Quick Disconnect Round Up
Colder HFC12, Koolance VL3, Koolance VL3N, Koolance VL4
by skinnee - December 10, 2009



Pressure and Flow Results

Pressure drop testing is a standard practice at the lab, QDC's were a little goofy though. I say goofy only because I had two but two sets inline with a short of tube connecting them as possible. Where typically I just set the components on the counter, so QDC's presented a soak the entire room risk due to the tubing setup. Happy to report I didn't spray too much water around the room, but I did end up with a slightly wet shirt.

Test Method

I have the line from my wash basin in the mud room hooked up to the gate valve controlling flow, which then runs into the King flow meter. The bottom port on the flow meter is the inlet, top port is the outlet. The outlet runs down to the Delrin T which I have Bitspower 1/2" barbs on for the normal flow, and the negative pressure line connects via an EnzoTech 1/4" fitting. After the negative pressure T, the component in testing is attached. I always use Bitspower 1/2" fittings, that keeps everything on a common test platform...well from a fitting perspective anyhow. At the outlet of the component is the positive pressure T fitting, again with Bitspower 1/2" fittings and an EnzoTech 1/4" fitting for the pressure line. The tubing the runs back into the wash basin and down the drain.

I chose to run the tests with two full QDC's inline, I saw no reason to test them individually... why have just one, that defeats the whole concept of quick disconnect. The tubing connecting the two QDC's was just long enough to fit the barbs and compression collars to reduce or eliminate any added restriction, we just want the QDC's.

Test tools are the same as always, with a pen and printed Excel template for taking measurements.


Pressure Drop Data Tables

Here are the combined pressure drop numbers for our round-up. I have included kPa and mH2O using Liters per Hour for our European metric system friends. After all there is such a large number of readers who use metric over imperial units, they should have data in their common format too.



PSI Drop per GPM of flow

The data table may not be clear for some, visual representations always seem to help... like always here are the resulting charts.




kPa drop per LPH of flow

And for the metric readers...



From a strictly pressure drop perspective, QDC's are a lot less restrictive than I expected. For some reason I had in my mind that adding quick disconnects was going to be like adding a EK Supreme to the loop and I was completely wrong. So lets take a look at what each set of QDC's does to a sample loop, and lets not forget to see if the No-Spill holds up.



[  Page One - Intro/Overview  |  Page Three - Loop Flow and Loss  |  Page Four - Conclusion  ]
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