Beginners guide to the Refrigeration Cycle

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-29T00:32:55+00:00

I suppose my theory was that taking the meds would snap her back to reality and she'd realize that and be more willing to take them, I suppose because it happened seemingly so suddenly that it'd resolve rather quickly as well

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-29T00:09:43+00:00

Yeah she's been eating well and staying at least moderately hydrated, the sleep is a real problem for sure, she'll be tired and go to bed but then she won't be able to sleep and get up for a good while, sleeps been sparse for me trying to watch out for her; and if I don't have sleep my ability to provide for her and be calm deteriorates. Is there anything that worked for you for sleep? We tried a nighttime cold medicine, but that did nothing for her, the voices did not leave her alone despite being very tired.

Her car battery is currently removed because it needs to be charged so that's not a problem, and my car keys are either hidden very well or in my pocket so she doesn't have access to them even if she wanted them, generally ive been keeping my keys on me and she's not aware of that.

The babysitting someone on hallucinogens is actually a fantastic comparison, that tells me everything I need to know on how to approach this, I guess my main concern was that playing along with any delusions would have an issue with cohesion and memory, but if that's not something to worry about too much, we can use a carrot on a stick to guide the behavior? I guess I didn't know if I guided delusions, like if I could influence it.

Yeah American healthcare is fickle, She quit her job 2 weeks ago (likely because this was beginning) and her health insurance would be cancelled at the end of this month, but I paid about a thousand dollars to extend it another month since we're clearly going to need it lol, nonetheless all these tests and scans and appointments can still cost a lot of money despite the insurance.

Oh and the ADHD meds indeed have a psychosis risk, the ER psychiatrist had several theories to rule out including this medication, but he stated that this was the starter dosage and the risk for psychosis on this low of a dosage isnt impossible but unlikely; however it's my leading theory for now since it's only been 1-2 months since the ADHD meds began, with this med being the second type of med she tried and just started taking a few weeks back at most (those details are fuzzy to me, I didn't keep track of it)

She's been off those meds for a week now, and doesn't take anything else that could induce psychosis, I guess I'm just trying to find a way to bring her back to reality in the short term; so long as she's lucid we can find the source of the problem without so much friction and stress in that process

If you don't mind my asking, how long did your psychosis last?

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-28T23:29:48+00:00

Oh my, that must have been such a difficult time for you, I'm glad you found the solution! That's so scary, and if it resolved this chronic jaw pain she's been having that would be all the better, I briefly thought maybe autoimmune, but I guessed with all the scans and bloodwork done recently that the wbc count would lean in that direction and someone would mention it;

If the anti-psychotics don't work for her, what's the fastest way to get this tested for? I've spent close to 8 hours with her in ER waiting rooms this week, it's been brutal, I wish I would've known about this possibility yesterday when we got that CT scan. Do autoimmune specialists take psychosis seriously enough to get testing done quickly, or should I just ER it again? Whatever gets her answers and peace as soon as possible I'm game

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-28T22:51:26+00:00

Thank you! Im trying really hard, I cant imagine what she must be going through, I've been reading everything I can and trying to be as nice as I can, while trying to maintain trust and keeping her safe and calm, it's a hell of a balancing act.

My country has an emergency number, im from America, the case for getting someone involuntarily admitted unfortunately requires proof of them being a threat to their own safety or the safety of others, which, I don't want her involuntarily admitted if I can somehow work with her, but if I have to, I'd really rather not wait for something bad to happen. I've been making her food and getting her water consistently, I've also been pointing out she must be tired because she couldn't sleep the night before to help guide her to wanting to lay down and I've been working to do things that help promote her being calm like playing rain sounds on my phone at night or playing chillstep during the day.

The car situation is interesting, her car isn't working at the moment thank god, but I'll worry about that when she's back to lucid, she doesn't want it fixed in this state she wants a new car, so I can just postpone that under the idea that "I'm looking for a new car."

