Short #66 - Water in My Tools!
HVAC School - For Techs, By Techs
Bryan Orr
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2019
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this short podcast episode, Bryan explains what to do when you get water in your tools. (Hint: the answer is NOT to panic!)
Some technicians try not to get water in their tools at all. Depending on the climate and line of work, that may be an impossible task. In humid or coastal climates, you may deal with a lot of rain and moisture. If you work on cooling towers and boilers, you will be working with systems that rely on heat transfer through water, so you WILL encounter water.
When your tools get wet, you can't just stick them back in your toolbag and pretend that nothing happened; the tools' performance WILL suffer if you don't address the issue. If your tools get water on them, they won't dry on their own; they will corrode. At Kalos, we use microfiber cloths to clean our hand tools after they get wet. In the case of battery-powered tools, make sure you remove the battery and dry it off as best as you can. Sometimes, you can use WD-40 to help displace water.
You can also look into using degassing chambers to remove moisture from battery-free tools. These chambers look like crockpots and make it easy to pull a deep vacuum (below 500 microns) to remove moisture. (Don't put batteries or devices with refrigerant in the degassing chambers! Cell phones fall into this category, too!)
Learn more about Refrigeration Technologies HERE.
If you have an iPhone, subscribe to the podcast HERE, and if you have an Android phone, subscribe HERE.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, this is the HVAC School Podcast. I'm Brian, and this episode is a short episode and it's about |
| 0:08.7 | what you do when you get your tools wet, which is going to happen quite often in this trade. |
| 0:13.0 | I think it's funny when some technicians try to completely prevent ever getting wet. |
| 0:19.0 | It's just not going to happen. |
| 0:20.0 | I imagine if you live in certain parts of the country you can see it coming for a country mile but in Florida |
| 0:25.2 | especially these things pop up pretty quick and you're just going to get your tools wet from time to time and you're going to get wet from time to time and that's just life. |
| 0:31.1 | It's better if you can set a ten up or an umbrella or something like that, but it's going to happen. |
| 0:36.0 | And so we're going to talk about what to do when it does happen. |
| 0:38.0 | Just give a couple quick tips. |
| 0:40.0 | But before we do that, I want to thank our sponsors and our sponsors are carrier and carrier equipment manufacturer who we deal at my contracting company Kailos |
| 0:48.7 | Refrigeration Technologies at refrigetech.com the pastoralos make great stuff at refrigeration technologies. |
| 0:54.8 | If you haven't taken a look at the pan and drain spray as a replacement for pan tabs, |
| 1:00.5 | it really works great. |
| 1:01.5 | It has a detergent in there that has a silicone in it and so it helps kind of create a slick surface on the bottom of the drain pan and helps to make that stuff run out so that way it doesn't build up inside the drain. |
| 1:12.0 | It's pan and drain spray from refrigeration technologies. |
| 1:15.2 | Speed clean at speed clean.com |
| 1:17.1 | they make the infamous bucket de scalar |
| 1:20.6 | if you need to de scale small boilers or especially tankless water heaters |
| 1:24.9 | those need to be de-scaled pretty regularly the bucket de-scaler from |
| 1:28.0 | speed clean makes that nice and easy as you get into maintenance season you |
| 1:31.8 | might want to think about picking one up they're very reasonably priced and they do the job that's the bucket descaler from speed clean navac global.com navac makes the NRDD recovery, a really great recovery machine that I recently did a video on. |
| 1:46.0 | You're going to want to check that out on our YouTube channel. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bryan Orr, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Bryan Orr and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.