Service IS What We Sell

HVAC/R service technicians must master many different skills to be successful. There are the hard skills that involve manipulation and mechanical ability like electrical wiring, brazing, and refrigerant handling; there are the problem solving skills like refrigeration and electrical troubleshooting; and there are soft skills such as customer service. Service technicians must be competent in every one of these skillsets. Note that these skillsets are quite different from each other. The hard skills require mechanical ability and a good kinesthetic sense. Problem solving requires abstract thinking and the ability to take several pieces of information and form a reasonable judgment. Even if a service technician has great mechanical ability and is an accomplished problem solver, they must be able to deal with customers. Service work is primarily about customer service. Often, individuals who are mechanically gifted are not “people persons.” They would much rather rebuild a compressor than talk to the compressor’s owner. The problem is that the compressor is not who writes the checks, the owner is. So if you want to be paid, you need to learn to talk to the customers.

Increasingly, service technicians are required to make out a bill and collect payment. I consider this yet another skill set – financial. In the good old days, I would simply tell the customer that they would receive a bill. When they wanted to know how much it would be I honestly did not have a clue. I might as well have told them to write a check and leave the amount blank so I could fill it in for their convenience later on. Customers now expect to know what they owe before the technician leaves. In many cases, the company expects the technician to collect payment. To create bills and collect payment technicians must be familiar with the company’s pricing policies. Many companies use price books which list prices for specific services. The price includes all aspects of the cost - parts, labor, overhead, and profit . Technicians bill customers according to the services they deliver. The technician needs to learn how the book is organized and be comfortable looking up prices in the book. Many technicians are uncomfortable using the books, making bills, and collecting payment. Often, companies just hand the new technician the book without much training. Although every company’s price book and billing procedure are unique, most companies now require their service technicians to produce bills and collect payment.

I think every HVAC/R program should have some example pricing procedures available to their students. The point is not to tell them what to charge, but to help them prepare to make bills using pricing policies that are prevalent in your area. A vendor for a price book that is used by several contractors in our area supplied us with a sample book. The prices do not reflect any particular company and all services are not in the book. Further, SAMPLE is written prominently across every page. But this book lets us inject a dose of reality into troubleshooting. Students should not only be able to track down the cause of the problem, they should also be able to find the service required to repair the system in the price book.

One thing that many students have a hard time with is the large price discrepancy between the cost of the part being replaced and the cost of providing the service. I emphasize that the customer pays far more for the technician’s expertise and service than they do for the part. The cost of the part is almost negligible. I point out that this is true for nearly any service business. Otherwise, the company cannot make money and their technicians cannot earn a good living. They are not cheating the customer by charging a high price. They are cheating the customer if they fail to deliver complete and competent service. We are called service technicians for a reason.

Making the Connection with Schematic Diagrams

Many of topics that our students struggle with the most have some level of abstraction. Reading a schematic diagram is near the top of the list. A schematic diagram is a symbolic representation of an abstraction – circuit logic. Mentally tying this symbolic representation to the physical components and wires can be a struggle for some students. This is especially true for devices like contactors and relays that are represented by multiple symbols because they have parts with different functions located in different circuits. Recently I have tried having students draw a schematic diagram of a basic packaged air conditioning system. Then I give them a pictorial diagram with drawings of components and ask them to “wire up” their schematic. Most students have a few difficulties drawing the schematic, but they usually make it past this part without too many scuff marks. The trouble comes when they have to translate the schematic diagram that they drew into “wires” on the pictorial diagram. I believe this is because students can essentially copy circuits they see in the book without understanding the details. However, details are important. Several years ago, we would put all our electrical theory up front. Students did not do any wiring until after covering all the theory. However, I noticed that many students who could draw a basic heat pump schematic diagram could not wire a toggle switch and a light. This caused me to wonder how much they really understood. Having students “wire” units on paper by drawing lines between pictures or drawings of components allows them to work out the connection between the abstract and the physical without burning up all your transformers. I am not suggesting that drawing lines to represent wires replaces wiring actual components, but it will quickly show you who has a clue and who doesn’t. You need to work some more with the folks who can’t differentiate between low voltage and line voltage circuits, or the people who want to put L1 on one side of a spst switch and L2 on the other side of the same switch. The pictorial diagrams with all the wires drawn in can look a bit messy and hard to follow. Using color coded markers helps. Better yet, use colored pencils that can be erased. Use two colors for line voltage and two more for low voltage. Have them draw in large dots where two wires are supposed to connect and little humps where two wires cross that are not supposed to connect. It does not take students long to figure out that neatness is its own reward. Loopy, hastily scribbled lines make for difficult circuit tracing and lead to confusion. I usually have a big stack of pages with the components that need to be “wired up.”

