Ep. 6 VRF Replacing Chillers?

In this podcast I share my thoughts on the future of VRV and chillers for HVAC Technician. 

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Transcript

 A big conversation has come up in the industry quite a bit here recently, and, and really, I, I say recently, it's been dragging around for a, a while now, are V R F going to replace chillers, for example? You know, so I do a lot of chiller work. I'm very heavily involved in that world and in that realm. It's a question against sparred routinely, and I see it through YouTube and various platforms, right?

It's, it's constantly coming up. And even when I sit down for interviews or. Talking to apprentices or whoever the conversation is focused around. We're usually at some point going to have this discussion somewhere because it's, it's a hot topic. So I really want to take an opportunity to really get my thoughts out and explain what I see in the industry and kind of where we stand today and what I see happening and how we're gonna move forward.

One of the ways I've had some interesting perspective on this is I, we have jobs where we've bid it both ways. We've. One major project recently where this was the exact conversation we had on site. The customer got a quote to do a air cold chiller system or a V RF system, and they, they ended up choosing the V rf.

And I'm gonna explain a lot of the reasons as to why through this podcast. And we'll get into some of the pros and cons and honestly even just cover what are the options today? You know, what could you choose? If you weren't gonna go v RF or what has traditionally been used over all these years, what is a traditional option that you could go with?

I think probably the most common one from a commercial stance that comes to mind would probably be RTU systems. You know, uh, you could have RTUs in range for anywhere from, hey, just a, a basic, uh, five ton system even on. Uh, commercial building. Uh, I would say probably no more than a couple of stories tall typically, but that could definitely be an option.

In a scenario like that, you'd have a set of supply and return trunks feeding just that r t u and it'd have its own thermostat and it would essentially run its own zone within that building. Now they do get more complicated in that, you know, it could be a very large RTU that serves an entire wing of the building, and at that point you might have a, a, a set of zone boxes down in the space.

Now I'll talk about those more in a. Another option you could run into would be just a traditional air handler system or a self-contained. Now when I say self-contained, I'm not talking like a package in or anything like that, you know, if what that means for me in my market is like an S W P Daikin system or an old school, McQuaid is what they used to be, and essentially it's just one big air handler that has all the refrigeration process built into it.

The only thing that's not contained inside of it is. Uh, the, the actual, I guess, condensing side of it. Now, there is a condenser in there, but there's water that flows through. Uh, usually there are a shell and tube by a lot of modern standards. Some of the older ones were tube and tube condensers, and that would be what rejected your heat out through a cooling tower, for example.

Now, the air handler side of that, that could be whether it be chill water or refrigerated. You know, you may have a hundred ton air handler sitting. And you have a hundred ton air cooled condenser, uh, remotely sitting outside on the ground, on the roof, wherever they've got it, and that's gonna be serving that air.

We've done some systems, and I've talked about it heavily in some of my YouTube content, where they have one large air handler that serves an entire half of the building, for example, and it may be 200 tons. And then there's two 100 ton air cooled condensers that serve that air handle. So those are extremely common applications where we could see that.

Now, usually attached to something like that, you're gonna also see a VA v a V system. So that's a variable air volume. That's also where we're gonna start getting into terminology like, uh, fan power box or fbs, or however you want to designate those. Here's a hundred ways to do it. So the VV turns that air handler, that self-contained into its own zone.

Systems you may have. Main air handler or one self-contained system per an entire floor or per half of a, of a wing or a floor, however, they've got it set up and then the supply air coming off of that's gonna feed into all the VA boxes, and those VAVs are gonna have their own. Room thermostats where they're gonna control that Airstream directly right there in the space.

And so that air handler is just trying to provide X amount of air volume to the V A V as well as the air being a specific temperature and state, you know, already dehumidified and all the stuff. Now taking that zoned approach a little bit further. Uh, you also had a lot of water source heat pump buildings.

Now these are quite literally just what a lot of 'em are, one to three ton water source heat pumps. They're usually small enough where one person could almost carry the things by themself.  almost, and they're just a water cooled water source heat pump that sits up in the ceiling or somewhere thereabouts.

