Let me tell you a story…

By Richard Hawkins, MACS Contributor

Editor’s note: Longtime mobile A/C industry professional Richard Hawkins joins the MACS editorial team as a regular blog contributor. Check in every Tuesday for Richard’s view and information on mobile A/C repair.

When I was contacted by MACS about doing some writing for this blog, I asked what they were interested in having me write about.  And the response was along the lines of: you have a lot of years of experience with doing training and tech support, so you probably have some interesting experiences that could be shared.

The timing on this was somewhat ironic as I have something of an anniversary involving air conditioning training coming up this year.  I conducted my first A/C clinic in 1991 which of course was 30 years ago. That was right along the time when things were getting geared up for the transition from R-12 to R-134a and was a very interesting period.

Our vocabularies are always expanding as new products and new technologies are introduced into our world and that has certainly been the case over the past 30-years with mobile air conditioning.  If we were to find a mobile A/C glossary from 1991, there would be a lot of words and acronyms that we commonly use today that would likely not be in it.

Those words and acronyms might include recovery, recycling, R/R/R machine, retrofitting, Section 609 Certification, J-2788, SNAP, refrigerant blends, flammable refrigerants, refrigerant identifiers, PAG, Ester, POE, R-141b flush, parallel flow condensers, closed loop flushing, clutch less compressors, variable displacement electronically controlled compressors, internal heat exchangers, and finally HFO-1234yf.

It was rewarding supplying information about those things and other A/C issues in clinics and tech calls and over the coming weeks, I will dig into my archives to share some of those experiences with you.  Wishing everyone a Happy New Year.  Hopefully, it will be much better than the one we have just closed the book on.   

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