Articles by David Richardson

Instead of focusing on the poor work our industry has been plagued with, we decided to dream about how an ideal duct system could be built.

Combustion safety can be sacrificed when fuel-fired appliances needing interior air for combustion are not carefully considered. Many appliances depend on a consistent supply of air from inside the building to operate safely. If this fact is ignored, the results can be deadly.

Registers and grilles provide opportunities for you to easily solve comfort issues and make upgrade accessory sales that may have been overlooked previously. By understanding the impact these accessories have on HVAC systems and the air distribution in rooms, you create a win-win for you and your customers.

If you’re in doubt about how a fan was rated, dig a little deeper into the footnotes and a lot of questions will be answered. As you become a student of fan-performance tables, you begin to see truths about airflow that enable you to solve issues beyond the skill level of your competition.

To understand airflow, one must have a firm grasp of the rules driving its characteristics and behaviors. Many of the most complicated issues a tech encounters often tie to an airflow problem, so let's look at five airflow rules that can help anyone in the industry master the airside of the profession.

According to National Comfort Institute (NCI) studies of properly performing HVAC systems, coil pressure drop shouldn’t exceed 40 percent of the equipment’s rated total external static pressure.

The transition from winter to spring brings with it one of my favorite sports — baseball. Baseball is one of those games where memories are made and life lessons are learned. In the HVAC profession, we can learn a valuable lesson relating to HVAC system performance testing from the game of baseball.

With duct systems gaining more public attention than ever before, why not capitalize on this growing opportunity? Let’s take a look at airflow upgrades and how they might fit into your company.

Measuring the pressure drop over an air filter reveals valuable clues to its influence on a system. This simple test will help a tech determine whether the filter is adequate for the system it is installed in.