Sometimes they put 'em in closets and they'd be more of a vertical instead of a horizontal mount. And in the same way that we run a, uh, self-contained system, instead we have this little be tiny water source heat pump that's able to take care of its specific zone and we just run c condenser water to it and cool that water down, or if it's in heat mode, Uh, I want to bring, uh, just water to the now evaporator coil so that it can take the heat out of it and put it back into the space.

Now, typically, that requires a boiler or some other heating source. To keep the loop warm enough so that the water square seat pumps can work. But the point is that was another very common, fairly cost effective method of doing that, and cost has a big part of this conversation. As I get through this, you'll see how that plays more into it.

Another common traditional setup would be a F C U A fan coil unit. Or, you know, a lot of times we may also look at this as a split system. So in, in the heavy commercial world, when we refer to a F C U system, a lot of times we're talking about a split or what you would see at, at a regular house. And so those get used at times and usually you don't see those on anything more than a couple of stories I've seen 'em on.

5, 6, 7 story buildings before. And those systems really struggle in those environments because the line length becomes so much that they have a hard time keeping the velocity, which leads to oil issues and so forth. And you gotta put the traps and it's just, there's a lot of technicality to make those run really efficiently in those environments.

But they're, they're fairly cheap. Upfront. What's nice about those is it comes down to your ability to have something that a lot of people can work on. Most everybody, if you get into air conditioning, you know how to work on a split system. That's one of the core fundamentals of what we learn how to do.

And then the final big, grandiose, traditional style system is, yeah, the chiller, the chill water side where we're taking a machine, whether it be an air cooled or water cooled, and we are providing cold water. That's what a chiller is. It's a machine. Produces cold water that is then used to control climate inside of a space, whether that be through air handlers, through fan coils.

So I talked very heavily about fan coils being, you know, the split system side, where they also could just be a little bitty tiny air handler with a water coil in it. And we're gonna take the chill water that the chiller produces and run that through that small coil and control the flow with the valve in order to produce the cold air result we're looking for.

And you can get a very small scale control of each individual climate space, whether it be a bunch of offices, whether that be people's. Say apartments or condos or however that was set up in that building, there's a lot of control that's able to get into that. So let's go ahead and pause right here though, and throw in some HVAC news.

The first piece of our news segment is gonna come from a announcement from train, actually. Uh, Trane commercial side is announcing a four to 7.5%, uh, price increase on some of their equipment. Just something to be aware of. My opinion. Train's already fairly expensive. I think they're just another one of many that are gonna continue to have this, you know.

price increases are just gonna be a thing. We need to get ready for that. We need to be prepared for that. I think most of us probably already have, but I just wanted to put it out there that they have officially announced that. And they also put in their announcement that there may be other products in their lineup that might even see more than seven and a half percent.

So just be aware. The second item is a tool that I find pretty interesting. Uh, these are super handy, but it's a 90 degree drill attachment. It goes to a quarter or three eight, uh, socket, you know, just a square head. So that's pretty handy. Uh, this one is a Flex Torque. It's produced by DeWalt. I haven't really seen these on the shelf.

Again, I haven't really looked for 'em, but as I was kind of going through and seeing some different product announcements and stuff, this one really stood out to. I know there's lots of scenarios. We get into some really tight spots and products like this make dealing with those situations significantly easier.

So I appreciate DeWalt putting that r and d into coming out with a product like this. Hopefully it stands up. That's one of the big issues, these types of, you know, 90 degree drill attachments have is. The gears in 'em don't do so well, especially when we put them under the stress that sometimes we, or sometimes heck, we deal with almost on a daily basis most of the time.

If you haven't ever tried one of these though, you would be surprised how handy it can be once you have one. But then the problem does come back to can it survive? Yeah. Another big piece of news I wanna talk about is Craig, and I'm not gonna even insult you. I'm trying to pronounce your last name cuz I'm not good at that kind of thing.

Has released his new book, inverter Minis Split Operation and Service Procedures. I think he's doing pre-orders right now. Maybe by the time this podcast comes out, he'll switch that over to, I'm not really sure where he is at in the process. Either way, go check that out. It is very much tied into what we're talking about here.

This is gonna be a great book to really. You learn and engage and start to get into this side of the world and this it is time that you do so. So I really appreciate Craig and all the work he's put into helping provide really good education for this industry and pushing us forward. On a higher level.