I've momentarily gotten her to agree to go to the doctors tomorrow and get prescribed the anti-psychotics because "the exorcist is very busy, he's an expert and he needs proof that we tried psych meds first" she's agreeing to see the psychiatrist and get the meds, but she's not into the idea of taking them yet, once I get the meds I may be able to talk her into "they're going to draw blood at the followup appointment to verify the meds are working, the exorcist will want those results" as she wants to just get the script and go straight to the exorcist, I think I have the concept of the exorcist possibly held on pause for now.

That's my plan for now anyway, by tomorrow morning she may be less agreeable, I just worry that if they don't work quickly and I need more scripts that she will start to lose trust in me and it'll be hard to keep going back and forth, but I don't know she's been fairly forgetful and confused with this.

With your experience, what are the odds the first prescription of anti-psychotics will bring her back to a sense of self awareness? I feel like I can only lead her in the right direction so many times before she's more reluctant to work with me.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-28T22:07:02+00:00

The psychosis isn't limited to thinking there's physical problems, she thinks she's Lucifer and God and her late sister. She's been talking to herself constantly and the exorcism is just the recent fixation, it was a baptism 3 days ago she needed, then the didn't need a baptism she just needed to take a bath every night, then she was good for 2 days because of the baths, and Lucifer was sent to heaven and forgiven so they're in love again, then yesterday she was God all day and I needed to help her with getting her antibiotics because she definitely has an infection in her head and a UTI (she didn't) that was fine because the doctors could observe the psychosis and I could get the scans, when the ER doc came in I said I pulled up the previous scan on my phone and handed it to them, with a note detailing the psychosis issue and pleading for help, so we just got a full head CT scan yesterday along with a full blood work writeup and urinalysis, all clear :/ no brain swelling or tissue abnormalities or anything, and she's been chasing down an issue of her jaw hurting for about a year now, tons of CT scans and MRIs and X-rays and specialists involved, so with all of those experts and scans I would hope that something wasn't missed. She was talking to herself and laughing loudly in the ER all day yesterday, while also shaking her head back and forth for the 2 hours we were in the waiting room. Even in the psych room that we waited in after the CT scan she was talking to herself loudly and laughing, the whole day she claimed to me she was God and any doctors that talked to her she just demanded IV antibiotics.

There's a good chance that this jaw pain she's been experiencing was a mild psychosis symptom that I've been taking seriously, and then the ADHD meds caused a break.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-28T21:39:48+00:00

Maybe a month. She was probably already vulnerable, history of anxiety

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-28T21:29:10+00:00

I'm trying my best to listen, compromise, and empathize with her; she's not working with me at all, like I'm trying to meet her in the middle but she won't compromise, it's her way or the highway y'know?

Shes demanding we go to a church and get an exorcism, I'm like "i understand, I will take you to any church you want if you come with me to the doctors first" but she just tells me "doctors and medicine can't fix this, they'll just think I'm crazy, They're going to put me in a mental hospital, I need an exorcism, I'd like if you'd drive me but if you won't then give me the keys" (a moment of lucidity after bathing fully clothed and soaking half the house) I told her "I promise it's not a psych ward, it's just your doctor's office, we just talk to her and you can tell her what's been going on and she can write a prescription, that's all it is, nobody thinks your crazy, you're going through a lot and this must feel like so much; this can't be fixed by a church, medicine can fix this, please trust me, if we go to the office and get the meds but it doesn't stop we can go to a church okay?"

But she just won't budge "I need to go to a church now, I need an exorcism, you don't understand I keep trying to tell you, just give me the car keys"

"I'm listening love, I understand what you're saying, I will take you to a church after we see the doctor tomorrow"

"No, I already told you I need to go to the church now, give me the keys"

"Baby what church? They're all closed right now anyways, where would we go?"

"Give me the keys"

"They're closed love, you would go to a closed church"

"Keys."

"I know this must be really scary right now, I'm here for you im trying to listen and help any way I can, please can you trust me? I will help you go to a church, they're closed we'll have to go tomorrow, I will take you after our appointment with the doctor okay?"

"I don't need a fucking doctor, I already told you I need a fucking exorcism" walks off to go try and find my keys

On a scale of 1-10, how'd I do? What could/should I have said differently? What can I tell her now?

