The Board of Trustees of North American Technician Excellence (NATE) Inc., a leading certification program for technicians in the HVACR industry, announced certification test sales were running almost 100% ahead of last year’s pace.
There are museums whose architectural structures and materials are as impressive as their paintings and sculptures. The Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), located in downtown Milwaukee on the Lake Michigan shore, is one of these. Milwaukee’s “masterpiece on the lakefront” not only offers visitors an impressive collection of nearly 20,000 works from antiquity to the present, but it’s currently in the finishing stages of an ambitious five-year, 140,000-square-foot expansion and renovation project.
Jay Messenger has been driving to the far corners of Hardin County and beyond for 14 years. The service technician for Aire Serv/JBS Heating & Cooling Inc. loves what he does and loves seeing the familiar faces of people in the small communities he visits each day. “This is a close-knit community, and a lot of people are on a first-name basis,” he said. “I’ve been in the local Wal-Mart and someone has said, ‘Look, there is my furnace man.’”
Radiant ceiling technologies are being introduced to the United States and Canada by Invensys Energy Management. This technology can cool offices at a reported energy savings of up to 30%, while minimizing the risks of airborne hazards, according to the company.
The majority of new home developments are larger, three-or-more-bedroom homes with multitudes of baths, whirlpool tubs, etc., and the necessity of providing a source of heat to all of these things. Many of these homes have multiple zones of radiant floor heat, air conditioning and heating coils, along with everything else. For these reasons, more and more of these homes are being furnished with hydronic heating. The question for the HVAC contractor often is, whether to size the system with one heating boiler or to use two or more.
Motor efficiency remains one of the top issues in our industry, but when you talk about efficiency, often you’re talking about tradeoffs. In other words, it is relatively easy to make a motor more efficient if money is no object. But since cost is a factor, motor manufacturers keep seeking the right balance of increasing motor output without driving up the price of the product.
High-side piping can be simply described as the piping that connects various components of a refrigeration system that operate at, or near, the system condensing temperature. This includes, but is not limited to, condensers, receivers, thermosyphon oil coolers, purgers, and oil separators.
You are called out to service a piece of refrigeration equipment. As soon as you arrive on the job, the customer follows every move you make. After you’ve looked at the equipment for only a few seconds, he wants to know what the problem is and how much it will cost to fix it. Sometimes he’ll even tell you what the problem is. Does this sound familiar?
Last month we examined the operation and application of the potential starting relay. This month we will cover voltage specifications of the potential relay.