EP.3 Rethink an HVAC System

Sharing my thoughts on what an HVAC system is and the mindset needed to troubleshoot as an hvac technician. This makes episode 3 of the video podcast. My hope is that you walk away with a firmer grasp on how to troubleshoot ac units as a service tech. 

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Transcript

 Welcome to the HVAC Time podcast, episode number three. Today we're gonna be talking about HVAC systems and you know, a lot of the thought processes, processes, and mindsets behind them. I've got some thoughts to share for myself and talking about, you know, HVAC system, what does the. Average tech. Think about when that gets brought up.

A lot of the times we think about, you know, we've got a condenser, we've got a line set, we've got maybe some duct work. Well, that thought process is not completely false. It's not the most true either isn't. It's got more to do with. Is that the most effective way to think about it? And let me explain what I mean by that before I delve off into that.

Let's go ahead and let's talk about our news. Item number one, we have a Lennox. Lennox has announced that they are going to be increasing their pricing and going into 2023 and their new lines of equipment. Uh, this is kind of on the heels of them making their announcements about, uh, the new SR protocols.

Now, I think there's more to it than just that. So it's not as simple as just, you know, it's, it's just about the seer thing. You know, there's a lot of other factors at play, this leading to those decisions. But it is something that we have to be very careful with and we're probably gonna have to get used to, to a certain degree.

We've experienced this very heavily on our side on, with the commercial end of it, just in a matter of months. We go from. Uh, we had chillers that we had quoted and honestly were within budget and all kinds of stuff, and job was going really well, and it took them, uh, took the customer a couple of months to get all their stuff in order and the engineers and, and so forth.

And just in that amount of time, once they finally release the contract and we go to move forward with it, we get, uh, notified that they had to reevaluate the pricing again, and the second pricing came back in. I think they had like a 20% increase. Push the whole job over budget. What that led to is having to completely reevaluate who the co, who the supplier was of the equipment.

So, uh, we're seeing this across the board. This is way more than just a Lennox issue. Lennox is just one of several companies. This is something I think we're just gonna continue to see, especially with the, uh, SEA updates. And that leads me to my point number two. Uh, we'll come back to this in a minute. I gotta get the chickens handled first.

The Sears standards across the board are updating by basically one seer. You know, we went from a, was it 12 to 13 seer, if I'm not mistaken, or maybe it was 10 to to 13. I think it went 10 to 12 and then went 12 to 13 seer. And so now we're going from 13 to 14. Sears, the basic standard across the board, so going into 2023.

You can expect that to be kind of just the new standard going forward as we have stepped up a, a full SR in the rating scale, which is gonna drive some cost and things. And I want to add. Some extra input to that. Something that as an industry we heavily learned by, uh, what happened during the last year increases the design parameters for those higher sea ratings go up significantly and as something that you have to be thinking about.

If you're a contractor and you're doing this kind of stuff and you're not that heavy into system design, or if you're not used to working with maybe some higher Sears systems, you really should be thinking about this and paying attention to what's happening. The. Seer increases. And the more that the industry continues to have this process, the more those design parameters become more strenuous.

And what's gonna happen is if you don't do this correctly, you're gonna find yourself having to do a ton of warranty and, and even maybe in some cases, major system changes that comes back to how you originally put the system in. I'm talking from a ductwork perspective. I'm talking, you know, if you're not familiar, Uh, high efficiency homes in terms of being, um, Uh, like spray foam or more high efficiency buildings.

There's so many variables that are coming to the forefront today with these energy ratings continuing to improve. It's gonna get you in trouble. And we saw this, you know, this, this is, this got a lot of people in trouble when we've had inre increases in the past, largely because, uh, they, you don't properly factor in how this is changing things in the system.

Such as your airflow requirements and your air exchange requirements, like there is a lot of difference between them. And if you're not prepared for that or if you're not calculating that in to whatever it is you're doing, you're gonna get yourself in trouble getting back to the subject at hand. Okay.

So if you continue to think about the system as the unit itself, you're gonna open yourself up to some misdiagnosis opportunities as you move forward. And you're also gonna find that it's gonna be more, it's gonna be challenging to have really firm solidified diagnosis that you can stand behind because, well, we're getting to a day and age.

