Freon Funnies

This blog is primarily for useful HVAC information but there is always time to have a little laugh. I know that a lot of the readers of this blog are in the heating and air conditioning business and I thought that I would start a little thread that could turn into the joke spot for hvac related humor. I have appropriately titled this post "Freon Funnies". So if you know of a good joke that would fall under this category I would invite you to share it with the world by leaving a comment on this post. Anything related to furnaces, air conditioners, ventilations systems, condensers, or anything closely related is fine. So since I am the author and architect of this wonderful idea I will go ahead and kick things off with a joke of my own. Now I am no stand-up comic but I think that some of you will get a chuckle out of this one. So a guy walks into a bar and says "Sheesh, it's hotter than a $3 Tijuana hooker in here. " The bartender replies, yeah the ac guy is upstairs with my wife getting the blower working." LOL Ok folks your turn. Have at it.

How Air Conditioners Work

Have you ever wondered how an air conditioner works? I'm sure that you have. Well today is your lucky day because I am about to answer all of the questions that you have ever had. OK OK maybe not but I will show you a cool video that I found that helps explain how an air conditioner works. The video has been featured on a lot of other cool hvac sites so I thought what the heck, why not let my readers benefit from a video like this? So that is exactly what I am doing :) You folks can thank me in the comments or by email. OK without any further ado, here is the video:

Did you like it? I sure hope so. It's great when you can watch a video that is only 90 seconds long and really take something away from it. That is what I hope that you have done today. So next time when you want to impress one of your friends start explaining how an air conditioner works, they are sure to look at you in a totally different light. :) Have a great weekend folks!

Atlanta Heating and Air

Hello and thanks for visiting my little corner of cyberspace. In this post I want to talk about a friend of mine who runs an Atlanta heating and air company. His name is Eric and I was speaking with him this weekend about a few new developments in the HVAC industry. For those who are unfamiliar with HVAC, it stands for heating ventilation and  air conditioning. We were talking about 13 seer equipment and what we thought the impact actually was in terms of cost savings for a home owner over 10 seer equipment. Now let me back up for a second and start to define some of these terms for people who may be unfamiliar with heating and air conditioning terminology. 10 seer and 13 seer refer to the Seer rating of a central air unit. Now Seer stands for seasonal energy efficiency ratio(SEER). Now without getting into too much detail on all of this I will simply say that the higher the SEER number the more efficient the unit operates. So a 13 seer unit is more efficient than a 10 seer unit. Similarly a 15 seer unit would function more efficiently than would a 13 seer unit. Now in the case of modern HVAC the government requires that all new  heating and air units have a minimum seer rating of 13. This means that stores no longer sell the less efficient 10 seer units and although many homeowners still own legacy models the trend in the industry is to steer these customers toward upgrading their systems to 13 seer. The mandate that all units must be 13 seer is a rather recent development so most of my career was spend working on 10 seer models.  In our conversation we came to the mutual conclusion that these units probably make up the difference in cost between the older models in utility savings within the first year. Not only that it probably doesn't take more than 4 years or so for an upgraded unit to completely pay for itself. After that you are operating it for free and most likely saving a nice amount of money on that utility bill each month. If you are considering upgrading your system, I would highly recommend you doing so. If you are in the Atlanta area and looking for a solid company, go ahead and give my buddy Eric a call at Atlanta heating and air.

Basement Heating, Cooling, and Water

Hello everyone! I've had an eventful week and I must say that I am really starting to get into this whole blogging thing! I love teaching and I love people so this seems like the perfect fit for an old HVAC technician like myself. Now I got an email regarding how to handle water in the basement when installing new heating and cooling units. Now before we go into a whole lot of depth on his particular topic I wanted to point out a few things that are important to understand anytime you are dealing with basements. First You will need most likely partner with an electrician to come out and make sure that you have your 220's available in the location of your central unit. Now in my career I have seen a lot of things and I know that it can be tempting to just handle the electrical stuff yourself(especially after you have seen it done hundreds of times) but I must caution you to avoid this. I thought long and hard about this when I was a younger man but thankfully I had an older wiser tech tell me to stay away from this. Let me briefly tell you the story about how this came about. I was installing a new unit and there was a young electrician running the electrical wiring. He had some problems and I essentially had to walk him through several parts which I will admit were a little tricky but nevertheless an experienced pro would have been able to deal with. Since he was still pretty new, he was trying to have someone walk him through the process over the phone and it was just taking way too long. I explained to him what needed to be done and then he did it. Now you can imagine that after that experience I was ready to go ahead and run all my own electrical wiring and save myself the money of constantly contracting that part out. I am glad that I didn't do that because I would have regretted it. Now sorry for the digression but let's get back to the task at hand. Now when you are new you may also want to consider hiring a plumber to help with some of the water or gas line movement. This all depends on you and in general if you are comfortable with various types of piping(you should be by the time you are taking service calls in the field), this won't be necessary. Now if you are in need of a plumber, you can find a good plumber by doing a google search or checking out some of the plumber review websites. Many sites have information on plumbers in cities all across the country. So whether you are looking for plumber in Atlanta or Seattle I'm sure you can find a good resource in your area. Once you have your assistants handy go ahead and get started on the installation. You should always make sure you run your drip line to an exterior point and make sure that you strap your ductwork as tightly as possible to the ceiling studs. I'm going to post a few videos on the various steps of this process soon but I wanted to go ahead and get a post up so that some of you can get started looking for the other professionals you will need to perform jobs like this.

HVAC Technician Tool Selection

So I've heard from quite a few novice HVAC trainees that they would like a few recommendations on what equipment I recommend. Well there are a lot of factors that go into selecting the proper HVAC tools to use. One is the climate, depending on the type of climate that you will be working in, certain tools will be more or less necessary. For example if you are working in a region that has mild summers and very harsh winters, you may not need to stock up on freon. Likewise if your climate is tropical or one where you are primarily dealing with air conditioning problems then you will not need the same cold weather ratings for many of your gauges. With this in mind you will want to be sure to think about the climate that you are working before spending your hard earned money on equipment and tools that you may never use. Now when you are in school, you will learn how to use all of the main tools of the trade, but when it comes time for you to start forking over your own money, you may want to start small with just the stuff you need for the season you are in. So if you are venturing out on your own in the winter, skip the freon and a/c exclusive tools and equipment. Save that money and when the time comes you can make the investment then. But in the beginning just play it safe and buy only what you need. With that said, you will always need a standard multi-meter which is needed by not only HVAC technicians but anyone who needs to test whether there is voltage at a particular point. So any aspiring electricians can gain something from this as well. Here is a cool video that goes over a few interesting details on selecting a good multimeter: