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.