Your Job is NOT to Answer E-mail

My job would be so much easier without the constant interruption from these students! It can be easy to lose your focus in the hustle and bustle of running an HVAC/R program. With the demands of documenting things like student learning outcomes, justifying the need for an expendables budget for items like copper, advising students, scheduling classes, attending faculty meetings, and answering e-mail, it sometimes seems like taking care of administrative details is your primary job. There can be a bit of a let-down when the fury momentarily subsides and there are no URGENT e-mails to answer. "Oh there are no e-mails, what do I do?” Then a student comes in, asks a question and I remember why I am there in the first place. It is important that we remember to save enough time and energy to focus on the students. All the other things are just supporting roles, not the main job. One way to keep the administrative part of teaching from completely taking over your time is to set aside a specific time for accomplishing administrative duties. One day a week I do not lecture or teach in the lab, I administer. That way I am not stealing time from the students, trying to complete reports five minutes at a time in between working with students. When you are juggling administrative functions and students at the same time it may feel like you are being productive because you are so busy, but an honest assessment of what you have accomplished afterwards can be deflating. I personally find that trying to juggle students and administrative details at the same time leads to lack of focus and poor performance on both tasks. That is not to say I don’t answer any e-mails until Friday, it just means that I know I have time to accomplish time consuming tasks on Friday. Another trick is to automate administrative tasks whenever possible. I confess that for many years I really could not understand why many of my friends liked using test banks to write quizzes and tests. I was a purist – writing all my tests from scratch so no two tests were ever the same. I would often save them in Word format, and use old tests as templates, but that was the extent of my automation. Then I became involved in writing Fundamentals of HVAC/R and everything that goes with it, including writing a bank of test questions for use with TestGen. It did not take long for me to see the advantage of using an organized test bank. I can write a good test in about five minutes by just selecting questions from the test bank. I can still write all the new questions I want, but saving them in the test-bank format means that I can retrieve them easily later on. With all the Word documents, I end up searching through lots of electronic documents looking for that gas furnace test I wrote last year. Finally, you should learn to use your tools. You expect your students to learn how to use gauges and electric meters. They have to become proficient in their use to do the job they are training to do. Similarly, all instructors should be proficient with office productivity applications like Word and Excel. If Microsoft is not your cup of tea, substitute whatever word processor and spreadsheet program you like, but mastering the word processor and spreadsheet will make your life much easier. I would certainly not try to pass myself off as an expert in either, but I do use both Word and Excel on a daily basis. Since I use them every day, learning to use them well saves me time. This requires an up-front investment of time, but it pays off almost every day.

Communicating Control Systems

The standard air conditioning control system uses relay logic or an electronic representation of relay logic. Things are either off or on. The controls work something like a light switch – when the switch is on the light operates, when it is off the light is off. Thermostats are basically switches that are controlled by temperature. The thermostat closes a set of contacts to complete a circuit to a relay coil, the relay coil then closes the relay contacts to complete a circuit to a motor. When the thermostat is satisfied its contacts open, breaking the circuit to the relay coil. The relay opens its contacts, breaking the circuit to the motor. Everything works based on the presence or absence of control voltage. One advantage of this system is that it is easy to understand, and it has been the basis for HVAC/R controls for many years. However, this control system needs a separate control wire for each function. Some split system heat pumps require 12 control wires running between the indoor and outdoor section. Even with twelve wires, the range of control is still somewhat limited.

