Badri Patel:
Welcome to this month's edition of ASHRAE Journal podcast, VRF Systems in A2L World. I'm your host, Badri Patel. Been in the HVAC world for quite some time now. I'm a long-standing member of TC Technical Committee 8.7, that is VRF-Variable Refrigerant Flow. Alongside that, I have got a few other roles at ASHRAE that keep me busy and connected with industry. By day I'm an HVAC equipment account executive at Johnson Controls, helping clients to navigate the best solutions for their projects. And I'm here thrilled to have two VRF veterans with us today, Chris Williams and Scott McGinnis. These guys have been in the VRF game for years and bring a wealth of knowledge to the table. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just getting into the VRF systems, you're going to want to hear what they have to say. So let's jump in and let's start with some quick introductions from our guests.
Chris, let's kick things off with you. Could you give us a little bit of background in how you got started in the VRF space?
Chris Williams:
So a little bit about me, I'm graduate Texas Tech University. Woohoo, go Red Raiders! Wreck ‘em Tech! I have been in the industry for right about 30 years and I'm a past president of my national ASHRAE chapter, Distinguished Service Award and chapter award, and I've been on too many ASHRAE committees and subcommittees to mention, but a couple that might be interesting are Standard 15 and CSA B52. And so I got started in the industry about 14, 15 years ago I started as a sales guy just like you, Badri. And one thing led to another and I found myself in my current role. I currently work for Trane where I go and I coach our team members in engineering on how to use the standards and how to use the guidelines and on good applications for VRF. The last committee that work led to me being the chair of Guideline 41, which we were able to publish the first edition two years ago. So thanks for having me on.
Badri Patel:
Thanks for the introduction, Chris.
Scott, let's hear your side of story about your role in the industry and how you got here.
Scott McGinnis:
Good to see you, Chris. Good to see you, Badri. Yeah, I've been in the HVAC industry for about 30 years. I got into it because I was in the United States Air Force for about eight and a half years and my wife told me, "I'm sick and tired of the Air Force, go get a real job." And that job ended up selling air conditioning here in Texas where I'm from, went to Texas A&M. And for the past 14 years of that 30 years, I've given my life over to this VRF technology. I own a rep firm here in Texas and that's all we focus on is just VRF. So I call on the architects, I call on the engineers, call on the building owners. I'm out in the field, I'm designing systems, anything that goes along with VRF technology. And after about two years of doing HVAC, I realized I needed to either find a way of enjoying it and becoming good at it.
Went to ASHRAE and ASHRAE had a lot of opportunities for me there to do both learn about the HVAC industry and also do some giving back, enjoying it, meeting new friends. And so I got involved in ASHRAE. I was the membership promotion chair in Dallas for a while. Then on the national level, I got involved in things like Research Promotion, the writing of the design guide for dedicated outside air units. And then because of the VRF, I joined TC 8.7, which is the VRF think tank for ASHRAE. And after a few years last year in this next coming year, I'm the chairman of that committee. So it's great to be here and looking forward to chatting about what I spend my life doing.
Badri Patel:
Awesome. Thank you for the introduction both. We are here to talk today about the changing landscape of VRF. VRF technology is still growing and continues to capture a solid portion of the HVAC market I think. One of the main things we want to touch upon today is definitely A2L refrigerants, ASHRAE Standard 15 and the implications. But before we dive in into the nitty-gritty of all that, we know we have got a diverse audience here, many of our listeners, our students or young engineers who may be newer to the VRF technology. So Scott, why don't we start with a quick primer on what VRF is and how it works. Then we can jump into more advanced topics here.
Scott McGinnis:
Yeah, sure. And Chris, well, Badri too, y'all may have felt the same way depending on how long ago you went to HVAC training is, VRF is a technology that I was taught was impossible. You could not do this with it. Think about just a heat pump, anybody, just a three or four ton heat pump and it had a lot of limitations. It wouldn't run under 40 degrees outside. You could only have about 150 feet of line length associated with it, if it was a split system. And what has transpired since then is this new type of heat pump, which is much larger. Think about a 20 ton system, a 40 ton system, and being a heat pump, it can heat air by making hot gas with the compressor or it can cool air by making cold refrigerant with the compressor. Whereas the old heat pumps, you would attach one condensing unit or one heat pump to one fan coil unit. Now with VRF, you can attach multiple fan coil units. On a 20-ton system. You could put 30 fan coil units on it and instead of being limited to 150 fit line length, now you could have a total of 3,000 feet, almost half a mile of line length you can hook up.