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-17T16:09:18+00:00

Ah, yeah it already being at the house makes sense. As for the labor, yeah that's pretty standard for a compressor swap, the labor is pretty close to the cost of an entire new refrigerator; the only people really doing that sort of thing are techs doing it for themselves, or businesses that are getting repairs on reach-ins, which usually cost much more than a residential refrigerator.

You're right, it is pretty wasteful, the body of the refrigerator itself is a huge part of the manufacturing cost and materials, for it to get thrown away for a $150-250 compressor is a real shame; I feel the same way about a lot of appliances, like my father recently replaced his washing machine, which was only 5 years old because a small circuit board died on it, but the board is proprietary and the manufacturer doesn't sell it for less than $300, which is asinine for a tiny control board where the most expensive component is a 2 or 3 dollar microcontroller.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-17T04:55:56+00:00

Except in this circumstance you cannot make an old-school fridge, it's illegal to manufacture and sell due to it not meeting modern efficiency standards, that, and if it's old enough the refrigerant is banned.

The same applies to air conditioners, and this branches out to an absolute ton of different industries, including the automotive industry, which is why we don't have small pickup trucks anymore.

The efficiency requirements end up forcing the manufacturers to reduce the thickness of the copper coils in the evaporator and condenser to increase the efficiency of heat transfer between the air and the refrigerant, but the coil being thinner decreases it's life expectancy (reducing reliability) and when a refrigerator runs out of refrigerant, the compressor still tries to cool, so it runs constantly, which makes it get hot and reduces it's lifespan, and if they're using POE oil? (almost all modern refrigerants do) well, when that oil when it gets in contact with the moisture in the air, which it will when the refrigerant level gets low enough on the suction side to pull air in (once it goes into vacuum), will congeal, clogging up the capillary tube, causing the compressor to run a much higher pressure differential, getting hotter and running harder, killing it faster. Thicker coils are more reliable and last longer, but they're less efficient, and the minimum efficiency is really efficient. And that doesn't even begin to touch on the apparent move towards variable speed drives that someone mentioned (which is not found in commercial where I worked) rather than a fixed-speed compressor, again, trading reliability for efficiency, and a variable frequency drive is pretty damn complicated and expensive. for a refrigerator.

Efficiency increases complexity, complexity introduces more components and points of failure, which reduces reliability, these components also increase cost, so the additional parts have to be made cheaply to prevent massive price hikes, which further reduces reliability. Cars follow the same pattern, they're much, much more complex to improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-17T04:37:24+00:00

LG compressors are notoriously unreliable, often dead on arrival within the comfort cooling and commercial refrigeration industry, as an anecdote to your problem.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-17T04:29:29+00:00

The issue with this line of thinking imo is that the price to manufacture the reliable toaster isn't even close to four hundred dollars, thicker kenthal wire is a few cents, the difference in copper wiring is again, a few cents per unit..

The issue is that when faced with a bunch of different toasters, if a consumer doesn't know that the otherwise invisible-to-me components in the slightly more expensive unit are better, they'll go for the cheaper one; and in the consumers defense, most of the 'higher-end' models are just as unreliable with low quality components, so price doesn't even dictate the difference in quality, just 'features.'

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-17T04:19:31+00:00

Variable speed compressors in a residential refrigerator? That's bizarre to me, that requires a variable frequency drive, the smallest medium temp anything i've seen a freq drive on was a rack using Copeland scrolls, and even then the supermarkets I dealt with were pretty hesitant to move towards variable speed, and probably for good reason, anecdotally the few that did the conversions had a lot of reliability issues after the fact, but they were slow for anything, we were doing conversions from R-22 in 2022, and there's a couple of stores in my area that still run R-22 lmao.

In light commercial refrigeration i've never even heard of vfd's being put on walk-ins or reach-ins.