And I'm seeing this more and more customers are questioning the diagnosis given more than I think I've ever seen. You know, there was not that long ago where customer rarely actually questioned what you did that much. And the upper management honestly wasn't really even that involved. And most of the process and a change that we've seen very heavily on our side, you know, in central.

Is the management and everybody is getting more and more involved in the conversations. And I don't know if it's because of lack of trust, I don't know what is driving it, but in them asking more questions, we're seeing that we're having to make sure that we've got a more educated diagnosis to back those things up.

Because there's been several times where too generic of an answer doesn't cut it for these people and. Rightfully so. It shouldn't, we should be able to properly explain everything that we recommend, and in some cases, I mean, you have to give, well, this is just what my experience has shown, right? It's not that that's not a valid answer, but a lot of times we have the ability to give a more educated answer.

So let me give a scenario of, you know, looking at the system or looking at. HVAC unit as the system and how that perspective, you know, leads into some trouble. And this is something that I've personally experienced. This is something I've had to grow through. And this is also something that I deal with routinely with my own technicians and trying to help develop their, uh, mindset and how they think and look at different systems.

So if you're working on a self-contained system, we're saying like Aqua or Trane? Ssw, uh, s wp. All right. And I think trains. S P C or S wc. Anyway, it's a self-contained system, so, and when I say self-contained, I'm not talking about. Like a package unit. And I'm also not talking about a water source heat pump, for example.

While Sure. Those are self-contained. For those who aren't familiar with it, we do have a, there's a type of system, an S W P is what McQuay. And Dican I know for sure called it. And I think trains is an SSW something. What it is, it's basically air handler with a water cooled condenser and it'll have a refrigerated circuit inside of it.

And that one air handler, you may have multiple of these, uh, systems on a single. A lot of the times they'll size 'em to our one unit will be big enough to. The entire floor and you may have a 20 story building with each one, each floor having its own self-contained. And then all of this is tied into a larger C water loop and pumps and cooling towers and the whole nine yard.

So something I used to be guilty of before I really started to shift my mindset is when I walked up to one of these units spin, I had to go do a system troubleshoot. I'll say it that way. I say I had to go to the 10th floor and this, uh, s WP system was having high head. You know, kept tripping the high pressure switch on the, on the condenser.

You know, I would dive into that unit and I'd start troubleshooting it out, you know, and, and with that, you're looking at, you know, each circuit has its own condenser, whether it be tube and tube or a barrel style. You know, a lot of the newer systems have gone barrel. Some of the older ones had tube and tubes.

So you walk up to the unit and what you're trying to check is, you know, what's all the common head pressure things. You know, it's, you know, is it a charge issue? Is it a maybe flow issue on the barrels? Are the barrels gunned up? Do we have a strainer problem? Are we dealing with some kind of filter dryer issue?

Is it overcharge? You know, honestly, overcharging on these systems is a pretty common problem. You know, we run into, especially when we take on new accounts, probably one of the. Misdiagnosed versions of this call is condemning a fouled condenser bureau because you know, one, there's a lot more training to it.

So if you're paying attention to approach and things, there's always the devil's advocate to the argument I'm making. My point is though, if you're just strictly looking at this one unit as it's own internal system and really nothing else, you know, you got the piping coming. Once you get past the isolation valves, you're no longer working on this system.

You're working on something entirely different. So most of the time, the technicians that's gonna fall for the misdiagnosis here is they're gonna be looking at, you know, I'm dealing with high head pressure. My strainers clean, my ball valves are open on the system or my, my butterfly valves, however big it is, doesn't matter.

So my valves are open all the way my strainers clean on the system. Maybe I'll look at the pumps, you know. But honestly, if, if none of the other units in the, in the building are having a problem in that moment, a lot of times they won't even look at the pumps. You know? I know I. Long as I knew the rest of the building was working fine, I would just automatically assume the pumps were fine.

And eventually, you know, you, you feed that through long enough. You get to a point where it just, it makes sense. Okay. Well I've just, I've got dirty caner tubes. We need to come in. Brush 'em, do whatever we need to do to, uh, fix the condenser issue. I've even completely condemned those barrels before because I couldn't get the head pressure under control.

I had all the valves and everything else open and, and you find yourself in a position to where you get so localized at this one unit, the options become very narrow as to what the problems could. Because your system is the unit itself, okay? I'm making this big hoop law about, you know what I'm calling a system and I'm being super dramatic about how I'm using the term system and da, da da da da.

