Sercon 12
 

I have a chance to buy some at $15 per can. Is this stuff as good as the Dupont R12?

WHY would you pay this much for a junk refrigerant when in todays market you can buy R12 for the same price?

I've never heard of Sercon 12, but a Google search suggests that it is an alternative brand for the real thing. I would want to be sure though; the can should be labeled with the contents.

I love you guys who answer a question with another question.

So I am left to conclude that Sercon 12 - of which I have never heard before - is a knock-off and in fact not the same quality as Dupont's R12. I hope my conclusion is correct, since I first started wrenching on cars back when the only AC for autos was an add-on unit and thus paid it very little mind.

I suspect that Larry is conditioned by all the real junk refrigerants with 12 in the name, of which there are plenty, and he isn't talking about CFC-12 from another manufacturer, which should pose no problem at all. DuPont was not the only manufacturer of R12.

I appreciate the clear answer. Thanks.

I would want to make DARN SURE that Sercon is indeed R12 and not one of the six zillion junk refrigerants that have 12 at the end of their name.

So would I. Reading the label is required. You can't trademark a number, so anyone can make any product and include "12" in the name.

Intel had the same problem with their processors, and learned their lesson only after the 486 line. Now they all have names, but there are numbers attached, that are supposedly invalid. Good luck with that, is what I say.

The same goes for letters in any language. DEC had a processor popularly called Alpha, but its actual designation was AXP. It was internally called Alpha before it the designation AXP was ever conceived.

The issue with refrigerants is more complex though, since R12 or R134a actually describe chemical properties, so the product developer didn't really assign these at random (as opposed to their trade names, Freon and Suva). Then these shysters come up with these junk products and include 12 in the name, with impunity.

Sercon did indeed make real R-12 back in the last century.

Wow, I thought that I was the only person on the forum that had ever even HEARD of Digital Equipment Corporation. I started on a PDP 8 in 1974. I did some minor machine language work with it. It had 4K (12 bit) Core memory. Unless you work with something like that, you don't REALLY understand what it means to "Boot" a computer.

Paul,

I love the honestly stated location in your profile. I guess it should be the default for all of us in the US now days.

Larry

I work on AXP machines every day, but they are a bit more powerful than that PDP. We have 1-way through 16-way machines, tons of memory. I get into the guts of them now and then too, with the OS-provided tools. Wrote a few things in Macro-32 and Macro-64, but only some short routines to run in kernel mode. I found that I cannot beat the C compiler for speed, no matter how careful I am with Macro code. Now, reading assembly language is another matter; I have to do that all the time.

Now with the DEC -> Compaq -> HP transition, they're "out of the CPU business" and are buying Itanium chips from Intel. HP likes to call them "Integrity Server" but I like "Itanic" more.