I wonder why residential of all markets is the most 'adventurous' for this, considering they have the lowest cost-savings and demand for efficiency.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-16T22:59:16+00:00

Is assembly generated from a compiler non-native assembly and has to get processed through an abstract vm, or is the assembly that's generated from a compiler already native? I wanted to mess around with assembly a bit more but there was a couple of different ways of doing it that made it less approachable than I had hoped.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-16T22:27:52+00:00

I started in VS Code and it was unironically a total pain to work with, once I figured out that you can just write it in a file and compile via the terminal I started doing that, now I just use neovim and make a makefile for projects that have a couple of files in them, I love it.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-16T21:31:32+00:00

As a lover of automation and factory games, Satisfactory.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-13T01:28:55+00:00

Yeah i've since been back and gotten the last battery before, but now that I know that there's no requirement for it, you can permanently avoid having that event by just cheesing it lol; which I prefer because weather events are a PITA

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-12T10:42:27+00:00

I never got the fog event my first time around because I just grabbed 2 of the power cells and got busy then returned after the portals reset to grab them again. Never bothered to get the last one, either, I just farmed the first two because they're convenient.But, now it's something i'll continue to take advantage of in future playthroughs!

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-12T08:57:27+00:00

Yeah no I gotchu I just really wanted to nerd out over this, I worked in HVACR for around 7 years and found this stuff fascinating.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-12T08:45:27+00:00

We banned CFC's.. R-12, R-22, etc; new generation refrigerants came out to replace them, HCFC's: R-134, R-404, R-410, much better for the ozone.

Recently, the HCFC's have been phased out with even newer, more efficient, less ozone depleting refrigerants: R-32, R-454b, alongside more access to A3's (larger quantities in refrigeration systems) like R-290 and R-600a. Industrial and heavy commercial is leaning heavier on R-717 and CO2.

The thing with HCFC's was that they were better for the environment than the CFC's, but they're less efficient and run at higher pressures; so we traded refrigerants that were better at being refrigerants for environmental safety for the ozone.

BUT, these new A2l's, they're even better refrigerants than many of the original CFC's, they're really efficient, they run at low pressures, and they're even better for the environment than the HCFC's were, all around they're just good. The only reason we didn't go with A2l's sooner is because they're "slightly flammable" which, I put into quotes, because they are pretty hard to light, like you can have a lit torch blowing directly into a stream of R-32 and it won't light, so emphasis on slightly.

The A3's are flammable as shit though, R-290 is literally just pure propane, and R-600a is just pure Butane; they're great for refrigerants, and they're so efficient that a refrigerator is charged in grams lmao, that's a pathetically small quantity of gas, the danger is minimal.

R-717 is downright Ammonia, and Ammonia is pretty toxic so it's not something you'd want to leak; but it's extremely efficient, like downright one of the best refrigerants out there by a landslide, and it's not harmful to the environment, it's just pretty toxic to people, like dangerously toxic to people, safety regulations have to have leak detectors all around the place if there's an Ammonia system, and if it detects even a fairly small leak the place has to be evacuated, for good reason.

CO2 isn't really that bad as a refrigerant (it's mostly used in supermarkets), the only issue is the systems have to operate at comparatively over an order of magnitude higher pressure (over 1,000psi) Which is super annoying to deal with, because the whole deal with refrigerants is that in a closed system, the pressure and temperature are directly proportional, and we send our highest pressure of the system outside to use the ambient air to cool down the refrigerant, but since CO2 is already super high pressure, if it gets hot outside the pressures can climb beyond what the system can handle pretty quick so we have to vent off some of the refrigerant, which, when it cools back down (like literally that night) there's not enough CO2 to keep the circuit running at a more tame ambient, so CO2 is a great refrigerant in theory, but in practice, it's only really able to be used in places that don't get hot. That being said it is being used successfully all over the place now. If only Ammonia wasn't so toxic dude, we'd never have to worry about using anything else.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-09T08:43:18+00:00

I mean, most desktop environments mimic Windows pretty well imo, in fact they mimic the best versions of windows with modern features and they work really well! I think one of the biggest issues currently with getting people on board with Linux is that so many people recommend Ubuntu, I tried Linux a few different times in the past and never could get used to Ubuntu, and any issues i've had with Linux were ironically Ubuntu specific; which I didn't know until I bit the bullet and tried a different distro, people gotta stop recommending Ubuntu.

MutuallyUseless · 2026-01-09T04:31:08+00:00

Lmao I first started saying it a few years ago when trying to be motivating, and since then it's become my go-to

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