Starting on a Water Chiller

[Zork]

The suction line is the line between the evaporator (the thing that gets cold) and the compressor. Usually this line will be cold if not have ice on it. Make sure you do tweak the charge while the system is under your max load, I say this because you can achieve incredibly lower temps with very little refrigerant in the system but as soon as you put a load on it your temps will sky rocket, so tweaking the unit without a load will only make thing worse. Oh and the reason it is called low side/high side is because the pressure inside the system. The evap,accumulator, and the return line are considered the low side and the condensor(the thing that gets warm), liquid line, drier, and cap tube are considered the high side. I would not recommend place a peircing valve on the high side because after time it will probably leak. One more thing to note, by placing the valve on the low side, most these systems run in vacumm on the low side so if you open the valve while the compressor is on it will probably suck in air, wich is a bad bad thing in these systems. You should turn the compressor off and give it a few minutes for the pressure to equilize inside so then you can let some of it out, instead of it sucking in.

 

[VisEtVirtus]

Thanks for clearing that up, and I didn't know about the max load part. Guess I will have to wait until I get everything setup to use the piercing valve.