We wouldn’t have believed it had it not come from a reputable source — our good friend and bandleader Richard “Swingin’ Dick” Long. In his own words:
“As you know, I gave up drinking about 14 years ago but the newer non-alcoholic beers–particular the IPAs–are quite good. They don’t have alcohol but the full bodied beer taste. So as a present the boys in the band gave me a mini-fridge stocked with IPA and Guinness Zero. It was great and I enjoyed having a cold one in our break room while smoking a bowl of fine Cavendish tobacco in my Italian pipe while contemplating the next stops on our tour or new arrangements in the Swingin’ Dick style. Anyway I was there looking over some new charts when one of the boys tripped and slammed into the fridge. I thought nothing of it but heard a sort of hissing noise. Next thing I know there’s a Ka-WHOOMP, feel some heat on my back, suds all over the place, and my Swingin’ Dick hairdoo is ablaze ! I managed to stop, drop, roll and get the flames out–suffering nothing other than some singed hair and spilled tobacco–but was really surprised that my fridge had apparently exploded !”
How could this be ? Aren’t our modern day refrigerators the epitome of efficiency and safety ?
Apparently not.
So we tagged one of our on-staff engineering experts — J. J. “Slasher” Isherwood — to look into the matter in detail. In HIS own words:
“Refrigeration used to be quite dangerous. The whole principle behind air conditioning or refrigeration is to use a phase change of a liquid into a gas to pump heat from one place to another. It takes ALOT of heat to make something boil; changing water from liquid at 212F to vapor at 212 F takes 540 calories per gram. It only takes 100 calories to get that same gram of water from 33 to 212 degrees F but over five times that to simply change it from vapor to water. Steam engines have exploited this huge energy change for centuries in using water as a working fluid. And a refrigerator is simply a heat engine run in reverse.
So refrigerators or air conditioners use a substance that’s easily liquified in the condenser (the outside coils on an A/C or fridge) and boils at a low temperature in the freezer/refrigerator section or indoor evaporator to remove heat from the interior of the fridge or the house. The freon or whatever enters as liquid and boils in the evaporator–making it cold–and using the huge energy change from liquid to gas to capture the heat. This gas is then run through the compressor where the pressure is raised and then the captured heat is rejected in the condenser coils — turning the gas back into a liquid so the process can be repeated.
The substance used as a working fluid needs to have decent heat transfer characteristics, a relatively low (but not TOO low) boiling point (perhaps around -20 to -40 F or so at atmospheric pressure), and be able to be condensed into a liquid at not too high a pressure; somewhere usually between 90 and 400 PSI–such that conventional metals like copper or aluminum can be used as coils.
Early refrigerators–I had one–used Sulfur Dioxide as a refrigerant. Nasty stuff; it’s quite toxic. But it worked. On the heels of that was Methyl Chloride (R40) — toxic but not as bad as SO2. And it worked also. Then Ammonia (gas) was discovered to work well and is still in use in large scale refrigeration. Ammonia is the pungent stuff we all know (but an anhydrous gas) — a choking and breathing hazard in high concentrations. It also forms an explosion hazard. While Ammonia caught on for large industrial applications where the piping can be really rugged and well maintained, alternatives were sought for the commercial refrigerator market as well as for home air conditioning (ammonia being a significant hazard if cooling coils were punctured in a home refrigerator and unsuitable for residential or commercial air conditioning systems due to the toxicity).
In the quest for a ‘perfect’ refrigerant Freon was born. Freon is great stuff–it’s non-toxic–and has great heat transfer properties. Has for generations. But then the EPA was born and needed a mission to squash everything holy and everything that worked well.
Freons are basically halogenated hydrocarbons — a fancy word for natural gas mixed with Chlorine and/or Florine–and the same stuff volcanoes have been belching by the mega-tonne for centuries. Certain types can be toxic if combusted; when bromated they make wonderful fire extinguishers. R-12 (Dichlorodiflouromethane) and R-22 (Dichloroflouromethane) worked great in car aircon/refrigerators and home and industrial air conditioners respectively. They were benign, had excellent heat transfer, and relatively low pressures to re-liquify the gas. Because they worked well, they became a target.
A few lab eggheads found if they put HUGE concentrations of these refrigerants in a chamber it could inhibit ozone production as well as destroy ozone. We were talking a whole can of Freon in a small enclosed space; nothing that could ever be achieved in nature. So it was theorized that it might make holes in the ozone layer that protects us agains UV. Problem is that not only was nature belching this stuff by the mega-tonne for centuries, but also being VERY heavy compounds there wasn’t any easy way for man made freons to make it past the trop into the stratosphere. Nor were man-made freons any significant fraction of anything; a literal drop of water in the pacific. Nevertheless on this half-baked theory the EPA chose to ban R-12, R-22, as well as Halon fire extinguishers. It was later proven to be a complete lie; instead of acknowledging the error the EPA then reclassified freon as a ‘greenhouse gas’ (capitalizing on the climate change carbon nonsense). Replacing R-12 and R-22 were R-134 and R-410a respectively. You probably noticed this when the newer cars had aircon that didn’t get as cold and work as well as their R-12 ancestors. Or when your new ‘environmentally friendly’ R-410a air conditioner started springing leaks in the evaporator due to R-410’s higher working pressure and the aluminum/copper coils not handling the increased pressure well on the evaporator side. Unlike the old R-22 units that functioned for decades, the R-410 units were cantankerous but eventually got to be kinda-OK in reliability. R134 worked kinda-OK in car aircon and refrigerators but not as good as R-12.
Not being satisfied with the damage they’d already caused, and not realizing that the average family doesn’t have $25,000 bucks to spend when their A/C springs a leak, they EPA went on to ban 410a under some ‘greenhouse’ nonsense moving the goalposts without scientific justification once again. And then went off on R-134.
At this rate, we’ll be back to Ammonia and Sulfur Dioxide soon. I guess they figure it’s better to kill humans than have their fairy tale of the ‘environment’ threatened.
Anyway, as the freons were banned once again, the industry turned to another replacement–isobutane (also known as R-600). They put this into refrigerators and are trying to put it into car air conditioners–despite it’s known high degree of flammability. Given that you have an immensely flammable gas under high temperature and pressure running through an electrical compressor loaded with oil is the reason why new refrigerators have the ‘explosion’ warning on them. So once again the EPA hurts humans to propagate a lie. Seems that our good friend “Swingin’ Dick” was an early casualty of the enviromarxism/’climate change’ communism, but thank goodness it was only his hair that got singed. The rest of us can derive solace that it’s in general hard to get the right combination of air and isobutane to generate an explosive mixture — I guess Dick picked the wrong moment to light his pipe. And wearing a hat for a few weeks will probably work for him.
So, yeah…thanks to this administrative state behemoth we’re taking huge technological steps backward and making life more unpleasant and dangerous for everyone. But there are easy work-arounds to flow restrictors, ‘water saving’ dishwashers and washing machines which leave things dirty, and flush-limited toilets. Drill out the restrictors, run the washer twice or fill it by hand, and flush a few times.”
We’d like to thank J. J. for his excellent analysis and give our best wishes to Richard for his recovery. Meanwhile make sure YOU’RE careful around your refrigerators. If you’d like to send Richard some well wishes he’d love to hear from you–he can be reached on his band’s website at :
Let us know what you think of Swingin’ Dick !
Diatomaceous-Johnson 