And the thing that's really nice about it is it varies. That's where we get the term variable. It takes inverter compressors and varies the flow of refrigerant to all of these fan coil units. And you may pass that refrigerant hot gas, cold liquid through a heat recovery control unit, which is installed in the system. And then the fan coil unit can choose, "Hey, I need a heat a room. Give me hot gas." That heat recovery control unit will give you the hot gas. Another room can says, "I want to cool." And that unit will say, heat and recovery control unit will say, "Okay, here's some cold liquid, cool off that room."
And it makes for a very nice engineered system you can use in projects where you used to not be able to use just package DX split systems. So in a nutshell, a VRF system is a chiller that pushes refrigerant either hot gas or cold liquid to all of the fan coil units inside a building versus push and chill water. Chris, you probably maybe had the same thought when you first heard about it.
Chris Williams:
Yeah, I remember going to the very first ASHRAE presentation, it was at Lunch-and-Learn in Nashville and they had one of the guys came and talked about this VRF and I will freely admit this. I went, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of in my entire life."
Scott McGinnis:
Exactly. Yep.
Chris Williams:
And so I remember the date, that was February, 2002. I just remember that presentation and it's amazing what VRF has done for the industry. Since that time obviously I've come around and never dreamed that I would chair the guideline to go and issue for ASHRAE how to go and design better systems. And so life is funny. What I tell people is what's really cool about VRF is it addresses that middle market where you've got unitary products and you've got your applied products and you've got right there in that middle that sometimes it's unitary, sometimes is applied. And VRF has done basically what Southwest Airlines did for air travel. VRF has democratized that middle market and allowed entry for people who would never have participated before, just like Southwest Airlines made airfare cheap for the masses. VRF has allowed a lot of these smaller contractors, mid-size contractors who never had any intention of being big chiller guys to go and service their customers and provide some really cool needs and some really cool solutions. So it's been fun to watch the market grow over the last 20 years.
Badri Patel:
That's well said about Southwest Airlines, Chris.
I can relate it to myself as well, my experience in the industry, so half of my career has been in Asia where I started early 2000 and VRF was getting entry into especially where I worked before in India, getting entry there and I could see the hesitancy going from commercial space, how people were kind of a little bit hesitant to adopt. It's more sort of a behavioral thing I guess I would say, rather than a technical thing. And then when I transitioned to Toronto, I got exposed to the North American market and I could see the same thing two decades before the system was getting into there. But I read all these market research reports from organizations like BSRIA or JARN. I think the global HVAC market is what around like $250 billion, north of that. The VRF component is around 20% of that. It could vary depending from continent to continent, but it's a stronger growth—growth if you look at the past or if you look at the forecast for next 5, 10, 15 years. So it's good to witness this growth and be part of this game.
Now you made a right point that it's opened that mid-market between chiller and the unitary products and it's important to understand, and I guess Scott, you can share some more insights based on your local and regional markets, why it is getting popular and traction compared to the other technologies, right?
Scott McGinnis:
Yeah, the best thing I can do is to give you an example. In Dallas or in Texas, every major city they probably have five big contractors that can do 34-story hotels or used to. Big high rises. Things that are obviously historically have had to have a chiller associated with it. Chiller, boiler, maybe a cooling tower or a water source heat pump project, individual water source heat pumps, cooling tower, pumps, heat exchangers, that sort of thing. Not every mechanical contractor with, in Texas, a class A license can really do that work. 14 years ago when I started out, this stuff was the most expensive equipment that you could buy. It might be $20,000 per ton installed compared to today where you could probably get it to seven, nine, $11,000 installed. But one of the reasons it came down in price is more competitors in the market get more popular. Of course the economics of that helps reduce the cost, but the ability for these middle level contractors to get into markets they didn't exist in. Like Chris was talking about it, they couldn't play in because they couldn't do huge chill water jobs.
So one contractor, a quick story, he's older than I am and I was talking to him and I was talking to him about VRF and "Hey, let's take look at this chill water job and let's maybe..." It was over budget, "Let's talk about VRF, something like that." And he looked at me and I was trying to explain all this stuff I was explaining earlier and I finally just stopped my little sales pitch and I said, "Gary, you just really want this stuff to go away, don't you? You don't want to have to learn anything new." And he said, "I really do. I've been doing this too long to learn something new."
But they became one of the largest installers of VRF when they realized it opened up markets to them that they could be very competitive in just like Chris was saying, these middle-level contractors now. So I'll just close with my best example is just about any contractor. We do a lot of training. We can train any contractor to properly install a 20 ton VRF system. Well, we had a job that was three 20 ton systems per floor. So okay, you're going to do it three times, 20 tons three times, no problem. But it was a 51-story building. So this middle-level contractor manned up and he was, when I say manned up, I meant added people. It was over a 3,000 ton VRF project. They would've never done it, if it had been chill water. So those middle-level people started bringing the price down as well to where the developers saw it and said, Hey, this is a cost-effective system that we can put in our buildings now. And the energy efficiency is there that they benefit from that side of it as well. So it's DX system has got really good energy efficiency and it can be a lower cost to some of their traditional systems. So that's why it's getting popular.
