Peter Powell

There is usually extreme pressure on high school counselors to get a high percentage of graduating students into college. To tell a student not to go on to college would call for diplomacy. To help in the diplomacy effort, it is important that the vocational tracks offered are shown in a favorable light.

Net zero energy buildings, changes coming in domestic refrigeration, the future of turbo equipment, and trends in energy efficiency. Those were the topics during plenary sessions that started each morning at the every other year Purdue conferences dealing with HVACR.

A hot topic in the world of refrigeration and air conditioning continues to swirl around refrigerants and what refrigerants will take hold and be used now, besides HFCs, and what will supplant HFCs in the future.

The problem of unwanted moisture in HVACR systems has been an industry evil for years. How to deal with it is resulting in a widening range of solutions. To the familiar approaches of using filter driers, nitrogen purges, and multiple evacuations, manufacturers are adding use of sealants as well as dehydrating and activating agents.

The concurrent 21st International Compressor Engineering Conference, 14th International Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Conference, and 2nd International High Performance Buildings Conference showed how dramatically the issue of global warming is impacting the refrigerant aspect of the HVACR industry and how complex the issue is.

As the supermarket industry continues to embrace so-called ‘natural refrigerants,’ manufacturers also continue to seek improvements in energy efficiency with what they hope is easy to use equipment for service technicians. The FMI Food Retail Show was a major showcase for these developments at this year’s show in Dallas.

With HFC refrigerants secure for the foreseeable future, it is still interesting to take a look from time to time at phase down talk and how the industry may adjust should that become a reality.

When it comes to industrial and commercial refrigeration, high on the research radar screen are low GWP alternative refrigerants for everything from small bottle coolers and freezers to entire supermarket systems.

When the EPA’s  Greenchill’s Keilly Witman spoke at the Food Marketing Institute Expo last spring she said so-called natural refrigerants  would dominate the conversation and begin to appear in supermarkets in North America. Was she right?

As this is being written temperatures are near 100°F here on the Illinois/Wisconsin border and a drought is in full force. The hue and cry is, “See, see, global warming! Told you it was real!” But folks from Europe were telling me that the Old World was experiencing one the coolest and wettest summers on record.