A communicating control system is more like a computer network. The system components communicate over a serial network. Each part has its own unique electronic signature or address, allowing the controller to recognize all the parts and coordinate their operation. Most residential communicating systems use four wires between all components – two for power and two for communication. It does not matter if the component is a furnace, air handler, air conditioner, heat pump, or zone control – everything uses the same four wire connection. This works because the units respond to commands sent over the communication network, not the presence or absence of control voltage. Commands for different components can be sent over the same network. Further, communication is not just one way. Communication between components allows them to know what the other components are doing and adjust accordingly. For example, Carrier’s Infinity zone control knows what the blower CFM is and what the CFM in each zone is. Better yet, it can report this to the service technician. The system airflow can be ramped up or down to match system capacity. Staged furnaces, air conditioners, and heat pumps give the system the ability to modulate system capacity and airflow as the house load requires, improving efficiency and reducing energy use. Just a few years ago Carrier was the only game in town if you wanted a residential communicating system. Some folks were not paying too much attention because these systems were only offered in high end equipment made by one equipment manufacturer. Today it seems like everyone is offering a communicating system. Equipment manufacturers advertising communicating systems now include Carrier, Bryant, Trane, American Standard, Lennox, York, Rheem, Ruud, Amana, and Goodman. I apologize in advance for leaving anyone off. The point is that communicating controls are booming. Communicating systems used to be proprietary, now there is an open standard called ClimateTalk. The ClimateTalk will encourage the development of equipment that plays nice across different brands. I don’t believe we are at the point of interoperability yet, but that day is coming. Besides the proprietary systems built exclusively for a particular brand, two major control manufacturers are producing communicating systems – Emerson and Johnson Controls. The availability of “standard” components and an open protocol means that smaller manufacturers can use communicating controls, opening the market up even more. In the very near future, every technician will need to work with communicating controls regardless of the brand equipment their company sells and services.

For more details regarding communicating control systems check out Unit 52 Heat Pump Installation, and Unit 59 Zone Control Systems in Fundamentals of HVAC/R. Many manufacturers also have some information online regarding their communicating systems, including

• Carrier Infinity
• Trane ComfortLink
• Lennox Icomfort
• Goodman ComfortNet
• Rheem Comfort Control System
• Emerson UltraTech
• ClimateTalk Alliance ClimateTalk

Interactive PowerPoint Presentations

Most PowerPoint presentations are used to as visual aids for a lecture or presentation. As such, they do not have to stand on their own. The speaker will fill in the details and keep the presentation engaging – or at least that is the plan. However, PowerPoint presentations can also be used as a self-paced leaning activity. This has the advantage of allowing the viewer to control the flow of material. If the presentation is designed for individual viewing, you can include more information in a slide, or you can narrate each slide to replace the live speaker. Try to layer the information so that it is presented a little at a time in a logical fashion, rather than all at once. For example, show a contactor with a title that names it: Contactor. Use the same picture on the next slide and add text that generally describes what it does. Then do a series of slides that label the parts: coil, contacts, L1 & L2, T1 & T2. The idea is to introduce the information a little piece at a time in a logical manner. After all the parts are located, have a series of interactive slides that ask the viewer to click on different parts.

Use shapes to make the clickable points. You can add shapes on top of a picture by gong to the “Insert” tab, clicking on “Shapes”, and clicking on a square or circle. Draw a square or circle over the area you want the viewer to click. It normally will draw a filled object. To make it transparent, click on the “Format” tab, click on “Shape Fill” and click “No Fill.” You can now see through the object, but the line is still there. You can leave the line as a general guide, or you can make it disappear as well. If you don’t want the line, click on “No Outline.” However, wait to do that until after you are finished designing the page because you won’t be able to see the object.

To make the object interactive, select the object, click on the insert tab, and click on “Action.“ A dialogue box will pop up that allows you to choose the action you want. First, you choose if the action is from a “click” or a “mouse over.” Then you can choose between a hyperlink, running a program, or running a macro. I like hyperlinks because they are relatively simple to do. The hyperlink can go to any slide in the presentation, an address on the internet, a file, or even another PowerPoint Presentation. If you know the viewer will have online access, you can hyperlink to manufacturer’s web sites to incorporate publicly available information in an organized fashion. Rather than just pointing your students to YouTube, the PowerPoint presentation can direct them to specific YouTube videos that fit in with the lesson.