So if we have all these options at our disposal and what we can use and install in the system, why did chillers really become so prevalent? Well, from an industrial perspective, chillers make a lot of sense because you're talking machines that can get into the thousands of tons, you know, 3000, 5,000, they get.

Huge in their size and, and so in major industrial applications, they're the only pieces of equipment that can actually scale to that size. That even makes sense. How does a commercial application, when we're talking about, you know, comfort cooling, why does a chiller make sense in that environment? One of the things about chillers is they're very expensive to put in the, all the piping required the machine, the equipment itself.

Well, I say that the chiller itself is fairly expensive. The air handl. Comparatively, or probably less expensive because all they are is just a, a, a water coil. Those coils are not that sophisticated. They're not that hard to make, but there's a lot of copper in there, and those coils are not small. That's, so that's one of the things about a chill water coil is the coil physical size does tend to be a little bigger than what I see in a refrigerated coil size and its ability to transfer heat in the same way, but despite all of a chill water system's upfront.

they make up for it in their efficiency. Cuz water is a fantastic, uh, heat exchange medium. It does a really good job taking in and rejecting heat, which works really well when we start dealing with trying to control the space and trying to control. The overall building envelope. And what's also really nice about it is it's easy to build redundancy into a chill water system.

So we could have multiple chillers hooked up to the same loop, and if one chiller goes down, it's not that big a deal. Now we still have lots of properties. They've only got one chiller to begin with, so they have no redundancy. So that's not a valid argument, but the efficiency still is their BTU per kilowatt.

Is where they pay for themselves. But the other side of chillers is they do require a lot more technical skill and ability to know how and your ability to troubleshoot things. And they do tend to cost a lot to repair, especially as modern times continues to move forward. And we get more into the electronics and that side of the world and industry is catching up to the chiller side.

Everything's just getting more expensive. There's no way around that. And honestly, the chillers themselves are becoming more and more technical. Uh, it's not hard for me to take some of my guys that are fresh into it and I'll take them to an old rta, a for example, and I'll be able to put them in front of that and walk them through what that chiller does, and an R T A A, or at least the later.

Before they went electronic. It's a very basic machine cuz all it is is txv. S and there's not that much to it. There's very minimal electronics. And then training them from that into machines that got the electronic valves and such put into them, but are still core, fundamental, very basic. Those, those are easy machines to train on.

But what we have coming out today is not so much, you know, we've got ECM motors and uh, VFD driven motors, not only at the compressor level, but. At the, uh, condenser fans level, and, and there's a lot more to that. So there's a high level of technical ability and understanding and training that now goes into that.

That also means that those components themselves are very expensive. We were, it was already not, uh, it was already common to have a, a single condenser fan motor. You're usually spending about a thousand dollars on average just for the motor assembly itself. That's one of the major things that boiled down to was they're reliable.

and they're efficient for what they are. You know, on the grand scale of things, especially, you know, you can look at some old chillers and just think, okay, well that's not very efficient. But you have to think about its time and day that it was efficient. So what makes a V rf what it is and why it's so threatening to all these other types of installs and equipment, and including chillers, you know, how is something like that able to compete with a chiller?

What really separates. Is not what the components themselves technically are, but how we are using technology to apply them. And part of that technology is how the heat pump side of it and the heat recovery side of it really functioned one. The heat pump side of it for a long time has far been able to exceed.

What a standard heat pump split system that you would think about has ever been able to produce on a, on a basic scale, at the efficiency that it can produce at the low temperatures that it can produce, it at split systems are only just now starting to even come close to competing to the numbers. That the V R F and V R V and even many splits have been able to produce for quite some time.

And a big difference to the cost there is the, the regular split systems that can compete at that level. The cost of those things are so astronomically high that it doesn't make any sense as to why you wouldn't go with the. V R F option in that case because it just, they found a really good combination of technology and mechanical, and the heat recovery is just a whole nother ballgame.

And the vast majority of these systems are getting utilized in a heat recovery state. So in a heat recovery, there is one extra component in introduced. It's a branch selector or a branch.  and we use that to control the refrigerant flow and with that component in place. And instead of just two pipes, you know, you got your suction and liquid line.