Badri Patel:
Yeah, I guess the more you do, the more you get acquainted with it, right? Chris, I guess you can share your thoughts on that.
Chris Williams:
I was going to agree with Scott said, and you're sitting there, you're looking at these guys and the other interesting thing is you got these guys coming into the applied market and they still have no desire to go up to be one of those big five, big six that every city has. Those guys, they're still selling chillers. VRF is not going to put any other product out of business. The cool thing about it is it's a new tool for our portfolio and what's really fascinating for me is how many projects did you see where you might have a mix of these of package units of VRF systems of chillers on the same job and it is just been a fantastic add for our design portfolio.
Scott McGinnis:
Yeah, Chris, I just saw one yesterday. It's chillers in the base of the building. It's big tall building—
Chris Williams:
Yes.
Scott McGinnis:
They're doing VRF in the hotels and then above the hotels is going to be condos and they're just doing residential splits.
Chris Williams:
Yes, exactly.
Scott McGinnis:
So you're seeing all three types of systems in one building and it makes sense to do it that way.
Badri Patel:
Yeah, I could share a little different perspective as well, and Chris, you have heard me saying this, the brains in North America, engineering brains in North America are wired with hydronics chillers for a hundred plus years. So when I transitioned from India to Toronto, it was a little bit challenging for me because to respect the commercialism, we won't name the big fives or big six here, the manufacturers. But because the technology was developed in East Asia and then all the companies transition here or either they partner with the OEMs that were part of US or Canada based before, and so there was never that skill set in the engineering industry where somebody can get to the table and can justify, hey, this is the VRF, why it is better than a rooftop VAV system or why it is better than a four pipe. And again, like VRF is not the be all and all solution for every single project. It's a niche market there.
So eventually the skill set, the professionals, they transition here to North America and they also got exposed to what the other engineers are specifying, what other the technologies contractors are using. So my mindset approaching a consulting engineer in 2016 and today are completely different because now I have worked with so much of a rooftop market, and that's another thing. If you look at Europe or if you look at Asia, rooftop unit market is not as big as we see in US and Canada here. So those markets are splits, commercial package units. So the terminology, the technology also evolved over a course of time and then now we have a talent that understands the technology and how to compare it with the other existing technologies we have been using here. So I'm glad we talked about that.
Switching our gears a little bit here, we would like to talk about the changing landscape here. So we have department of energy and then in Canada we have Natural Resources Canada, they have memorandum of understandings and the A2L transition, ASHRAE Standard 15 is there. So I guess we can start talking a little bit about that. Scott, I know you tell this story about these explosive gases all the time. I think it would be a fun segue to kind of take a deeper dive into this.
Scott McGinnis:
Yes, please don't use the word explosive gases in a VRF presentation. That's how rumors get started.
Chris Williams:
Right, right.
Scott McGinnis:
Yeah. So what Badri mentioned is ASHRAE 15 is something with VRF we've always followed. It's the standard for how safe it is to push refrigerant through buildings and it was pretty easy to follow VRF with the 410A refrigerant in it. But now that the A2L refrigerants are coming, what I like to term an A2L is those are low burn velocity refrigerants. We'll get into that in a little bit, but there's a lot of misinformation out there. And so people were hearing low burn velocity A2L, and I was getting phone calls asking me how long will it be until your units are shipping with propane in them and how do I charge a propane based air conditioning system? So I had to stop and tell people like I just did you Badri, "Please don't say explosive, please don't say propane because that really has a bad connotation here. It doesn't sound safe."
So part of my ASHRAE experience is sitting with Chris in a lot of meetings for this Standard 15 and they have been working diligently to rewrite it. It went from I think 18 pages to 84 pages or something like that in a two-year period so that we know how to safely use A2L refrigerants in VRF systems or in buildings at all because it applies to a lot of things other than just VRF. So Chris, I know you've spent a ton of time sitting in all these meetings. I think you sit in at least what, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—
Chris Williams:
Too many.
Scott McGinnis:
... 10, at least 10 hours a month of your time is spent between the three ASHRAE 15 committees and subcommittees you're in. So yeah, maybe you could kind of go over that process and what the purpose of it is, how long it's been around, that sort of thing.
