I found a glass bottle marked “Freon” (with two crudely drawn skulls) in the shed yesterday. Nobody remembers where it came from. It contains about half a liter of a clear, colorless liquid and got a rather leaky cap.
I’ve been browsing this site and narrowed the selection down to 113, 123b1, 150 or 30, I guess (judging from the temperatures it was likely exposed to).
I wouldn’t really care if it was 113, but the others sound rather nasty.
Any suggestions? Maybe try to light a small sample? I got a gas mask from the army surplus store somewhere.
You want to identify it? One way is to use a refrigerant identifier. Mine is designed for automotive use, but it gives a readout indicating the particular refrigerants with each one’s percentage of the mixture. Cost me 1500. I don’t know how many different refrigerants it will recognize, but so far I’ve seen R-12 and R-134a (the two automotive ones) as well as R-22 (home units), R-124, & R-142.
I could tell the difference between Freon 30 and Freon 113 by the smell alone.
Freon 30, also known as dichloromethane or DCM will strip the paint off of metal and is much more vile.
Freon 113, aside from ripping up the ozone layer, seems pretty innocuous.
Anyway, the first clue I’d gather to try and identify it would be to measure it’s density. The 4 Freons you have listed all have significantly different densities, so if you’re sure it’s one of these four, it’s a piece of cake.
Oh yeah, express density in grams/ml and your units will match up with the MSDS units.
This isn’t strictly on topic, but I thought someone might be interested in knowing how the freons are named. (It’s actually on the site fishcheer linked to, but I’ve always thought it was interesting in an arcane, inefficient way…)
The number after “Freon”, plus 90, is a code for the composition of that refrigerant. Adding 90 to the number gives a 3-digit number; the first digit is the number of carbons, the second is the number of hydrogens, and the third is the number of fluorines. (The number of chlorines isn’t given, but you can calculate it by subtracting the number of hydrogens and fluorines from the total number of hydrogens in an alkane, given by the formula 2N+2.)
So, for Freon 113, 113+90 = 203. A 2-carbon alkane (ethane…) has 6 hydrogens, so the formula of Freon 113 is C2Cl3F3. Freon 30 gives 120, so it’s CH2Cl2 (DCM or methylene chloride).
This system seems to work for R-xxx numbers too.
fischeer15: I guess I can’t blame you if you want to identify your freon, but be careful doing it, and dispose of it properly once you find out. I’m not sure if household hazardous waste facilities in your area will accept Freon, but almost all the Freons are powerful ozone-destroying gases, especially the ones that don’t contain hydrogen.
Gary T: Do you know how refrigerant identifiers work? Does it just measure density, or is it something more complex?
Thank you, honkytonkwillie, excellent suggestion. My little science project can begin!
Roches, our local municipal recycling depot accepts old refrigerators, so I guess this won’t be a problem. But at the moment I’m just too curious about this little gem to dump it yet.
