313A Exam Questions and Answers PDF — Free 50-Question Mock Exam

What's inside

• 50 original exam-style questions drawn from the five topic areas the 313A Refrigeration & AC Mechanic bank is built around — Refrigerants, Troubleshooting, Refrigeration Cycle, Components, and Controls & Electrical
• Every answer explained in the back of the PDF, so a wrong answer turns into something learned, not just a lost mark
• Works offline — study in the lunchroom, the truck, or anywhere without a signal. No account needed.

Want every question?

This mock exam is a 50-question slice. The 313A Complete Question Bank has all 115 questions with a full explanation for every answer, grouped by this site's own topic areas (not one-to-one with the official Major Work Activities), in one printable offline PDF.

Corrections to the question banks are listed with dates on the question bank updates page.

The five areas in the 115-question bank

The free 50 come from the same bank. Each area sets out what it covers and the errors to avoid.

• Refrigerants — 25 questions Safety classification and handling, recovery, recycling and reclaim, cylinder handling and fill limits, azeotropic against zeotropic blends and why glide matters, pressure-temperature relationships, oil compatibility, leak detection, and evacuation and dehydration. Do not vapour-charge a blend with glide: it fractionates the charge and leaves the system running on the wrong mixture. Work from a blend's bubble and dew points, not one saturation temperature. Mineral oil does not belong in a system running a synthetic-oil refrigerant.
• Troubleshooting — 23 questions Reading gauge pressures alongside measured superheat and subcooling, separating a charge fault from a restriction, airflow-side faults, non-condensables, a hunting expansion valve, short-cycling, and telling an electrical fault from a mechanical one before you touch the refrigerant circuit. Do not diagnose from superheat alone: superheat reports on the evaporator, subcooling reports on the condenser and receiver, and only the two together separate an undercharge from a plugged metering device. And do not add refrigerant to fix what is really a dirty coil, a backwards fan or a blocked filter.
• Refrigeration Cycle — 23 questions The four processes, latent and sensible heat, saturation, the pressure-enthalpy diagram, superheat and subcooling as measured quantities, compression ratio and volumetric efficiency, evaporator and condenser temperature difference, net refrigeration effect, and reversing operation on a heat pump. Superheat is not a pressure. It is a temperature difference — measured line temperature minus the saturation temperature at the measured pressure — and a line temperature on its own tells you nothing. Compression ratio is worth drilling: a high ratio means low volumetric efficiency and lost capacity.
• Components — 22 questions Compressor types and capacity control, air-cooled, water-cooled and evaporative condensers, head pressure control, metering devices from capillary tube to thermostatic and electronic expansion valves, dry and flooded evaporators, receivers, accumulators, filter driers, sight glasses, oil separators, service valves and brazing practice. Two field mistakes to know: mounting a valve bulb at the wrong clock position or leaving it uninsulated, which gives erratic superheat that then gets blamed on the charge; and brazing without a nitrogen purge, which leaves scale inside the tubing to plug the drier later. A clear sight glass is not proof of charge.
• Controls & Electrical — 22 questions Ladder and schematic reading, line against control voltage, contactors, relays and motor protection, start and run capacitors, permanent split capacitor and electronically commutated motors, low- and high-pressure controls, pump-down, defrost control, staging, safety lockouts and sequence of operation. Read a diagram by following the sequence of operation, or "which safety opened" becomes a guess. A failed run capacitor gives you a compressor that hums and draws locked-rotor current, so check the capacitor before condemning the compressor. Jumping out a safety is never the right answer.

Sitting the 50 the way it will be marked

Red Seal allows four hours for the 125-question Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Mechanic examination — a little under two minutes a question. Give yourself 95 minutes and sit all 50 in one pass. Red Seal's preparation guide says reference material such as math formulas is supplied where a trade's exam calls for it, but your phone is not, so do this without an app.

Write down your working, not just the letter. On a superheat or subcooling question, note the saturation temperature you used and the arithmetic you did with it. When you mark the paper, a right answer reached from a wrong saturation temperature counts as a miss — it will not survive the next question with different numbers.

Flag guesses with a small G and count those as misses too, then group what is left. Diagram and sequence-of-operation misses need a schematic in front of you and a system to walk through. Cycle and refrigerant misses need the pressure-enthalpy diagram and a chart until the relationships are automatic. Those are two different kinds of study.

What the 313A exam covers

The exam is written from the Red Seal Occupational Standard for Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Mechanic at red-seal.ca. Red Seal states the interprovincial examination for this trade has 125 questions, the writing time is four hours, the pass mark is 70%, and each question is multiple choice with four choices and one correct answer.

These figures were checked in September 2026. Exams aligned to the new 2024 occupational standard are already in use: SkilledTradesBC's new exam has been active since June 22, 2026, and Alberta's counselling sheet dated August 5, 2026 shows the new breakdown. The red-seal.ca exam information page still lists the previous breakdown. The exam still has 125 questions. Before you book, confirm with your apprenticeship authority which version you will write.

The weightings for the new exam (2024 standard) are organised by what you do rather than by system: maintenance and service 25%, installation 21%, commissioning 17%, routine trade activities 16%, planning an installation 13%, and common occupational skills 8% (red-seal.ca examination weightings, checked September 2026). More than half the exam sits in installation, commissioning and service, so procedure and sequence carry as much weight as theory.

Our five topic areas cut across those activities on purpose. The cycle and refrigerant knowledge behind a commissioning question is the same knowledge a service question tests, so the bank is grouped by system instead. Eligibility, refrigerant handling requirements and exam booking are set elsewhere — check them with your provincial or territorial apprenticeship authority.

Questions from refrigeration apprentices

• Does this cover commercial refrigeration as well as air conditioning? Yes. The trade standard spans both and the bank follows it: dry and flooded evaporators, heat pump reversing, head pressure control on a winter condenser and defrost control all sit alongside the comfort cooling questions.
• Is refrigerant handling certification the same as trade certification? No. Environmental handling requirements sit under separate regulation from your trade ticket, and both the requirements and who administers them are set by government, not by a study site. Check before you book.
• Why is there no separate codes section? Because code content is not really a subject you study on its own — it turns up inside the refrigerant, component and installation questions where it applies. The published occupational standard is the place to see the full scope.
• Are these actual exam questions? No. Every question is original, written against the trade's topic areas. Live Red Seal questions are secure, written and reviewed by tradespeople working in the trade.