Latest / The Refrigeration Mentor Podcast / Episode 376. Adiabatic Coolers and Cooler Innovations with Rob Ochs of Recold

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Episode 376. Adiabatic Coolers and Cooler Innovations with Rob Ochs of Recold · The Refrigeration Mentor Podcast

• 0:00
  Trevor: Welcome to the Refrigeration Mentor Podcast. We're here at the 2026 A HR xpo. Super excited about this, hanging out with my good friend Rob Oaks. We've done multiple podcasts before, but today we're gonna be diving into some of the new things you've been up to because you had a lot of shifts going on, which is really cool.
• 0:01
  And as I went through training as a tech, I did service for quite some time, did construction ended up in project management that led me to an engineering career. So a lot of the RS schedule. So I got, I got a little bit of a scope of all this. Type businesses that we have available in refrigeration.
• 0:02
  Yeah. Grow. How was, how was that for you? 'cause it's always scary. Even when I changed from a technician going into a business development role, it was scary. You know what I mean? You don't know what the, what to expect. How was those transitions for you over the years?
• 0:03
  Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. I, I totally agree with that. Yeah. I think learning so many different sides of the industry, 'cause it's so vast. Yeah. Like refrigeration is just so huge, you know? Yeah. When I got into it, I just, you know, oh, it's just construction and it's just supermarket refrigeration, but it. There's so much more to it I've learned over the last 20 years than just this little part because there's, there's install, there's service, there's maintenance, there's controls, there's startup, there's project management, there's sales, there's, you know, leadership.
• 0:04
  Oil separators. Well, now I'm just putting it on a piece of paper, right? Yeah. So it made it easy for that transition. But I'm gonna tell you the most rewarding thing that I found in refrigeration throughout my career was every day I went to work for that five, six year period, I had technicians standing at my door, Robbie.
• 0:05
  I just gotta translate the engineering that's in that motor room for that tech. I gotta, I just gotta translate that. To what they already know inside of the building. Right? Yeah. And, and, and that was really the bridge for a long time to just create Okay. The engineer at Hussman site or this site or whatever site it was Yep.
• 0:06
  Refrigeration. And when you start to learn that, because I know I'm a way better technician now than ever before because I understand the design, I understand the R schedules, I understand the IO schedules. I understand. How it's supposed to be built and the sequences of it. Yeah. And it takes time to learn this stuff.
• 0:07
  I'm like, you guys gotta learn the technical, the technician side. Yeah. So when you're designing it to make sure it's simple for them. You know, kind of like we talked about before, it's like we gotta make it easy for the service guys or the install guys. Because when you have them all working together, you have the designers, the contractors, the manufacturer working together, your systems run way more smoothly.
• 0:08
  Robert: percent right. Yeah. With electronics coming in, right, and the cases and PLCs, all of this different stuff, it's a little bit bigger animal than I had, so maybe I came through the right timeframe.
• 0:09
  Trevor: And, and I know we had talks about it.
• 0:10
  Yeah. What, you know, what improvements do we make? And we we're doing some inside testing. Now that's as a high level as I can leave it. Yeah. But some of the greatest things is to work with some of these manufacturers and like you're saying. Initially, we're dialing in the performance now, so that we're hoping from an OEM standpoint for us that, that are suppliers of the CapEx equipment, right?
• 0:11
  So, you know, one of the key examples is when you're doing a antibiotic, right, you'll see a lot of 'em undersized. It doesn't matter what type, but you'll see a lot of undersized because you have to size by the mean, coincidence, wet foam, right? And some people don't, didn't make that transition. The other thing I've learned a lot is as we, as I've approached into aio about, right, our AIO about specifically has a stainless steel coil.
• 0:12
  You have a higher temperature, whether it's water based, a fluid cooler. So our A about could be a fluid cooler, gas cooler, right. Or refrigerant cooler. Yep. But when we're still sizing those things, right, we have to be sizing up any of those condensers. Of the circuiting, right? Because if we have R 4 48 8 and we're using a water tower.
• 0:13
  Right. I want you to go back and go to the compressor manufacturer and give me a rack summary today so I can help you design. Because a lot of this stuff was always sized bigger and bigger. Right. And as we've gotten farther in refrigeration, it's more precision with this stuff.
