The topics that actually cost you marks
Not a full syllabus. Six focused guides on the material people get wrong, which is almost always the numeric material: tables, thresholds, percentages and dates. Between them they cover 172 of the 305 questions in our bank.
Evacuation levels
The table everyone loses marks on
It is a table of numbers with two columns, two units pointing in opposite directions, and a date that changes the answer. There is nothing to reason out; you either know it or you guess.
Recovery, recycling and reclamation
Three words that are not synonyms
The largest single cluster of questions in the bank, and the three terms are used loosely in the field but defined precisely in the regulation. Exam questions turn on the distinction.
Leak rates and repair deadlines
Three percentages, one weight, two clocks
Three different thresholds that look interchangeable, a charge size that gates whether any of it applies, and deadlines measured in days. Exam questions combine all four in one sentence.
Safety, cylinders and handling
The practical half of the exam
Spread across 18 different topics rather than concentrated, so it is easy to revise everything else and still walk in short on this. It is also the material most likely to matter on a real job.
Ozone science and the regulatory timeline
The "why" material, and the dates
It feels like background reading, so it gets skipped, and then a fifth of the Core section asks about it. Chlorine, ODP, the Montreal Protocol and the phaseout schedule are all straightforwardly learnable.
Recovery equipment and certification
Why 15 November 1993 keeps appearing
One date governs which performance standard a machine must meet, and the exam keeps testing whether you know which side of it a scenario falls on.
How these six were chosen
Honestly: not from user data, because the site is new and there is not any yet. The next best evidence is question density in our own bank, which was written against the published outline and therefore tracks where the exam puts its weight, crossed with which material is numeric. Numbers are what people forget under pressure; concepts they can often reason out from first principles.
That will improve. The missed-question notebook records which topics get missed, so once there is real usage the choice of guides can be made from what people actually get wrong rather than from what we expect them to.
Every figure is sourced
The evacuation table, the leak-rate thresholds, the repair deadlines and the small-appliance recovery percentages are all quoted from the Code of Federal Regulations and were verified against the live text. Where a number is not in the regulation, it is not stated. That matters more than usual here, because a study guide with a wrong threshold in it is worse than no study guide at all.