Chris Williams:
So as everyone knows, what happened was we got looking at our global warming potentials and if we were an evil scientist and we wanted to go and destroy the planet from a global warming perspective, we would invent this magic substance called a refrigerant and it would be the perfect evil science to go and promote global warming. And I'm saying that facetiously and trying to make a joke. The reality is we're a bunch of engineers and what do engineers do? We designed very stable systems and it wasn't real great and so looking for something that would have a lower GWP that pushed us into the A2L refrigerants, which are slightly flammable. When I got involved with the Standard 15, I was not real excited about the flammable refrigerants, was a little bit concerned about it. A funny story. I'm fixing to get a new unit at my house which will have a flammable refrigerant in it. It's going to be here on Friday.
And so the interesting thing about flammable refrigerants is low flammable, 2Ls. It is not a part of the group two refrigerants. 2L is its own unique subclass. You have to have very, very high burning velocity, 700 degrees centigrade to go and ignite 2L refrigerant, I believe that's 1,290 degrees in freedom units. For just context paper ignites at 451 degrees according to Ray Bradbury. The other cool thing about the two refrigerants is the flame spread on it is very, very low, very, very slow. AHRI was doing some research for the fire service and the fire service wanted to see it ignite and so they had these candles set up and it kept putting the candles out because the candles, it would cool down the candles. It's the interesting thing, refrigerants, they absorb heat, who knew? And it was putting the candles out and so finally they had to use a really hot surface to go and ignite it and when you see it kind of looks like a weird Hollywood special effects, so it will burn. It's not crazy, it's not aggressive. People ask me says, "Well what do I do Chris, if I have a building and it catches on fire?" "Well, you call the fire department, same thing you do if the trash can catches on fire."
And so that's where Standard 15 went and started looking at this and recognized that the rules that we had for two refrigerants and three refrigerants group two and group three refrigerants were not applicable. And we've done a lot of work and we've done a lot of research on this. The ASHRAE 15-2022 was a fundamental transformative standard. There's not many standards. Usually when the standard comes out the next edition, it gets harder. ASHRAE 15-2022 actually made it easier to design for VRF systems. It went, answered a lot of questions that people have been asking for years and years and years because we've been focused on chillers primarily and the research is continuing on it. The upgrades are continuing, the addendas, we're tweaking it. People ask me, they say, "Is Standard 15 set?" Well, yeah, the bones of Standard 15 are set. We've agreed on this as the concepts going forward. Now what we're doing is we're sanding off the rough edges.
Why are we doing so much work right now on Standard 15? Well, you got to understand Standard 15 is 125 years old. Standard 15 actually predates ASHRAE. It goes back to the ASRE years back when people were trying to use refrigerants like sulfur dioxide, which killed people. It was very, very toxic. But for all those years we've had a hundred years to get the chillers right. And so this is all new territory, this is all brand new and we're going and we're learning and we're growing, but there's a lot of really cool things that we're doing for Standard 15. A lot of really cool things that we're doing specifically for VRF systems in Standard 15.
Scott McGinnis:
Well, and I appreciate it, Chris, because about two and a half years ago I was ready to jump off a bridge or a building when I started thinking about having to transition over to these new refrigerants and the fear that we were hearing in people's minds. I was thinking VRF may not be viable anymore, but your work and everybody else on those committees, it's actually going to be a lot easier and a lot more reliable now.
Badri Patel:
And I would personally like to thank you, Chris for the leadership that you have taken to contribute to ASHRAE Standard 15 and I'm glad that you touched upon the legacy of it, right? We always talk about these standards, 90.1, 62.1, 55, but we forget that 15 comes before all that. So it's a great legacy there.
Chris Williams:
I appreciate the kind words there, but there were a lot of people besides just me. I just happened to be the one who gets to be on the call. So thank you for the kind words, but lots of other people smarter than Chris were a part of this.
Badri Patel:
Yeah, no, I, definitely understand it's a teamwork, but you are a face of TC 8.7 to Standard 15 I guess. I guess another point that comes to my mind here is these days whether as an application engineer or a sales professional, when we go talk to the mechanical contractors or consulting engineers, there are lots of questions around like, Hey, we are changing to R32 R454B, especially for the VRF. What does it take for them when laying out a project, especially for the ventilated shafts and other stuff, Chris, if you have any thoughts on that?
Chris Williams:
Well, the original concern when we wrote Standard 15 was what if we had leak and it collected in the bottom of a pipe shaft and that shaft typically has a two-hour fire rating and it was concerned that the refrigerant would be contained. There were some different concepts that were initially put out there on how to go and ventilate the shaft and how to make sure that the refrigerant did not collect in the bottom of that. Since then, there's been a lot of vigorous debate and the debate is ongoing as of this podcast right now, Standard 15 went and recently issued Addenda A to the 2024 edition and Addenda A says that a pipe chase, in the past, a pipe chase, if you were more than two floors and the roof, then you had to go and had to be in a pipe chase. Well, now Standard 15 has changed that and said that you may be in a pipe chase, that it's not required. What's most important is that we get the fire stop between each floor. So as long as we go and we get our penetrations of the pipe as it goes through each floor and we properly treat that, then we may not need a pipe chase and that is perfectly okay.