Now we've got three pipes. We have a hot gas line coming off of the discharge side, and we can activate all three lines simultaneously. And I could have half the system running in heat and half the system running in. Cool. And the unit to be perfectly fine functioning that way for an extended period of time.

Well, in a commercial sense, now we've got a system. That is extremely efficient and that's what it really comes down to for the BTU to KW cost. It is astounding. This starts getting into why these are replacing because that whole list of all the different types I, I ran through in the very beginning, this system can now form fit to all of those applications and do it better because now we can get zoned control.

That is directly in the space where we want it, and we don't have to have a ton of extra duct work. We don't need all this extra mechanical space because that's, that's a lot of me, that's a lot of design and that's a lot of extra work that goes into that. So, If you have RTUs, you have all the, all the duct work, you have all the electrical RTUs pull a lot of power compared to a V R F system.

These V RF condensers on the roof or the outdoor units don't have that much power duty load really pulling against them. I mean, obviously they've got some, especially if you've got a larger tonnage. But the point is when you compare it to what the alternative is, it is significantly. At that stage, you don't have all the extra mechanical design that has to go into putting the VF in over the rtu, which makes it more cost effective up upfront.

And I think we all can understand how it could replace the split system. Cuz at the end of the day, the only thing in between is the line. We just got copper running in between and copper doesn't take up that much space. So we had a building that had a bunch of regular split systems. Pretty obvious which one's gonna come out on top there for two reasons.

Efficiency is a big part of it, but also we need a lot less copper for a VF system than we do a, a traditional building done with split systems because now every single split system needs two pipes running. And while the VF may need a larger pipe, you've got no more than three pipes running down and actually , there's some vr, there's some heat recovery systems now that only need a two pipe heat.

those are pretty interesting, but how does it actually start to put pressure on the chiller world? That is the ultimate question. I'm, I'm just rambling right now about RTUs and split systems, and I think we all really can grasp that concept a lot better. But how is this much smaller system and form factor able to compete at the level of these big, massive chiller.

So I referenced to the job we had to do a bit of retrofit on for 2022, and we had to have that discussion with the customer of exactly which way they wanted to go and which way the engineers were recommending them to go. And they ended up going V R F instead of going chiller for this building retrofit, because originally it had all split systems, so there was just shy of a hundred split systems on this roof that took care of a four-story building.

So in the evaluation process, it came down to efficiency and. At the end of the day, the V RF was able to compete with the efficiency ratings of a chill water system with a significantly lower cost up front. And that's where chillers are really going to get hindered because they're very expensive to put in, but they pay for themselves after the fact.

Well, now we've got a system that is, is still cost a lot. But it's a lot less expensive than a chiller to install. But then it's so efficient that it can also compete with a chiller's, efficiency factors at the same time. And you can also have all the redundancy of a chiller system. And it's because of all these factors that it, the V R F is taking.

All of the best technologies of, of so much of our industry. Combining them into one central system that's able to get all the coverage, you know, we, we are consolidating, we need less of an overall roof footprint. It's less total weight on the system, on the, or meaning on the roof and such. That was one of the problems we faced was we were gonna have to reinforce the roof in order to support the weight, the chillers, where we didn't have to do that with a V RF system.

The roof was already structurally sound enough to support that weight, but still get the same over overall effect. So the overall pros pro one, it's gonna be efficiency. These systems, their efficiency value. Is so high, it becomes hard to talk a customer out of it. A lot of the time now, children's themselves are still extremely efficient, but for the V R F, it's broad application ability to just reuse it everywhere.

And as building and construction owners and everybody gets more familiar with that side and that technology, it becomes more and more of a no-brainer for them to continue using what they feel. But these things do come with some cons. One is serviceability. While there are more people that can work on VF than there are chiller people, there's still a high level of technical skill and ability needed to work on these properly and effectively and cost effectively.

And those people are not easy to find or come across. And so, like me personally, I spend a lot of my time working on systems that other people have just really struggled with. As a team, we've gotten our team a lot better trained, so we spend a lot of our time just fixing things other people couldn't, and that just comes down to pure training at, at its fundamental core.

