INTRO (0:00 to 0:30)
VOICEOVER: This is your exam-strategy session for EPA 608 Core. You have read the article and watched the theory video. Now we do what a good instructor does the night before the test: walk the hardest concepts, expose the trap questions, and drill the answers until they are reflexes. Twenty-five questions, eighteen right to pass. Most of the misses come from the same six topics, and we are going to hit all six.
ON-SCREEN: Title card: "C13 v2: Core Exam Strategy." Then a six-item agenda list: 1. Three Rs wording traps. 2. Leak rates old vs new. 3. Date questions. 4. Venting edge cases. 5. Cylinder numbers. 6. Test-day mechanics.
MAIN (0:30 to 10:00)
[0:30-2:00] Trap zone 1: the three Rs are a vocabulary test
VOICEOVER: The recover, recycle, reclaim questions are won or lost on single words. Here is the skeleton. Recover: remove refrigerant and store it in an external container, with NO testing and NO processing. The defining feature is the absence of processing. Recycle: clean the refrigerant using oil separation and filter-driers, usually on site. Cleaned, but never certified. Reclaim: reprocess to the AHRI 700 purity standard, verified by chemical analysis, at an EPA-certified facility. Now the question the exam builds from this: when can refrigerant be sold to a new owner? Only after reclamation. Same owner, reuse is fine with no processing at all. Different owner, AHRI 700 or nothing. Watch a practice question: "Refrigerant recovered from a customer's system may be charged into another system if..." and the right answer is "the other system belongs to the same owner." Any answer involving selling, trading, or transferring recovered gas without a certified reclaimer is bait.
ON-SCREEN: C13-three-rs-decision-tree.svg with each branch highlighted as it is defined. Then a practice question card appears, the bait answers shake and dim red, the correct answer pulses blue.
[2:00-3:45] Trap zone 2: the leak rate time machine
VOICEOVER: Here is the topic where studying from the wrong decade fails students who knew the material. Current rule, today, the one you answer with: appliances containing fifty pounds or more of ozone-depleting refrigerant trigger leak repair at thirty percent annualized for industrial process refrigeration, twenty percent for commercial refrigeration, ten percent for comfort cooling. Thirty, twenty, ten, at the fifty pound line. Now the history, so old material cannot rattle you. Before January first, twenty-nineteen, the thresholds were thirty-five percent for commercial and industrial, fifteen percent for everything else. Thousands of practice exams still circulate with those numbers. If you see thirty-five or fifteen as an option, that question was written before twenty-nineteen, and on today's exam those are wrong answers. One more layer of history in thirty seconds, because a senior tech may quote it at you: in February twenty-twenty the EPA limited the Section 608 leak repair rules to ozone-depleting refrigerants only, so for a few years a pure HFC machine had no federal leak repair duty. Then the AIM Act era brought HFC leak rules back, with a fifteen pound threshold, same percentages. What you answer on the 608 exam is the Section 608 framework: thirty, twenty, ten, fifty pounds. What you remember on the job is that HFC appliances now have their own parallel rule. Two facts, two uses, zero confusion.
ON-SCREEN: C13-leak-rate-thresholds.svg full screen. Current bars glow; legacy bars get a red strikethrough labeled "pre-2019." A small timeline ribbon appears underneath: 2019 tightened, 2020 ODS-only, AIM Act era restores HFC rules at 15 lb.
[3:45-5:15] Trap zone 3: the date questions, drilled
VOICEOVER: Core date questions cluster on a short list, so we drill them as flashcards. Montreal Protocol: nineteen eighty-seven. The treaty itself, international, covers ozone-depleting substances broadly. Clean Air Act amendments that created Section 608: nineteen ninety. Venting prohibition effective: July first, nineteen ninety-two. Recovery equipment certification line: November fifteenth, nineteen ninety-three, equipment built after that date must be certified to AHRI 740 with low-loss fittings. Sales restriction: November fourteenth, nineteen ninety-four. CFC production ban: January first, nineteen ninety-six. New R-22 production ends: January twenty-twenty. All HCFC production ends: twenty-thirty. And the new era: AIM Act, December twenty-twenty, GWP-driven, with no new residential equipment over seven hundred GWP from twenty-twenty-five. Pause the video here and run these in both directions: date to event, event to date. The exam asks both ways.