Now, however, there are still some organizations and there are some opportunities where you're still going to want a pipe shaft and people ask me, "So what happens today if I still have a pipe shaft?" There are codes who still are going to require it. There's architects who need it to make their building work. Sometimes a pipe shaft is the answer. The way the standard is written as of this podcast is that you will still have to do a ventilated chase. There is a PPR from Standard 15 for Addenda B that is going to go and talk about some options to go and whether or not we still need to go and ventilate that shaft, but that has to go out for public review. We're going to read the comments, we're going to see what people smarter than us have to say about it, and then we're going to go from there. But there is a lot of really vigorous debate on this. And so that's where people sit there and I get a little frustrated sometimes the VRF guys and says, "ASHRAE 15 hates us." We spend an inordinate amount of time going and help solve the issues for VRF to make it a productive and profitable system.
Badri Patel:
Chris, you may want to explain what a PPR is.
Chris Williams:
So the ASHRAE process is consensus-based, and that's how we get a very well-thought-out defendable standard. And it takes a really long time and it gets really frustrating for people because the speed of ASHRAE is about twice as slow as Christmas, or at least that's how it seems sometimes. But the result is we get a defendable standard. And so what the process works is someone goes and says, "I have an idea, I want to make a change." And that's called a CMP, a continuous maintenance proposal. Then it's debated among the members of the committee. They go and they work put, usually they'll put together a working group, they'll go talk it, bring it out to the subcommittees who then debate it, who then take it to the full committee, who then debates it again. This may go back and forth two or three times.
And then it goes out. And once everyone says, "Well, we think that we've got something here that's good," it goes out for what's called a pre-publication review, PPR. And we send this out to the industry and anybody in the entire world can go and comment on a PPR and the committee is forced to go and read those comments and read the comp and debate what is said. And then they go and they take that input and they either agree, they modify or they can disagree with that comment. And sometimes what they'll do is they'll go, and it happened, this is actually the second PPR for Addenda B because the first one came back and there was comments there which led to a complete rewrite of it. And so now it's going out for the second public review. And if once we get to a point where we've addressed all the comments, then it becomes an addenda and those addenda can be found for free on ASHRAE.org, just go and do a Google ASHRAE standards and addenda.
Badri Patel:
I think this was very informational part for our listeners, I guess. Sorry Scott, you were going to share something?
Scott McGinnis:
Yeah, I was just going to add in, but you made me think, Chris, you've stated this before, you ought to create one of those Saturday morning cartoons, "I'm just a bill on Capitol Hill."
Chris Williams:
Yes, yes. Yes.
Scott McGinnis:
"I'm just an ASHRAE standards idea sitting in a committee," and you can come up with your own words and everything. Put that in a cartoon.
But what I was going to add in is there's a lot of things I wish VRF had been doing the last decade and a half have been doing this that we now are going to be doing to make the systems a whole lot more reliable. And it's all because of these A2L refrigerants. Give you an example. The job I would've designed around R410A maybe would've had 125 pounds of R410A in it. The way all the standards were written and everything is that I had to make sure that whatever space this was serving or multiple spaces, the smallest space could absorb all of that leakage. If we had a in the fan coil, we had to assume 125 pounds could leak into a space. And at the time we were very worried about oxygen deprivation. We didn't want anybody not be able to breathe in that space. So we had to design the systems around that with no way of mitigating that leak, assumed all of it was going to leak in.
Well now with the A2Ls, and I believe part of this is coming from UL Safety is all fan coil units now and VRF and other systems will have a refrigerant leak detector in them. That refrigerant leak detector then will indicate when there's a leak, and then there's some other devices that are going to be inside the system like safety shutoff valves. So if a fan coil unit in room 101 starts leaking, instead of worrying about leaking all 125 pounds out, I can close a safety valve upstream of there, maybe 50 feet upstream, and that will close off and limit that leak to three pounds of R32, if that's the refrigerant inside of it.
And so that's going to save enormous amount of troubleshooting to go find a leak because the only time right now you find a leak sometimes is when the compressor dies because all the oil leaked out and then it's a massive effort to find the leak, evacuate, fix the leak, those sort of things. But with all these refrigerant monitors, we'll be able to know exactly, "Oh, room 101 sprung a leak, we probably lost about two pounds. We can go fix that leak, replace the coil in the fan coil unit and then recharge that two pounds back in” and everything's up and running a lot faster than it has been historically. The offshoot of some of the safety requirements are going to make VRF an even more reliable system and easier for operators to use, easier for people to troubleshoot, especially when it comes to leaks. So a lot of good things are happening for VRF.
