EPA 608 Type II Practice Test

Required evacuation levels for the appliances Type II covers

The appliance’s pressure class and the size of its charge together decide the number — and on three of these five rows the manufacturing date of your recovery equipment decides it as well.

Most Type II work sits on the first row. A residential or light-commercial split system or heat pump holds well under 200 pounds, so the required level is 0 inches Hg: bring the appliance down to atmospheric pressure and you have met the rule. It reads like a trick answer, and it is the most-missed row on the table, because a widely republished shortcut claims 4 inches Hg applies to anything under 200 pounds. That shortcut is not in the regulation.

Pressure class is decided by the refrigerant, not by the size of the box. R-22, R-410A and R-404A are high-pressure; R-12 and R-134a are medium-pressure. That is why a 150 lb R-12 cold-storage system needs 10 inches Hg with a recovery machine built after the cutoff, while a 45 lb R-410A split system needs nothing below atmospheric. The deepest figure on the inches-of-mercury side of the table is 15 inches Hg, and it belongs to medium-pressure appliances of 200 pounds or more — a 600 lb R-134a chiller, not the 250 lb R-22 system it is so often offered against.

These are the rows a Type II technician actually hits. The complete seven-row table, including the small-appliance and low-pressure rows this section does not test, is on the EPA 608 study guide, alongside the correction to the shortcut above.

When a question tells you how old the recovery machine is

The table has two columns, split by whether the recovery or recycling equipment was manufactured before 15 November 1993 or on or after it. Anything bought or rented today sits on the modern side of that line, so in practice you work from the right-hand column — but the exam asks about both, and every 4 inches Hg answer on these five rows lives in the older column.

So when a question bothers to tell you the machine was built in 2015, or "after November 15, 1993", that is not scene-setting: it is telling you which column to read. The two rows that show 0 inches Hg in both columns — high-pressure under 200 pounds, and very high-pressure at any charge — do not move with the date at all, and a question that supplies the date there is testing whether you know that it makes no difference.

0 inches Hg, 0 psig, and the repairs that need no vacuum at all

What the table gives you is the vacuum an appliance must be evacuated to before it is opened for major repair, when refrigerant is not being isolated in a sealed portion of the system. Two common jobs sit outside those conditions. If the repair is not major — changing a liquid-line filter drier, say — and the appliance will not be vented to the environment afterward, a medium-, high- or very high-pressure appliance may be evacuated to just 0 psig before it is opened, whatever its normal row says. Isolating the charge in a sealed part of the system — pumping it into the receiver behind a front-seated king valve, say — sits outside the table too, because these levels apply only when the refrigerant is not being isolated that way.

And when leaks in the appliance make the required vacuum unreachable, the answer is not to keep pulling. EPA allows the appliance to be evacuated to the lowest level attainable that does not exceed 0 psig, because continuing to pull on a leaking system draws air and moisture in and contaminates the refrigerant you are recovering. Venting is never the fallback: a knowing release stays illegal however awkward the job has become.

Getting a large charge out: liquid first, and why push-pull is preferred

Liquid refrigerant is far denser than vapor, so on a system holding several hundred pounds you take liquid out of the liquid port first and finish the job on vapor. Vapor-only recovery through long, small-diameter hoses with the Schrader cores left in place is the slow method that every "how do I shorten recovery time" question is built against; short, large-diameter hoses with the cores removed, drawing from the liquid and vapor ports at once, is the fast one.

Push-pull is preferred for the same reason, and it helps to know what the machine is actually doing: it pulls vapor off the recovery cylinder and discharges that vapor into the appliance, and the pressure it builds there pushes liquid out of the appliance’s liquid port and into the cylinder. It moves a large liquid charge quickly, which is exactly when you would reach for it. Nitrogen is never used to force refrigerant along that path — it would leave a non-condensable gas in the recovered charge — and whichever method you use, the recovery cylinder is filled to no more than 80 percent of capacity by weight so the liquid has room to expand.

When a leak becomes the owner’s legal problem

The leak-repair duties attach to a defined set of equipment: appliances with a full charge of 50 or more pounds of ozone-depleting refrigerant. Which trigger rate applies depends on what the equipment does, not on which refrigerant is in it:

A rooftop unit or a chiller cooling an office building is comfort cooling, the strictest of the three. A supermarket rack is commercial refrigeration. A chiller serving a manufacturing process is industrial process refrigeration — the only one of the three that can get longer than the standard 30 days to repair, and then only where reaching the leak means shutting the process down. The exam’s favorite move is to swap the three rates between those categories, and the superseded figures in the right-hand column are still printed by a lot of prep material, which is what makes them such effective wrong answers.

The rate is always annualized, and that is the step people skip. A comfort-cooling system with a 50 lb charge that needs a pound added every month is losing 2 percent of its charge a month — 24 percent a year, well past its trigger, even though no single top-up looks alarming. Same arithmetic on a service ticket: 20 pounds added to a 200 lb commercial refrigeration system three months after the last visit is 10 percent of the charge in a quarter, which annualizes to 40 percent, twice the commercial trigger. Answering with the raw percentage added on one visit is the trap.

Repair deadlines, the report to EPA, and what counts as fixed

• Standard repair: 30 days from the date the leak was discovered
• Retrofit or retirement instead of repair: Plan developed within 30 days, completed within 1 year
• Industrial process refrigeration requiring a process shutdown: 120 days substituted for the normal 30-day period

Owners and operators must report to EPA when an appliance containing 50 or more pounds leaks 125% or more of its full charge in one calendar year. The threshold is 125 percent — more than the appliance holds — because a large system that is topped up again and again can lose more than its own charge across a year, and that is the scale of loss EPA wants told about.

A repair only has to bring the annual leak rate back below the applicable threshold — it does not have to eliminate the leak entirely. In other words the standard is the rate, not the leak: bring that 50 lb comfort-cooling system from 24 percent a year back under its trigger and the requirement is met, even though the system has not been made perfectly tight.

Looking for the low-pressure number? That question is Type III

Low-pressure appliances — the centrifugal chillers running R-11, R-123 or R-1233zd — sit on the same table, but they are specified as an absolute pressure: 25 mm Hg absolute, in both columns, so the age of the recovery machine makes no difference there either. It is the only row on the table that changes units, which is why "25 inches Hg vacuum" works so well as a wrong answer — it repeats the number while describing a far shallower vacuum.

This Type II bank uses 25 mm Hg only as a distractor, because low-pressure machines are not Type II equipment. If that figure is what you came for, the questions that actually drill it — evacuation before a major repair, the 10 psig leak-test ceiling, purge units and ASHRAE 15 equipment rooms — are in the Type III section.

Drill them on the free EPA 608 Type 3 practice test.