For a HCFC-22 appliance or isolated component normally containing more than 200 pounds of refrigerant, what was the required recovery level before November 15, 1993?

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When you’re recovering refrigerant, the depth of vacuum you must reach is a regulatory requirement that indicates how completely the system should be evacuated before you stop recovering. For HCFC-22 appliances or isolated components that normally contain more than 200 pounds of refrigerant, the standard before November 15, 1993 was to evacuate until you reach a vacuum of four inches of mercury. This level was chosen because it provides a practical balance: it removes most of the refrigerant from large systems using then-available recovery equipment, while not requiring an impractically deep vacuum.

Understanding inches of mercury as vacuum helps: a four-inch vacuum means the pressure inside the system is four inches of mercury below atmospheric pressure. The other listed values would either be easier to achieve but weren’t the required level at that time (or would reflect different regulatory contexts), so the four-inch standard was the specific requirement for these large systems before the 1993 date.