Chris Williams:
So those valves by the way, just want to make sure that the listeners understand those are an option and you don't have to use those valves if you don't need them. So if you don't need them, don't buy them. But that is something that Standard 15 worked on that took over four, five years for that to get through the process. So that's a good example of how the standard has been working to go and address issues and to go and make it better. That's a really cool technology that they've got there.
Badri Patel:
So Scott mentioned about the flexibility of designing on the go with the VRF system, but my personal favorite when I talk VRF is the simultaneous cooling and heating feature, right? That's something unique. One thing I guess I could mention is there are 10 manufacturers now, and I think I have a call to action now. It's like everybody calls this Heat Recovery Control Unit with a different name. It's brand selector box, mode selection box, flow selector box, changeover box, switch box. I guess there are three other trade names. I wish somebody doesn't come up with black box in the end with what's going on with the airlines and stuff, but ASHRAE Handbook and SGPC 41, which is guideline for VRF, we have a technical name that all the stakeholders have agreed upon, which is Heat Recovery Control Unit. I think it would be nice at some point all the OEMs would start using that. So those who are newer to the technology, they don't get confused and there is a baseline there.
Now here's the interesting part. I was just traveling to Eastern Europe for a refrigeration conference and I was surprised, Chris, we are talking about R32 and Scott, we just talked about it like how the manufacturers are coming up with the design and application guides. They're launching R744 CO2 VRF in Europe. So I have a question for you guys, where do you see, I'm not talking about 10, 15 years, but next three, five, seven years game, especially in North America, where are we heading to with R32? Do we anticipate any big changes coming up pipeline or what are the regulatory frameworks that you guys are seeing across in your day-to-day jobs?
Scott McGinnis:
Yeah, I can probably start off. Yeah, I was actually at the ISH show in Frankfurt this past year as well, which would be the European version of ASHRAE. And I did see a lot of propane systems that sit outside rooftop units with propane. I did see one VRF system that was CO2 system on display. And what I think is Europe's always been, the reason we go over there is to say, "Hey, what's the future look like? They're doing it in Europe. It's going to probably end up over here at some point in time." But you could have gone to Europe 30 years ago and seen VRF technology. Probably 15 years ago, we started looking at A2Ls over there and it takes a while to get over here. And the fact that all of the major manufacturers just switched over to R32, I personally don't see that we're switching or R454B, the two A2Ls that are viable and DX. Don't want to leave the 454B guys out of this conversation, is I don't see those major manufacturers just willingly transitioning again and spending millions and millions of dollars to get a new refrigerant that has a little bit lower global warming potential.
I mean, we went from basically a GWP of 2100 down to 700. Major step there from 410A down to the A2Ls right now. And now we're talking about now we've got GWP of 700 to play with. Well, if we reduce that down to 350 or get it down to zero, that's nothing in comparison to what we just did and the millions of dollars that all the manufacturers just spent. So to answer your question, I may be hopefully thinking this, but I truly believe that in the states we're not going to get around to propane or CO2 for another 10 or 15 years. It's going to take time just like it did with the A2Ls. That transition took 15 years basically for us to get to a new refrigerant. So I think we can settle on this one, these A2Ls for now. And Chris, you probably know more on the safety side of it.
Chris Williams:
Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing. We went and had those who were advocating for 2L refrigerants actually wanted them faster than what we rolled them out. If you remember, we had the deadlines were two to three years earlier than what we originally, or what we finally settled on as a nation on implementing those. And the holdup was you have to have a viable safety standard so that people can install these things so that you don't hurt people. That's the bottom line. I mean, we can talk about everything else, but if you can't go and safely install this, nobody's going to do it. Nobody can afford to do it. It's not ethical to do it. And so it took Standard 15 roughly 12, 15 years to get the language totally worked out for 2L refrigerants. We haven't even started on a committee talking about group three flammable refrigerants in a occupied space other than small charges for ice machines and soda machines in those kinds of things.
We haven't really even started, had that conversation. And so there's a lot of work that has to come. So if a state were to go and regulate this and say, we're going to have this tomorrow, how are you going to go install it? The other question I get asked is why does Europe lead the United States on this so much? And there's a big key difference in how the regulations are created in Europe versus how they are in the United States. Their legal system is significantly different. Their tort system is significantly different, and their liabilities are significantly different than they are here in the United States. The manufacturers play a much stronger role in creating the safety standards in Europe than here in the United States, where here in the United States, we call them NRTLs, Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratories, you know the names UL, ETL, CSA, all these others who work to go and create product safety standards and then work with ASHRAE to go and the manufacturers and stakeholders to go and create application safety standards.
