When competing against other potential expeditures for approval by a building owner or manager, operations and maintenance staff and technicians need to clearly explain why money needs to be spent on the HVAC system. Retrocommissioning can help with this.
Apparently, contractors who do not perform residential load calculations prefer to be anonymous. Whether they think they should be doing load calcs, or whether they simply don't want to hear from people who think they should be, the respondents to our NEWS online poll largely did not identify themselves if they didn't perform load calcs on residential jobs.
Data logging has advanced through hand logging to strip chart recorders and benchtop loggers. "The true stand-alone logger is what we have today," said Bryan Welsh, P.E., of Welsh Commissioning Group, speaking at the National Conference on Building Commissioning.
There will always be a consumer market for silver bullets, those off-the-shelf quick fixes. But I wonder how long consumer enthusiasm for ozone-creating room air cleaners will last. A study showed that the amount of ozone created often was much higher than levels considered acceptable.
What caused a fan in a heat pump installed late in the season last year to run constantly, and the unit not to cool the house? Crack the case and submit your answer.
The move to higher-efficiency unitary systems has caused an explosion in the use of thermal expansion valves (TXVs/TEVs). But many returned to the manufacturer have nothing wrong with them. In order to understand how misdiagnoses happen, it's important to understand how a TXV operates.
When the business boat is rocked, owners, like sea captains, need to take steps to make sure they don't capsize. Jack Spinale, owner of Coastal Air, Heat & Refrigeration, rode through rough water by taking on a new yet related business: duct cleaning.
Reliability has been a key issue for heat pumps virtually since the first units were installed in the 1950s. But many times it was an installation issue. Today, according to some equipment manufacturers, quality of the installation will again play a critical role.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct) offers a lot more than its predecessor, EPAct of 1992 - there is more in it for residential HVAC contractors and their customers. This article addresses HVAC contractors' basic questions regarding EPAct 2005.
QC/QI stands for "Quality Contractors/Quality Installations," and it's the creation of ACCA (the Air Conditioning Contractors of America). The overall goal of QC/QI is to "establish a raised bar" and improve core competencies that result in quality contractors, who then perform quality installations.