• 0:14
  Yeah. Okay. And I learned a lot of this in the design program that, that, that I do with the Omega solution. 'cause I didn't know. Yeah. But that THR is super important. And over the years, what I've seen in that when I, because I've used to go and do energy remodels too. Sure. And add in variable speed drives and digital compression to really reduce the head on that.
• 0:15
  We don't know what was serviced. You could have had a, a small remodel. They added a few sets of evaporators, an extra box, right? Something like that. Take a picture of the name plate, right? Whomever the manufacturer is. Copeland Dora and Rascal Bitzer, right? Whomever it is. Take a picture of that group. Send it to the compressor manufacturer.
• 0:16
  It's not the UR, it's not the end user. Everybody's kind of picking for us. Yeah. Right. And we need to use the industry experts to say, okay, what? So when I send those engineering schedules back, you'll be able to validate on the store, this is what I have, this is what I don't have. Or you'll find the discrepancy.
• 0:17
  Speaker: If you're a technician, tired of guessing, getting stuck on jobs and feeling the pressure every day, this is for you. And if you're a service manager or business owner, tired of nonstop phone calls, long troubleshooting times, and callbacks crushing your margin, this is for you too. Refrigeration mentor helps techs go from helper to confidence service technician.
• 0:18
  Yeah. So I'll first go to the site survey. I'll look at the voltage right of the, of the piece of equipment. I'll look at that. THR we're talking. I'll look at the line sizing.
• 0:19
  Robert: So I first have to ask the strategy so that when I, I'm assembling options and I try to limit the options, kinda like a car salesman.
• 0:20
  Yeah. Because I've seen it where you got the design firm, then you got the contractor, you got the end user, then you got the manufacturer. No one's talking together. Yes. And it can be a disaster of a job. The poor contractors out there and lost in what they're doing, or there's a change. I had this one last week, ag ago, or no, about a month ago.
• 0:21
  Building these natural refrigerant systems for us to use. Right. Whether it's a distributed system, a parallel system, right. A condensing, it doesn't matter how they do it, but as they build these systems for us today, the design parameters are completely different than a HFC system.
• 0:22
  Everybody has a different style. But now the operation, although that component looks exactly the same as the other building, yeah, a critical charge system is completely different because we're reducing the pressure of the system ultimately. High level, right? Yeah. When it gets hot. So now we're pulling that gas out and we're storing it for six months in a colder area.
• 0:23
  And why do we know that oil return, right? The velocities change, right? We can, we've had flooded evaporators, right? Yep. We can't find it. We have a colder area when we split. So when we do the split, the oil's sitting in the condenser with the lazy gas on the roof. Right? You are, you're from Canada. You Right.
• 0:24
  Cool. It's super important to dive into understanding the sequence of operation. Understanding how that system works and yeah, finding mentors or finding people who have worked on that system. But sometimes guys tell me like, I don't have anyone. I'm new to the industry. Yes. We don't have anyone to follow up.
• 0:25
  Completely different design of how we do fan operation. Right. Yeah. On a critical charge system than a DX system, because at a DX system, we're watching just head pressure. Yep. We're slowing down the VFD and we're banking the fans on an air. Cool. Shut off. 14 and 13. Shut off. 12 and 11. And we always keep the header running.
• 0:26
  And that's the other big character to refrigeration is that guys refrigeration equipment is all your evaporators are tested at 75 degrees. Right. And 55 degree relative humidity in a lab. Yep. I don't know what supermarket I've been in. Not Okay.
• 0:27
  So if you bleed by some type of refrigerant, you're still gonna need a pump that's gonna turn on. So you have some bit of energy, right? So this grocer decided to, to put probes on every evaporator a meat case, right? The cooler box, every evaporator produce case. And what they associated in their graphing of a CDS valve is the percentage open to when the coil iced up.
• 0:28
  Robert: Yeah. This grocer decided to do defrost accurately. And that's significantly important to refrigeration because in refrigeration you're moving the gas and that moving of gas cost you an energy penalty, right? Yep. So one of the most stable ways, so this grocer took the CDS valve percentage of open, so they knew that if it was at 40% I'm at for a meat case, right?
