If I am correct, it lives in print, and I can easily pull the information up on www.achrnews.com to show anyone who will listen how smart I am. And if I am wrong … nobody will remember the silly predictions I made four months from now when this magazine is in a landfill somewhere.

The premiere of the documentary just happened a few weeks ago in Austin at the Heating, Air-Conditioning & Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI) conference. It is called “Hot Commodity,” and it is a recruitment documentary for the HVACR industry.

As we prepare to flip the calendar and turn our focus to the future, I feel moved to share a few of my predictions that are sure to come true in 2019.

Safety is an important topic: one that is emphasized in many an HVACR company. Emphasized or not, though, injuries happen.

The following remarks were made in response to the article “The Pushback on Propane,” written by Joanna R. Turpin, published Dec. 3.

According to a recent study by Valve + Meter, home service companies are not doing a very good job responding to customers. The study surveyed 466 home service companies, and only 60 percent of them responded within a five-day time frame. I am not great at math, but that tells me four out of 10 companies take more than a business week to respond to a customer — if they respond at all.

Essentially, I noted that changing demographics, new technologies, and evolving regulations may result in wider acceptance of self-contained refrigeration units that utilize propane. Several readers took issue with this, noting that central rack refrigeration systems — which are traditionally used in supermarkets around the U.S. — are not going anywhere and that propane units have too many drawbacks to ever seriously be considered for large-scale use.

With the holiday season just around the corner, HVAC contractors can expect to be asked to support any number of charitable efforts. Maybe it’s the Girl Scouts, the Goodfellows, your church, your kid’s hockey league, the high school orchestra. Some contractors have reported getting up to a dozen requests a week.

The football coach stepped up recruiting. He worked incredibly hard and had “out-of-the-box” thinking to bring talented players to Ann Arbor. The results have followed.

If finalized as proposed, the revised Refrigerant Management rule would, among other things, rescind the leak repair and maintenance requirements for substitute refrigerants.