It's just there's a lack of training knowledge and understanding in the trade, creating that situation. Another con is they also have a really high repair cost. Now, so do chillers. Chillers are expensive, Baso v, rf, all the different boards and modules that are in there. The motors themselves, the coils themselves, like all these components are fairly expensive, especially compared to their direct counterpart, let's say a regular split system on RT U.

something of that nature. And then if you start dealing with dramatic leaks in the system, well, what's crazy about these is they're extremely difficult to leak, search and troubleshoot that way. And sometimes it takes days to get it, find just a couple of leaks. But if they're critical leaks and they're causing major problems with being able to withhold the charge, well then, yeah, I mean, it's.

You're gonna end up spending more money trying to do the refrigerant than you would just spending the money letting us find the leak, and then we gotta fix it. Finding it is only the first step. It doesn't include fixing the leak, which is in, in itself. It's a whole nother major cost to undertake. So if this is a world you're looking at, may be getting into yourself, just keep that in mind is there is a lot of labor costs that's gonna go into servicing these machines.

And the third, and probably one of the biggest struggles that we're still facing, and we probably still will for quite some time, it's just bad install. Now at the end of the. . I still have bad installs on the simplest systems of art like RTUs, for example. RTUs are probably one of the easiest systems to put in, but it still gets done wrong a lot of the time.

I've got a building I've worked on for couple of years now, and I'm still finding. Install issues. One example I have is they didn't marry the curbs properly and so where the R T U curb, uh, married up to the actual supply duct for the building, half of that duct was really hard to get to and it wasn't the greatest access, and ultimately just nobody caught during the install that it wasn't married up.

Well, in a system like this, these, they monitor the airflow and the CFM and everything is, is very finely owned in, so they could tell the machine was moving about twice the CFM that the actual duct work was allowing through, which didn't really make a whole lot of sense to 'em. But it had been that way for a couple of years before it really became an issue with balancing and trying to get some efficiency ratings on the.

That's, that brought up a lot of questions that we had to then dig into, which eventually led to us realizing the big old gap that was in the supply duct the entire time. So my point is we're install issues are going to be issues, but V R F in particular are very sensitive to how you do it and because so much of the problems with them do tie back into the piping itself, the piping doesn't get done just.

And every little mistake that gets made in the piping adds to the overall piping issue. Well, when you start running the piping links and it's all conjoined together in the same system, it doesn't take too many of those issues done repetitively. For now, the entire system has a hard time. Stabilizing the refrigerant flow and getting to a really smooth and clean operation to achieve the efficiency that is rated for.

So do I think we'll ever be at a place where the install issues won't ever be a problem? No, I don't. But I think we could do a whole lot more to better train ourselves as an industry to eliminate a whole lot more of 'em than we have. And just in case any of this is bugging you, V R F versus v r. , they're the same thing.

Like if you've come across that in any way, they mean the same thing. How all that came about. V R V is a trademarked term by Daikin, so they're the ones that really pioneered a lot of this technology back in the eighties when they really started to develop it very heavily, and they have locked down on V R V.

A variable refrigerant volume. So now everybody else has jumped on the bandwagon of V R F, which is variable refrigerant flow. They're the same thing. They're, they are no different. It just comes down to pure trademark. And who gets to wave that banner at the end of all this. V r V are competing with chiller systems, but they're not replacing chillers.

Still have a, a really strong place and they have a, a good form factor that works. So do I think commercial buildings will are anywhere? Having chillers, uh, phased out of them? No, not even close. I am seeing a shift in the industry where a lot of buildings are going V R F because of the cost savings they can get and still get the efficiency out of it.

But another major hurdle that V R F has is, uh, the, the reputation that it's starting to get with a lot of properties where it is just a pain and it's a headache and they just hate having it because the poor install piece of. Creates so many problems after the fact and it's so expensive to now go back and fix what did what was wrong on the install.

But the install contractor, all he had to do was get past his warranty phase and all he had to do was have the local.  startup companies sign off on it that it functioned and they can get it to limp along for the, the warranty period, whether that's one year to sometimes three years. And as soon as that's done, they can cut and run and it's not their problem.

