 Alright guys, and thanks for stopping in. We're gonna be doing a review on the Inficon Detect Stratus and the Inficon Detect 3. Let's go ahead and get started with what comes with the Detect 3. You obviously get the detector. It has the wand already on it. You've got the charging cable, with a little power brick with multiple different heads that can be popped off for different voltages for different countries. I believe it came with the little car charger plug, which is just a USB style, and it comes with two filters. The Stratus comes with everything the Detect 3 does. They both obviously come with a manual, but the Stratus adds some headphones and an extra long wand that gets you into tighter spots. Setting them side by side, you can see there's definitely a size difference here. They both have the headphone jack, volume control, which is off, medium and high. They both have the battery compartment here on the bottom, which is real easy to remove the battery. Just hit the button. Out comes the new redesigned sensor. This is brand new to these two devices. This sensor can be upgraded to a CO2 sensor, and eventually they're gonna be releasing a combustion sensor. One of the biggest improvements that Infocon did was they finally went to an lithium-ion battery. And the way they charge the detector is through the micro USB charger on the side. The battery can also be charged by an optional charging dock that you can purchase separately. Now that we've covered the battery and how to charge it, let's talk about the battery life. This is a big improvement over the previous model. If you had to select prior to, you might have noticed the batteries didn't seem to hold charge well and they didn't last very long. With this being a lithium battery, this one has greatly improved battery life. The DTEC 3 comes in with up to 10 hours of battery life. The Stratus, because of the different pump mechanism and the full color display, drops down to nine hours in pinpoint mode and eight hours in cloud hunting mode. As you can see, that's more than enough time to find a normal leak, whether you're searching a supermarket or you're looking at your little reaching cooler or a residential unit. So battery life has been greatly improved. One thing that they kept that they've done before is they stuck with their filter system that they've had now for quite a while. This thing will stop water from going in there. They show on their website, dunking it into a glass of water and it protects the sensor from any damage. Now to turn them on, you do a long press of the power button. I will mention that it does seem to take a lot more pressure to turn them on, but you hit it. They come on, they go into their test mode. It might take anywhere from 45 seconds to 90 seconds. They both run in pinpoint mode, which is where it automatically will reset to the background refrigerant that's in the room. They also have the optional manual zero. And then the Stratus has the cloud hunting mode. Wow, the Stratus came in a lot quicker this time. Let's go ahead and turn these down. So we're gonna go ahead and hit the button once, which you'll see it change the little icon there. And again, goes to mute. Same thing over here. You don't have that, but you can just hear the difference. Like I said, they purposely made it difficult to turn them on and to mute them because they don't want false changes in the settings. So now that we've got them both on there, they both are right now in the super sensitive mode. These do have four levels of sensitivity, whereas before you always had just high and low. So like I said, super, high, medium and low. Same thing here. Super, high, medium and low. Generally, I've been running everything in super mode. I don't really get too many false alarms, whether I'm smacking it on stuff. There's a lot of detectors out there. If you smack the probe on something, you get a false alarm and your hopes get up that you found the leak. Well, this one doesn't do that. Sorry to disappoint you. The DTEC 3, same thing. I don't really get any false alarms or anything like that. Now if you blow in it, it obviously will do it. But we're in super mode. You go to high mode, it doesn't false alarm. So the super mode is obviously it's most sensitive mode, which is 0.03 ounces a year. That's an improvement over the select, which was a 0.1. Yeah, that one finally did it. And then in high mode, it does not do it. Now I will mention something far as false alarms. You gotta watch on the back. There's a port back here. This port is used when they're doing the cloud hunting mode because the pump inside starts sampling refrigerant levels from the tip versus what's inside the body. They're trying to find a differential. So you will hear a clicking noise when you're in the cloud hunting mode. That's also something that causes the battery life to reduce by about an hour. So I've used it in both modes, cloud hunting, manual mode and the traditional pinpoint mode. Generally pinpoint mode will get you the best sensitivity, the fastest reactance. So if you're in cloud hunting mode and trying to find the leak for the first time, that's really not a good idea because it is a little slower reacting. It's truly designed to limit down the background so that you can narrow it down to where you're at. I've got a video where I'm inside of a cooler and it's completely contaminated. And because it was so contaminated, it ended up going into the inside of the body and basically kind of eventually just zero it out because it was so overly contaminated, which is not really safe and you really shouldn't be doing that anyway. Let's talk a little bit about the different modes that we have here. They both right now are currently in super mode. As you can see, it's all the way at the highest there and it says it right here. So they're in super mode. So if you hit the mode, it'll jump it over to manual zero. Manual zero is signified by the blinking light here. For the stratus, it says manual zero at the bottom of the screen. To do the actual zeroing out, you just hit the zero button. The DTECH3 will set there and do a flutter to let you know that it did its