AHRI Certification

EVAPCO’s Evaporator Certification

As part of EVAPCO's support of and commitment to industry standards, all EVAPCO SST-B Series evaporators except SSTWB and SSTDB are certified by AHRI to AHRI Standard 420, “Performance Rating of Forced-Draft Circulation Free-Delivery Unit Coolers for Refrigeration." This ensures EVAPCO evaporators will function as stated under the desired conditions, with no hidden performance costs along the way.

When you choose EVAPCO, you are guaranteed the quality, efficiency, and thermal performance you expect.

What is AHRI certification?

Widely recognized as the gold-standard for heating and cooling certification, AHRI provides an accurate and unbiased evaluation of heating, ventilation, air conditioning and commercial refrigeration (HVACR) equipment. With over 80 years’ experience certifying heating and cooling hardware, the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI) is an internationally recognized certification standard. ANSI/AHRI standards benefit the HVAC and Refrigeration industry by ensuring the performance and efficiency of manufactured equipment is accurate and reliable.

AHRI Standard 420

AHRI standard 420-2008 applies to refrigerant fed evaporators, of either the direct expansion or liquid overfeed type. The goal of AHRI standard 420 is to ensure evaporators are capable of handling the expected work-load within the unit's designed parameters.

Per section 5.3 of AHRI Standard 420:

Tolerances: To comply with this standard, any representative production unit selected at random, when tested at the Standard Rating Conditions, shall have a Gross Total Cooling Effect not less than 95% of its published Standard Rating and not exceed 105% of its Rated Power.

Simply put, Standard 420 is designed to ensure evaporators are capable of handling the expected load under typical operation without causing additional costs to the owner. The importance is outlined in an EVAPCO white paper on the importance of evaporator standards:

"The evaporators used in this study have a contractor cost of less than $200,000.00. A 10% shortfall in performance over 20 Years is almost equal to the original cost of the evaporators. If the suction pressure is lowered to maintain -10 °F at all times, then the resulting higher annual operating cost will be equivalent to the evaporator first cost of $200,000 in 12 years."

To verify this, Standard 420 measures gross cooling effect which is equal to all of the heat that the coil assembly passes into the refrigerant. It also measures the power consumed by the fan(s). The gross cooling effect less the fan power is the net cooling effect, which is the portion of that evaporator’s capacity available for removing heat from the refrigerated space.