to apply it to the matter at hand. Maybe she was thinking of the open-fronted chillers/fridges in supermarkets etc. If those work, why shouldn't...