The Service Applications Manual (SAM) of the RSES has been one of the venerable documents of the HVACR industry. It consisted of two large loose-leaf binders in which were inserted printed training materials prepared by RSES in conjunction with industry experts.

The beauty of SAM was that sections could be easily updated as technologies changed. RSES would send out to its all its members periodic printed updates and specify which sections were being updated. So the technician could just toss out the old and insert the new.

In recent years, SAM has been available online to members through the RSES website, while updates were also being mailed out.

But at the last RSES International Conference, it was announced that while SAM would continue online, the print version would only be mailed out upon request. The obvious reasons are to save on paper and mailing costs — and also the fact that the new generations of service techs are as savvy about new media technologies as they are of HVACR system operations, so will make more use of the online version than the paper version.

The change is what it is. I was one of those who had those big binders on my desk for years. I’m not about to incur unneeded expenses on RSES for requesting the printed and mailed version. But, I will miss the days of manually deleting and inserting printed SAM inserts. The double-clicking as part of the deleting and inserting process was such a satisfying sound.