Flex line for R290, would regular propane hose be adequate?

Been working with R290 for awhile and am pretty confident with using it in regular sealed systems.

I just got a "farmer idea" this morning - to build a livestock watering bowl heat pump from a scrap compressor. Replace the heating element with a condenser coil, bury an evaporator and pump heat from the ground. These watering troughs are huge power consumers and even going to COP of 2 would be a huge gain. Since the condenser only needs to run barely above freezing, the compression ratio could be kept super low for likely a pretty good COP.

Trouble is, the lid/trough where the element is mounted is hinged for access to the interior. So the condenser would have to be mounted with flex lines or the copper lines would soon get work hardened and fail.

Flexible propane hose is readily available, rated for liquid transfer at a wide range of temperatures and with preinstalled flare fittings on the ends. Any reason that it wouldn't do the job?

This is the style of water trough if you don't know what I'm talking about. https://www.canarm.com/agriculture/hlw-heated-livestock-waterer.html Usually has a 600W element on the bottom of the stainless lid/tank, which flips up for service.

submitted by /u/evranch
[link] [comments]