What I'm getting at, stop looking at the unit. As the system, that piece of equipment is just one piece of the actual system. If you listen to or follow or have paid attention to Bill Spoon and the work he's done with the, uh, HVAC Building Science Podcast, you really should start paying attention to it.

You know, this was, this was a concept I'd started to work on a couple of years ago, and then in the last year I found Bill Stone's podcast and started listening to what he had to say and he really. Kind of bring the, the line of thought that I was trying to formulate for myself together. You know, he's, he's walked this road, he's lived this life.

A lot of wisdom in that man. As an alternative. The self-contained on that 10th floor was just one component of the bigger system, and the system itself is the entire building. It is facilitating that system. We got 10 floors, right? So typically in a setup like this, say the cooling towers were on the ground out, back behind the building, the pumps were down on the ground level at the tower yard, and we've got 10 building or 10 floors worth of piping and risers.

Each one of those things is a different component in the system inside of a regular HVAC refrige. Circuit, we have components to that system, but that is on a more micro scale. The system, the actual micro or macro, macro scale of the system is the building itself and for that whole building to function, there's lots of things that have to work together.

And don't think that everything is strictly isolated to one single floor, because something you have to factor in is if you're looking at everything from a building perspective, uh, if or if you're familiar at all with how heat load calculations are done, you don't necessarily, you don't calculate load from between floors.

You're calculating the perimeter walls because if the floor above. Being controlled like it's supposed to be, there shouldn't be a real load coming down nor a real load coming up. So what you're really focused on is just the perimeter, uh, infiltration points. But if the unit above is not controlling properly, that can start to cause symptoms and the unit below.

And an example of this would be like if you had a, a building that's having ti buildouts, meaning that there's, there's, uh, some empty spaces above. You know, are getting worked on. And, uh, most of the time buildings won't run the HVAC on those floors because they just save 'em money. The project doesn't wanna spend the money for the energy.

Cost happens all the time, but there's some consequences to that because the floor below it that still has tenants in, it wasn't calculated to have the floor above not working at all. So you might start having some excessive load issues. You might start having some hot spots or some humidity areas that.

Historically weren't having before that TI process started, or the tenant above ended up moving out and the building management stopped controlling that space. The floor in the middle, if you weren't paying attention to the. Whole building and what was happening there, it may not make a whole lot of sense to you why something changed.

And then that's going to be the question that, uh, management has is, well, we've not had a problem for all these years. Why is all of a sudden this or that, or this or that? And because you're, you're, you're too localized in your mindset, you will miss out as to what the actual problem is. The problem.  we're having to account for load that the system was never intended to have.

So in an extreme case, in my scenario, I've already created, you know, say the 10th floor unit became a TI Buildout, which has a roof line, and it was calculating all that extra roof load. Now the ninth floor has the excessive load on the 10th floor because it's not. Conditioned and the snowball continues.

And so when you walk up to that, we'll say the ninth floor unit, now you need to be thinking about what conditions are existing all around that, that unit. The floors above the floors, floors below.  and even the water piping. So each one of those, uh, self contains is its own component in the system. And then you also have pumps, you have cooling towers.

Any one of these things could be having a problem be reflected in that ninth floor unit or the 10th floor. So, to dive a little deeper, as to the misdiagnosis thing I was talking about earlier as I was still learning hydraulics and, you know, building my concepts as to how all that does work and how it's supposed to function and, you know, what are.

Proper ways of troubleshooting it. I began to realize that a lot of those diagnosis I had made in the past were wrong because I didn't realize that the piping part of the equation was not being taken into account. So when I say piping, I'm specifically referencing there was too little water. Right? And so that's what would happen, like on that 10th floor scenario.

I did this several times. This mistake led me to paying a lot more attention to the hydraulic side. Well, I wouldn't check the actual pressure and the pressure drop on the piping. I wouldn't see how little pressure was there. So for example, if your condenser water loop, especially if you got a set, a closed loop tower or something, uh, your lowest pressure point is gonna be up at that top level.

Your pumps themselves.  on the inlet side would have to be maintaining roughly 80 ish PSI in order to properly facilitate that building's head weight of the water. That would be an indicator to me that we've got enough water in the loop, but I could only see that at the pump at the unit. I should be seeing somewhere around 10 PSI ish or 10 to 15 coming into the.

