Capstone: Refrigeration & Heat Pump Diagnostics
Hands-on: diagnose eight refrigeration and heat-pump call-outs — fouled condenser, low charge, setpoint, part-load, resistance-vs-heat-pump, flow temperature, free cooling and backup controls — then calculate, verify and prescribe the fix.
30 min read · Jacob Willis, Net Zero Lead
You've learned the vapour-compression cycle, how COP measures performance, how to read superheat and subcooling, and the levers that lift seasonal efficiency. This capstone puts you on site as the engineer, working chillers and heat pumps that look like they're running fine but are quietly bleeding energy. The unifying metric is COP: a system's electrical input is its useful output divided by its COP. Almost every fault here is a COP that has collapsed — through fouling, undercharge, an unnecessarily large temperature lift, or bad part-load control — or heat made the expensive way, with resistance heaters or an over-used backup.