• 0:29
  Yeah. Just add it more defrost like, okay, let's add an extra defrost or add one. You don't want to do that. Yeah. That's not what you wanna do. And there's times where you'll adjust it. But I always start with the manufacturers manual. Well, how many is it four? One defrost a day? Yes. Whatever. And then if you have to add one more, there might be a reason.
• 0:30
  'cause it works. It works good. It works. We're we're just trying to melt the ice off so the, not to drop the ice off.
• 0:31
  We all know in refrigeration, the more expansion contraction, the more vibration we get, right, the more leaks we're gonna have, right? We don't wanna have any leaks, so by developing cool gas or light and gas defrost. But the significant point about both of those defrosts is again, back to our operational, right?
• 0:32
  Or we can choke it with an OLDR on the liquid line, feeding the store. That was the original way to do it. But when you choke it on an OLDR on the liquid line, it's a different type expansion valve. Right? And what ends up happening is, to Trevor's point earlier, when you keep adding defrost, what you're really doing is you're choking the whole store.
• 0:33
  How did we do that? So we have to do a choke valve on the end of each evaporation when you're doing big distribution warehouses. All we're really doing is on the suction line that's headed back because that cool gas vapor being colder than you said is coming in through the expansion valve or checking around the expansion valve to do a forward flow.
• 0:34
  Trevor: Yeah. No, I love that. Thank you for pointing that out, because that's something that's key that I get questions all the time about, you know what I mean?
• 0:35
  So it's very vague when we say that, but really all what we're really saying in Adba is that we're using the moisture right, to create a wet bulb, to re right, to do more work and remove more heat out of our. Condenser, whatever it's from. Gas cooler from CO2 to refrigerant, right. Whatever it's, yeah. So as you go through designs, one of the, some of the key points that we've seen, and we wanna learn for technicians, right?
• 0:36
  Robert: So what we found is. Just in compressors, we had oil carry over rate in condensers we have water carry over to the coil. Yeah. We don't want water carry over. Right? Yeah. Yeah. 'cause we get all the minerals. Right. The calcium right. All that stuff that, you know, plugs our condensers. But if you have a lot of water carry over, air's gonna go path leak resistant to the dry part of that pad, right?
• 0:37
  Robert: So we have the conductivity sensor right at the back of the pad, right where you're gonna catch all the minerals, right? And we call it cycles of concentration.
• 0:38
  Yeah. The other key point that I've learned, and I'm still continuing to learn,
• 0:39
  Robert: And when you have that liquid weight, it's changing the strategy to the condenser. Now the condenser can't perform right to that. Environment that it's trying to perform because that liquid weight is constantly changing the pressure if I'm reading it downstairs.
• 0:40
  So the ECM side, you can program, ramp up, ramp down, right? So if you see some lag in your delay and you see your suction floating higher, your head pressure floating higher, right? Just as we had a VFD that would kind of manage. Yeah. You can actually go in and create. Some critical points inside of the ops of each ECM and make them act more accurately Yeah.
• 0:41
  And I always give them a tip, if you can get the customer to buy a backup set. Yes. You know, it's hard to store them someplace when you have a 16 fan gas cooler, but that'll, that's a quick maintenance, you know? Yeah. But you gotta be maintaining those because you're not, you're not getting any of the efficiency, like we're talking
• 0:42
  Well, this is the decision you're gonna make when you first, yeah. You know, this, this is the, that conversation loop that everyone needs to have when you're, you know, you're building this equipment, you know what I mean? Yeah. Because it is new equipment. We want those stores to be running efficiently, so everyone has to be in the loop and understand what, what's expected, you know?
• 0:43
  Right? Love it. An amazing team. Very talented very skilled, right? And the product, to be honest, I've been out here a long time, as you know, a little bit over 30 years in my career. The product is truly state of the art, right? As I, as I look it up, not one is better than ours, but just the quality that we build.
• 0:44
  Robert: We've only talked about compressing c.
• 0:45
  Robert: Yeah. Ww.re cole.com. But we are here with Marley, so Marley's our cooling towers. Right. Cool. So we have a little bit of everything. So if you guys wanna get just the gamut, we have this.