And somewhere less than that, you know, a few pounds of drop coming out of it. And so what I've had happen is, you know, the, the makeup system, uh, which I find is actually way more common than I thought it was, are rarely maintained very well. And a lot of the times, A lot of technicians aren't taking the time to calibrate the makeup valve on any loop, and so when you're not calibrating that valve, it's easy for that valve to kind of slowly back itself out due to vibrations or whatever else.

Back itself out of maintaining proper pressure. So when it can't maintain proper pressure, if the relief start leaking or if anything happens, you can have a scenario where you end up losing too much water from the loop. So in that scenario, you know, okay, so we've lost so much water from the loop that we no longer have flow up on the 10th floor, and that's what.

Happening to me in some of those situations was, it's not that the, the other floors weren't tripping out because the loop still had just enough water to provide some kind of flow through them. But that very top floor, which will be the first floor to show that symptom, the pumps couldn't, uh, there wasn't enough water in the loop for the pumps to move it.

To provide a proper flow through the unit. You end up spending a lot of time if you're strictly just trying to troubleshoot that one self-contained by itself as its own independent thing, and you're trying to diagnose something that is not a, uh, there's not a unit problem. It is a building problem. It is a whole system problem, and if you're paying attention to the whole system as a whole upfront or it wouldn't take so much to recognize.

what your, what your bigger issue was is you had two little water in the loop, right? And I, I saved myself a ton of time because I've learned that when I start seeing symptoms like that, that's one of the first things to verify. Now again, some of this could also come down to just pure experience and having that experience, but what I'm saying is if you don't have that experience or if you've never seen these things before, you could end up in a place where you spend too much time.

You don't necessarily have to see these, some of these things. In order to quickly confirm what is happening, because once you begin to look at the bigger picture as to how the system is functioning and how every single one of those self contains, even from a balancing perspective, if somebody has gone through.

And throw every single one of the, the condenser water valves wide open, well that's gonna lead into a balancing problem on the loop. And that balancing problem will result in you having flow issues through that particular unit. So maybe it's not even that we don't have enough water, you're not moving the water the way it was designed.

You know, another big example that a lot of us really don't think about that much calculating like outside air, you know, that's another piece of the bigger. That if you're not paying enough attention to, you'll end up completely misdiagnosing something. Because if you're having trouble with like, say, humidity in the building, you know, you may only have one or two tenants in an entire space, or maybe you've only got two floors to begin with.

You know, this is not uncommon. So with your outside area, you usually have some kind of outside air input fan, and you'll have some kind of dedicated, you know, Stairs system when you're dealing with a, a system like a self-contained, if the supply air from the outside air and the exhaust air aren't balanced properly, or maybe they're running when they shouldn't be, regardless of the condition, there's all kinds of things that could be causing the problem.

But you say you have a two-story building, for example, the second story may be complaining like crazy because.  the whole, uh, floor, which keep in mind if we got one self-contained for that space, that whole floor is having crazy humidity issues and they is driving them nuts and they, they can't figure out why.

Well, that could very well be because of your outside air input. Now this is where having a system like, uh, field Pulse, for example, and what they do, and they can give you as a technician or even just call in the office. Really easy access to look up old data and see, you know, how many calls we've had. A lot of times some of this stuff, especially the more advanced things, that's where they become diagnosed.

It may not even be on the first call. It may be two or three calls in after we've had a couple of technicians on site. But having that software where you can look back at it in a very quick and efficient manner, makes it easy to see that. This is a sponsored podcast by the way. Appreciate Phil Paulson, those guys.

Go talk to Michael. Hope you like that plug there. I thought it was pretty creative. Anyway, the point is, you know, those kind of systems do assist in a legitimate troubleshooting ability for a technician because he can look back and see what happened on previous calls and it'll help guide him on how he needs to go through and troubleshoot that existing system.

The last guy might have come out, it couldn't explain why it was, or maybe, you know, I, I think so. Humidity. A very common, uh, misdiagnosis for humidity problems gets blamed on, uh, the actual like space air movement or something along those lines. You know, something actually in the space instead of actually, you know, taking a, um, psychrometer out and measuring the air conditions and seeing what needs to be adjusted or if you know this, make sure your saturations or your refrigerant side of it's actually processing that air down properly anyway.