ON-SCREEN: C13-regulation-timeline.svg. Each milestone pulses on its date as named. Then the screen switches to flashcard mode: date on one side flips to event, four rapid examples, then a "pause and drill" prompt.
[5:15-7:00] Trap zone 4: what counts as venting
VOICEOVER: Everyone knows venting is illegal. The exam tests the edges, so here are the edge cases as a quiz. Case one: a wisp of refrigerant escapes from a low-loss fitting as you disconnect after a proper recovery. Legal. That is de minimis, a trace loss despite a good-faith effort. Case two: same wisp, but from a bare open-ended hose with no low-loss fitting. Violation. No good-faith effort was made. The fitting is the difference between the two answers. Case three: a purge unit on a low-pressure chiller discharges during normal operation. Legal, normal operation is exempt. Case four: a factory holding charge of nitrogen with a trace of refrigerant is released from a new coil. Legal. Case five: a tech adds nitrogen on top of a full refrigerant charge and releases the mixture, calling it a holding charge. Violation, and a named trap in the rule itself. Case six: releasing carbon dioxide, nitrogen, or water. Always legal, those are exempt substitutes. Case seven: venting R-410A, which has zero ozone depletion potential. Violation. The prohibition covers substitute refrigerants too; zero ODP does not mean ventable. And the safety twin of this topic: pressurize with nitrogen through a regulator only. Oxygen or compressed air mixed with compressor oil under pressure can explode. That sentence is both a Core answer and a survival rule.
ON-SCREEN: Seven case cards slide in one at a time, each stamped LEGAL in blue or VIOLATION in red as the verdict lands. Case seven gets an extra callout: "Zero ODP does NOT mean ventable."
[7:00-8:30] Trap zone 5: cylinder numbers under pressure
VOICEOVER: Cylinder questions are pure memorization, so lock the numbers. Maximum fill: eighty percent of capacity, because liquid expands when it warms and the cylinder needs vapor space. Hydrostatic retest: every five years, date stamped on the cylinder. Disposable cylinders, DOT Spec thirty-nine: never refill, recover the heel to zero psig, render the cylinder useless, recycle the metal. Recovery cylinders: DOT-approved refillables, gray body with a yellow top, labeled for exactly one refrigerant, shipped upright as class 2.2 non-flammable gas. Never mix refrigerants in a cylinder, because a mixed cylinder cannot be reclaimed and becomes an expensive disposal problem. And the purity check you already know from the PT chart module: let the cylinder rest to room temperature and compare its pressure to the chart. Pressure above the chart value means non-condensables, meaning air, in the bottle. One habit ties all of this together: read the label, never the paint.
ON-SCREEN: C13-cylinder-rules.svg. Camera-style pans across each callout as it is narrated: fill line, hydro date, DOT spec, color, label.
[8:30-10:00] Test-day mechanics and the closing strategy
VOICEOVER: Final piece: the mechanics of the exam itself. Twenty-five questions per section, seventy percent to pass, which is eighteen of twenty-five. You can miss seven and still pass. Closed book, proctored, photo ID required. You are allowed a temperature-pressure chart and a calculator. Phones are banned. In one sitting you must pass Core plus at least one Type, or the attempt resets, so never book Core alone. Your certification never expires, but you are responsible for rule changes forever, which is exactly why this module taught you the current leak rates and the history behind them. Strategy for the session: answer the definitions and date questions first, they are free points if you drilled. Flag anything with numbers you doubt and return to it. When two options both look right, choose the one matching the CURRENT rule: thirty-twenty-ten, not thirty-five-fifteen. And read every three Rs question for its single operative word. You have seen every trap on this exam in the last ten minutes. Go take the practice quiz, score it honestly, and re-drill anything under eighty percent before you sit the real thing.
ON-SCREEN: Checklist slide: "ID. PT chart. Calculator. No phone. Core + one Type minimum." Then final card: "Miss 7, still pass. Drill the traps. Answer with the current rule."
OUTRO (10:00 to 10:15)
VOICEOVER: Pass Core and every Type section opens up. Take the C13 quiz next, then move into the Type material. Island Breeze techs certify Universal, so this is the first of four wins, and it is the one that unlocks the rest.
ON-SCREEN: End card: "Next: C13 quiz, then the Type sections." Island Breeze training logo block.