Don Fort, senior technical trainer, Heatcraft, walks HVAC technicians through the process of measuring superheat in a system.

Service technicians need to be careful when reading the pressure/temperature chart because if they choose the wrong values, they will make mistakes diagnosing the system.

The HVACR industry will soon be using low-GWP refrigerant blends, some of which have a temperature glide when evaporating and condensing. As these refrigerant blends change phase, there’s a change in their composition, which technicians must be able to calculate while in the field.

Understanding what the terms superheat, subcooling, and saturation mean can be helpful when troubleshooting an air conditioning or refrigeration system.

One of the worst enemies of a compressor is liquid refrigerant, so technicians should make sure the refrigeration system has proper superheat in order to protect the compressor from damage that can occur from flooding or slugging.

An evaporator can be cold but inactive, causing warm refrigerated space temperatures.

This article will compare subcooling amounts in a refrigeration system for three scenarios: an overcharge of refrigerant, a dirty condenser, and air in the system.

Much like subcooling, understanding and calculating superheat can be somewhat difficult for newbie technicians.

In one of its sections on TXVs, the book points out that “this component is widely used for nearly all types of air conditioning and refrigeration systems. The advantage of the TXV is its ability to automatically adjust to match the load, as it is designed to sense changes in the refrigeration load and respond to them.”

The app can compute target superheat for systems with fixed orifice expansion devices. The results may optionally be carried over to another page where actual superheat for specific refrigerants can be computed to determine if the system is charged correctly.