So yeah, a software can help with. But the core fundamental one I'm saying still holds true because if you walk into that call of the mindset of that self-contained is the only thing that you're, you're needing to look at, that's where the complaints are. You might find that there's not really that much wrong with the self-contained itself, you know, and maybe you do have some slightly weird evaporator readings.

But at the end of the day, you know, you, you, you're gonna look completely past the outside air piece of it, and then that was likely to lead to a misdiagnosis or even just a diagnosis. You're not very confident in which the customer's gonna register on their part. And then you ultimately just end up in a place where you don't solve their problem.

And when you can't solve their problem, you either have to find somebody who can, or they will find somebody who can instead. And you pick which one you'd rather. . So my kids got a wreck on this thing a little bit earlier, and ever since then it's why the hood popped up. And I think we may have stripped some gears or something on the wheel.

So I'm about to take this apart and look at it just in case you're wondering to summarize and to try to draw some conclusions, is what I'm saying. If you rethink how you look at a system and anytime you walk up to any. Before you hyper focus in on the unit that you're gonna be working on first, just look at the building as a whole and consider what's happening there before anything else, and start to see systems in that light, because I think what you will find.

Is it'll become much easier to get a much better diagnosis if there's something outside of the unit that's causing that problem. And this translates even to to home system. You know, I did residential for a period of time. There were a lot of situations where the problem was never the unit. It was things outside of the unit, but.

The symptoms it creates in the unit. We have the ability to sometimes manipulate the unit itself to fit the to the problem. And so, but the unit and what's happening in the unit is nothing more than a symptom of the problem. And what you end up with is a much less efficient system. It's gonna last a lot shorter timeframe.

And part of our goals, and my opinion is we are trying to help systems live longer and. Smoother, cleaner, better. We have the ability to do that. And when we don't hyper focus on just the actual piece of equipment itself at the same time, you know, just like when I talk about people like Field Pulse, you know, I, I'm very genuine in what I'm saying is these types of softwares are huge and our ability to use them as a, as a resource.

You know, when I was, my first several years in the trade, everything was still paper based. You know, we hadn't started switching to automated systems, and even the ones that existed weren't really that good, and they weren't, they ended up being something where the admin team were the only ones who were trained on it, and they had to basically input everything.

Like it wasn't broke down in such a way to where us as technicians could actually do.  reasonably, but that's not the trade of today. And we have tools like Phil Pulse at our disposal now where we can really improve our communication and efficiencies. And they genuinely help. Like they, they help companies make better diagnosis because we can get better information that is more real time in the.

And that's huge, you know, especially for a technician to have that at his fingertips. And even myself as a manager out in the field, you know, being able to access the company's data, you know, remotely is a massive thing. Now, I'm not gonna, I'm, I don't mean to mislead, to say that I personally use fill Pulse.

My company does not. But my point is, our software we have is not that different now. I'm just one person. I can't make that decision for my. , nor am I gonna enter into a conflict of interest. So let's just not have that conversation. That's not the point here. I appreciate you guys listening and just even caring to hear me out on anything I have to say.

Uh, I really appreciate the community and the feedback and y'all's voice really does help guide, you know, what I need to do to help. Cause that's why, that's why I'm here, that's why I'm doing this, is I. To help and provide knowledge, experience, feedback, whatever I can on my side. So the more you engage, the more you interact, it helps.

Tell me what it is that would help you as an individual the most and wherever you are in your career. Uh, anywhere from, you know, at an entry level, apprentice to the highest end of manage. I've been fortunate in what I've been able to do in my career. Bill Spoon, look him up. He is an incredible resource in this.

And he's got. , some incredible podcasts that do a much better job of what I've done today to explain more in depth to the building science side of things and why it's important. And if you can become not only a technician, but even a company that can start to really specialize in this line of work, I can tell you from personal experience that it is going to help drive your business.

This is something that, you know, the company I'm with, we've done as a management shift is really trying to specialize in optimizing buildings, you know, on a, on a heavy commercial scale. And the deeper we've gotten into this, uh, and the better we've gotten at doing it, it has really helped us. Improve our business as a whole because you know, these management companies can call us as a resource and we can significantly improve their building as a whole because we understand and we approach the thing as its own full dedicated system.

I'll shut up now guys. I got so a lot to do, so I'm just gonna keep talking and taking too much time trying to.