EPA Section 608 requires that any technician who purchases or uses refrigerant in the course of maintenance, service, repair, or disposal of appliances maintain records of the refrigerant used and recovered. That's not a suggestion. Inspectors ask for it, and the records have to be real — not reconstructed from memory in the parking lot before an audit.
Recovered vs. New — The Compliance Core
The Recovered Amt and New Ref fields are the two numbers that define whether a service call was handled in EPA compliance. Recovery comes first. You pull what's in the system before you open it, you log that number, and then you log what went back in.
A leak repair on an R22 system where the tech charged 2.5 lbs of new refrigerant without logging any recovered amount raises a flag — either the system was already empty (which itself requires documentation) or recovery didn't happen. The journal record is how you demonstrate, per unit and per service date, that your recovery-to-charge ratio is defensible.
The Refrigerant choice field — R134A, R22, R410A — is not decoration. R22 (HCFC-22) is no longer manufactured for new equipment and has been in phase-down since 2010, with reclaimed R22 the only legal source for existing systems since 2020. An R22 system getting charged with "new" refrigerant from post-2020 is using reclaimed stock that needs its own documentation chain. The refrigerant type on each record connects the service event to the compliance context for that refrigerant class.
Unit and Repair Type as Service Pattern Data
Three unit types — Refrigerator, Window Unit, PTAC — define the equipment population this journal was built for. PTAC (Packaged Terminal Air Conditioners) are the wall-mounted hotel and apartment units that run on 410A or older refrigerant blends and are often serviced under bulk property maintenance contracts where 20 units might be on a single dispatch.
Two repair types — Leak and Comp change — capture the two service scenarios that drive refrigerant usage. A compressor replacement on a sealed system always involves recovery and recharge. A leak repair on an active system requires recovery, leak detection and repair, and then recharge. The repair type tells you which procedure sequence applies to the refrigerant quantities on that record.
The Serial Field Is Barcode-Ready
The Serial field is a barcode field, not a text field. An HVAC technician standing in front of a PTAC unit with a 24-character serial number printed on a label in 6-point font can scan that label rather than transcribing it. The serial number on the record is then exact, tying the refrigerant usage to a specific equipment unit that can be cross-referenced against service history as the unit is serviced repeatedly over its lifecycle.
Combined with the Invoice field, every service event is documented with a financial reference that connects the technician's field record to the billing system — recoverable during an EPA audit and usable as a source document for customer-facing service history.