thing and it'll actually say zeroing at the bottom of the stratus. Now, as we've mentioned, Inficon's using an absorption infrared sensor. Depending on the operating mode that the detector is running in, you can go over top of a leak and actually hold it on top of the leak and it'll continue to rise or hold and show you a reading. Whereas some of the lesser sensor technology that's out there ends up auto-zeroing out and you have to be constantly moving back and forth. When I was out testing a lot of the other detectors on the market, that was a huge drawback. Not only were they not as sensitive as what this is, but they also had that constant lockout and they just had a hard time finding it. But if you're like me, I wanna go over top of the leak and actually find out where it's at. I don't wanna have to constantly go, okay, I went here, it went off, I went over here, it went off, so the leak must be here in the middle. So the Inficon sensor basically is a lot like a heated diode without all the drawbacks. The problem you have with a lot of different heated diodes is the sensor will start to wear out sensitivity on different types of refrigerants. A lot of times you have no idea what refrigerant you're starting to lose your sensitivity on. So the infrared stays sensitive on all the refrigerants all the time until the end of its sensor life, which generally is right at a thousand hours for the Inficon. So depending on what model you're looking at, this one right here comes in cheaper than the H10 and with the sensor not needing to be replaced every year to two years, you're saving quite a bit of money on sensors. All right, let's talk about investment costs. Currently right now in November of 2020, TrueTech Tools is selling the DTEC 3 for right around $450. They are also selling the Stratus for right at $850. Now, if you know a couple of the coupon codes out there like big picture, you can save 8%. The Inficon factories in Syracuse, New York, they make their sensor and they assemble the units up there. Believe it or not, they actually make the circuit boards and obviously some of the components are globally sourced which there's no way to get around that but they are made up in Syracuse, New York. The battery is produced over in China but they do have factories all over the world but they are making stuff here in the United States. I gotta give props to them for that. All right, so before we get into the videos I'm gonna mention this now. I've been using Stratus pretty much the whole summer. I wanted to make sure that it was worthy of me saying, yes, I would recommend this before I told you guys about it. Since the time that I received that, the DTEC 3 came out. So the question is, is it worth spending $850 over the $450 model? Would I go with the Stratus or would I go with the DTEC 3? If I didn't need the parts per million mode I wouldn't have a problem sticking with the DTEC 3. Like I said, I paid for this one and I still have it. I have the more expensive one also. I have this one. So you're not losing anything by going with it. Now as you guys know, I also use Backrack. Backrack's an exceptionally good detector but battery life is not there. Sensor costs a lot of money and although the sensitivity sometimes on certain select refrigerants might be a little itty bitty bit more sensitive I find myself using the Inficon most of the time. Let's go ahead and get started. I got the Inficon. I decided I'm gonna just look for leaks. Got a funny feeling. Maybe it's low on refrigerant. So we come right up in here and sure enough, right in that area right there, it goes nuts. So we can go into the parts per million mode and just let it hover there and see what we get. And that's gonna tell us whether or not we've got to say true leak there or is that a false alarm? Which I'm gonna say it's not a false alarm because it went off every time. Where's that leak at? You can see right there where that probe is at. I can tell you right now that's a real McCoy. This is 410A. Right here at the very bottom, I'm not touching the insulation. That's how far away I am from it. It's a leak, it'll stay there and it won't dissipate. See if you're pressing on the insulation and causing the bubbles to release some air or refrigerant, the expanding agent. That wouldn't stay like that. That's even on low. One advantage this has got, big time, is how it can decipher where it's at. So where the other one had it fit. Here we are in that, in the middle position. But when we go down here in the bottom, where it's really bad, you'll see it really change. You can tell it's at the outside edge corner. Where the other detector just goes all or nothing. I didn't really get nothing as I walked into the room. But when I got up in here into this area here, you can see I'm starting to go nuts. See, as you can tell, that's on the most sensitive mode, super. It's a little hard to narrow it out. So we're gonna go down to maybe medium and see how that does. So that's still a little bit too high. Let's go to low. One on that loop. Seems like there's some over there on that loop. And it's kind of hard to determine without going to soak, usually. That's the lowest we got. So now, what we can do, we could use the zeroing mode. Zero. There we go, get a little closer to it. And that's a little too much. So zero it again away from it. Now we'll come in a little closer. Okay, we'll pull it slightly away and hit zero. We get a little closer now. We got some on those two there. Here's we got some back on that one. See, I don't like the zeroing mode as much as I do the parts per million. So with this here, we're gonna come in and we'll just go right to what we wanna find out. So there's a 190, 200-ish area on the top of that elbow. So now we're gonna go down to the bottom of this elbow. And we're gonna go to this back elbow behind it. A little weaker down below it. That one definitely has got, yeah. See, that one's the bigger one. We go below that one. Yeah, it seems to me like it's right in that. And then aluminum to copper spot. Trying to find it here. Looks like right there, there's one of them. Might be another one there, I don't think it is.