That work, it hasn't started yet. We're doing some research here, we're doing some research there. We're finding some interesting things here. We're doing some interesting things there, but we've got so much work that has to be done to UL 60335-2-40, there's so much work that has to be done to ASHRAE 15. And so what I would say is when you start see that work start to be done by those committees, then you can look forward 10 to 15 years and that'll give you an idea of when we can see those flammable refrigerants. It's not happening tomorrow. Absolutely not. I'm not a good crystal ball reader. I got marked down on my last employee evaluation because I was told that I suck at mind reading. But I would guess that we're looking a solid 15 to 20 years minimum before we see that here in the United States and Canada.
Badri Patel:
Yes. And I guess this is the beauty and benefits of being involved with ASHRAE as well, right? Because you got to meet two people from different part of the walls when you go to the ASHRAE conference and these committee meetings, and then you exchange ideas. So it's important to know, ASHRAE's tagline was, Shaping Tomorrow's Built Environment Today. But at the recent conference, considering the feedback from across the globe, we changed it to Shaping Tomorrow's Global Built Environment Today. ASHRAE has 201 chapters, so just imagine how widespread our volunteers and members are. I would like to ask you, Scott and Chris, if somebody who is involved at the grassroots or they're new to ASHRAE and if they want to contribute to the VRF game, what are the options for them, where they can contribute and how they can get more involved and contribute to these dialogue and conversations?
Scott McGinnis:
Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, exactly. Show up. Well, if you're in the HVAC business here in the States or Canada, you cannot escape ASHRAE. It permeates through everything. Using me as an example, kind of the joke I tell right is I got into the HVAC business after the Air Force. I woke up two years into it. I had a wife, I had two daughters, I had another daughter on the way, I had a mortgage. And I realized that I am going to sell air conditioning the rest of my life. And so I need to do two things, find a way of being good at it and find a way of enjoying it. And I found both of those things through ASHRAE. ASHRAE educates me, but then it also allows me to participate in these events that really have some control over my life. So I started off with the local level, but I kind of got into the national level of things with this dedicated outside air design guide.
And then because I had given my life over to VRF, I thought, "Well, I ought to find the VRF committee." And that is Technical Committee 8.7, and there's other committees that kind of flow into that out of that or associated with it that have to do with VRF. So I just showed up. I knew one guy, I'm asking him what was up. He told me when the meeting was, I showed up. Not much happened. I showed up again, got some information, and then I kept showing up until one day they looked around the table and they said, "Hey, we need somebody to be the secretary. Who wants to do that?" And I said, "I'll be the secretary." And I didn't realize the secretary was a stepping stone to being the chairman. I just thought it was somebody that took notes, right?
Chris Williams:
It's a trap. It's a trap.
Scott McGinnis:
And then a couple of people quit and then or moved out of the industry and all of a sudden they're like, "Hey Scott, congratulations. You're going to be the chairman of this committee." But it's been invaluable. It has allowed me to meet people like Chris and Badri, people I probably would've never met. And you get to work with them and you get to have some influence over where this industry's going. And if you want to be an influencer, if we talk about all the young kids out there who are in this, everybody wants to be an influencer now, you can be an influencer by joining ASHRAE. And if you want to get started January, our next national meeting is in Las Vegas. Everybody likes to go to Las Vegas. So come to Las Vegas, look at the website for TC 8.7, we'll tell you what time we're meeting and what hotel room we're meeting. Show up, introduce yourself to me and you can see what it's all about and we'll find a way for you to get involved.
Chris Williams:
I was going to say very, very similar, started off with the local chapter and going through the chairs and started off as I'm just on the board of governors. And the next thing you know, seven years later, I was the president of the national chapter. And the thing that I love about ASHRAE is it gives an opportunity for all of us, all three of us work for a different company. All three of us go and we're fierce competitors during our daytime jobs, but yet we can come together and we have so much fun getting together and we can set that aside and work on common interests together and better the industry. And we have our focuses is on how do we make it better. Guideline 41, Guideline 41 had participation from everyone, from owners, installers, the manufacturers, and it's so much fun. And that's the part that I love about ASHRAE, is getting to go and see you guys.
And we go and have lunch, go and have dinner and just break bread, and we talk about everything and we take that work stuff and we put it aside. My story is how did I get involved at the national level? I had a question. I had one question. I did not understand how ASHRAE went and interpreted an undercut door for VRF systems. That was it. And I wanted the answer to that. So I got on an airplane and I went to Chicago and I sat in the Standard 15 meeting and I started sitting on the back row listening to the conversation. And when someone would say something that I didn't understand, I'd raise my hand and I would be recognized and they would allow me to ask the questions that I wanted to ask, and they would answer them very politely, very respectfully. And we would go on.
