The day has been cold and damp, and Bob has been called to do a routine checkup on a heat pump in a condominium complex. Most of the units in the complex are frosted over, but the unit that he is to service has a very different frost pattern. Bob is trying to figure out what’s going on when Btu Buddy appears to help him.

The greatest energy cost reduction opportunity lies with the HVAC system - a facility’s largest discretionary source of energy demand and, thus, its highest controllable expense. Advancements in commercial energy efficiency systems have now made them far more affordable for small to mid-sized facilities.

Bob gets a service call where the owner says there is not enough heating at one end of an office building. With Btu Buddy's assistance, Bob checks the duct system and finds that a piece of duct liner is laying down in the duct blocking the airflow and he proceeds to correct the problem.

In this troubleshooting situation, we have a customer who is complaining about one of the bedrooms in their home, specifically that the gas furnace doesn’t warm the room properly. When you arrive, you find that the bedroom in question is the furthest from the furnace, and that the duct system is an extended plenum system.

Their last service call is continued as Bob and Btu Buddy meet for lunch at the restaurant where the call occurred to discuss dew point. The duct through the dining room was dripping because the duct surface temperature was below the dew point temperature of the room and moisture formed on the duct surface.

We probably heard it many times growing up, the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. When it comes to your customer’s HVAC system, preventive maintenance not only increases the life of the system, improves energy efficiency, and reduces pollutants, but it also saves homeowners money.

Bob gets a call from the dispatcher that a new customer, a restaurant, has some ductwork in the dining room that has been sweating during the lunch hour for the last several days and dripping on the customers. It is about lunchtime so Bob goes to the restaurant to check it out. Btu Buddy helps in solving the problem.

This month’s problem piece of equipment is a soda vending machine. The complaint from the customer, who has positioned the unit outside their small motel, is that while the soda seems to be properly cooled during the middle of the day, there are times when the product is warmer than desired.

This service call is for a routine checkup on an old 7½-ton unit using R-22. The call is going well until the owner mentions to Bob that the unit has actually never cooled well. Bob then proceeds to do a complete check of the system with Btu Buddy’s assistance.

A critical element of motor servicing technique is being able to determine whether or not a replacement motor that is not an exact duplicate of the original is suitable for the application. As a technician, you must consider a number of factors, but this article focuses on one of the more important issues: nameplate amps.