And most of the time, the company or the building owners that then come in and take over after the GC is done and the installers are. They can't wait to get rid of them so they can try to bring somebody in. But if they try to bring those people in too soon in the process, cause I've been through this, they will then avoid warranty immediately.

And it's, and it's this whole just vicious cycle that's been created because these systems have way too many problems. That reputation is part of what's gonna keep chillers in the market and engaged and a viable thing. I think that a lot of your larger buildings, it probably will make more sense to go with a chiller system, especially one you can extend a lot more redundancy than you can with A V R F.

I especially see this in a lot of medical scenarios. A lot of your medical buildings are still very heavily leaning to the chiller side because of their proven technology and reliability. But I still see a lot of just regular office buildings going. That air cold chillers are getting set on the roof, and they're running the chill water, piping down, chill water, air handlers.

So it's just, it's a competition. I, I don't think they're com they're replacing by any standard and we're not talking industrial either. Like industrial. That's still what it is. That's really a no-brainer in my book. I don't think anything is gonna happen. With chillers being dominant in the industrial sector, I do think we're gonna see a side of the industry where a lot of the other applications are gonna start getting phased out and things such as regular split systems, regular RTUs, all of those types of units are going to become less relevant over time because of what V R F is bringing to the table.

Do I think those themselves will be completely replaced? Not for a very, very long time. Like we're nowhere. , those actually replacing those types of systems. But yeah, I think there is a, a real reality where you don't, unless it's an old system in an old building, you're not going to see very many new systems with that getting set in place.

Well, there's my thoughts, there's my rambles, there's everything that kind of floats around in my head. Somewhat organized fashion, and now you kind of see where I'm at and just where I think the industry's going. I think it's interesting how a lot of the legacy manufacturers, and I mean by that, it's like say train or carrier.

They're trying to build variable flow technology systems. They are trying to compete with what, uh, V R F are doing and they're trying. Utilize some of their downfalls and poor installs to push their own products that are just honestly, I think, I think they should just kind of give up on it, but I don't mean that in such a way as to stop driving innovation because I think competition still leaves innovation and I think it's interesting that they've pushed their own product so hard where you've got a traditional split system style setup that now.

putting a, uh, a, a variable flow option into, and the the cost that they're doing it at is, is just crazy. A lot of the contractors out there, some of you may be listening to this, y'all have a problem.  with working on those systems or the design of 'em or whatever else, or your dealer rates you, you sell so much of a particular lineup, say train for example, that it doesn't make sense for you to not sell those high-end systems and overinflate them to what they should be.

or what they're trying to be so that you can make that self, that's just really smart, proper business. I'm not faulting you for that. I am speaking more onto a really high level industry. They're trying to push and compete in that market the way that they are, not necessarily you in the field. Trying to, uh, just make a good business.

At the end of the day, you're just giving the customer what they want. That's at your disposal. I'm not faulting you for that. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Hope everybody had a good time. Hope my rambling wasn't too much rambling. Pretty good at that fee. Paid attention to any of my stuff or any length of time.

You'll, you'll notice that me and rambling are pretty good. If you ever need any tech support, if you need any help online, anything of that nature, feel free to go to my website@hvactimetx.com slash tech support. I've got a few options there. You can, uh, join a, a monthly thing where I can help you out over email and do what I can for you on that side of it and just be as, be supportive.

And then if you ever need some really in-depth technical training or, uh, even consultations for that, That's all in there too. So my ultimate goal is just to be here to help and to provide my thoughts where I can to help you just get through whatever it is you're dealing with. Maybe it's, maybe it is just a training thing.

I also ask that if you are interested in getting tools, true tech tools, check 'em out. Look at 'em. HVAC time as your promo code. They'll get you 8% off at your checkout. Really appreciate true tech. They've been a great partnership. I really like working with Bill Spoon and them over there. I highly encourage you to support their business.

They've got a really good thing going. I appreciate everybody and M t t make the time. Make the time for your family. Make the time for your kids, for your spouse. Don't let this industry utterly consume you and your life. It is very easy to. Much of the things that I talk about and recommend in trying to develop yourself.

It, it does open the door to some traps for this industry consuming you in a negative way, not a positive one. Keep in mind as you're moving along to make the time, m t t guys, I'll see you later.