And that's how I started learning and got involved with the Standard 15. And then now here I am 10 years later. And so you got questions, you don't like something, show up. It's always so frustrating for me is these people go and they say, "Ah, if I were them, I'd do it this way." Well, how about you show up at the meeting and tell us how you really feel about it, and we'll give you respect and we will debate it. And maybe you're right, or maybe we can explain something to you that you'll go, “oh, okay, well that's why they do it." And what did we do? We made the industry better. And even better, you get to participate.
Scott McGinnis:
Let me just add in real quick. I didn't mention it. You don't have to be an engineer to join ASHRAE. We need contractors, we need general contractors, we need developers. We need everybody that's involved in the process. And so just you don't have a Ph.D. or an engineering degree—
Chris Williams:
A P.E., or—
Scott McGinnis:
... you're just as valuable.
Chris Williams:
Yeah. Guideline 41, the VRF guideline, SGPC 41 which is the other one, come to Vegas and go to the Guideline 41 meeting. We have people who are in that room because they're an owner. That's it.
Badri Patel:
I guess it's well said. Both of you touched upon TC8.7 SGPC 41 Standard 15 LA course, so there are a lot of platforms we have here in ASHRAE, and I guess I'd like to reiterate this, ASHRAE's Society presidential member, Tim Wentz who used to say, "You have to be in that room." I guess that's it, right? Once again.
Chris Williams:
Yeah.
Badri Patel:
I guess, yeah. So we discuss in detail about how somebody can get involved with the VRF conversation at ASHRAE. Would you have any final thoughts on what we discussed today, Scott and Chris?
Scott McGinnis:
I may be stealing Chris's line. I think he said it, or maybe we just both thought it is, there's been a lot of, not turmoil, but a lot of questions, but a lot of engineers about VRF, lot of owners. Didn't always have the answers for them. Said, "I think this is what's happening. This is what I know now." But in closing, I would say in about a year, I bet no one's going to care to listen to this podcast because it's going to be business as usual again. We're going to be laying out VRF systems. They're going to be getting started up. They're going to be running. People are going to be happy with them. No one's going to care that it's an A2L refrigerant inside of it or not. And they may enjoy it a little more because we'll be able to detect their leaks now. So business as usual here very soon is what I would say. So thanks for having me.
Chris Williams:
Yeah. So I tell people this is going to be a Y2K event. And for those of us who are old enough to remember, the old codgers like me and Scott, Y2K was there was a coding error that they had in all the computers, and they thought that when the year 2000 hit that all the airplanes were going to fall out of the sky, the buses were going to stop running, people were going to starve. It was going to be cats and dogs living together, motors were going to be harmed, and it was just going to be the end of it all. And I remember they told everyone at midnight, don't pick up the phone and check the phone because if everyone goes and picks up the phone to check if the phone works, then we're going to crash the phone system. This was back in the day of landlines.
So midnight comes, everyone's having a great time. What did we do? Every single one of us picked up the phone to see if the phones were going to work, and dang it, the phones were still working. And the next day we all went, all that millions and billions of dollars that were spent to be Y2K compliant was nothing. And we all went to work the next day, and it was like none of it ever happened. That's what's happening with this 2L refrigerant. We spend all this money, we've gone and done our work, we've done our homework. It's safe. It's going to be profitable, it's going to be good for the owners, it's going to be good for the environment. In two years, no one's going to care. Absolutely no one's going to care. So thank you very much for having me on the podcast, Badri, and thank you for ASHRAE for setting this up to let us come and talk today.
Badri Patel:
Well, that brings us to the end of today's episode of VRF Systems in an A2L World. A big, big thank you again to Chris Williams and Scott McGinnis for joining us and sharing their deep expertise on VRF systems and where the industry is headed. And to all of you out there tuning in, whether you are a VRF veteran or just starting your journey, we hope you found today's discussion valuable. Until next time, keep pushing the VRF boundaries, what's possible in the HVAC world. Take care, and we'll catch you in the next episode. Thank you.
ASHRAE Journal:
The ASHRAE Journal Podcast team is editor, Drew Champlin; managing editor, Linda Rathke; producer and assistant editor, Allison Hambrick; assistant editor, Mary Sims; associate editor, Tani Palefski; and technical editor, Rebecca Matyasovski.
Copyright ASHRAE. The views expressed in this podcast are those of individuals only, and not of ASHRAE, its sponsors or advertisers. Please refer to ASHRAE.org/podcast for the full disclaimer.