Southface

The Georgia State Consortium of Air Conditioning Instructors met on October 25 at Southface in Atlanta. Southface is a non-profit agency devoted to energy efficiency and sustainability in buildings and communities. In keeping with their ideals for sustainability, Southface does not allow bottled water, box lunches, or  syrofoam cups in their facilities. I must admit, I was a little put out with all the rules. “Who do these people think they are?” But then I realized, they are actually practicing what they preach. They know who they are. A sponsor, Technical Training Aids, graciously provided our lunch wthin the confines of all the rules and it was great. We gathered there to hear about what Southface could offer and tour their facilities. They provided an overview of the new residential energy efficiency code and its application in Georgia. All new residential construction in Georgia is required to pass a blower door test and all new duct systems must pass a duct blaster test for tightness. Those two requirements are the big ones for HVACR contractors. Further, the people performing the test must be state certified to perform it. They get certified by taking a relatively short course that lasts less than a week and then passing a performance test. So at least in Georgia, installing tight duct systems is no longer an “add on” for the better homes, but a requirement. Although there will certainly be many contractors that will regard all this as a pain, at least one in Athens sees it as an opportunity. Anytime he sells a high efficiency changeout, he quotes a duct seal and wrap upgrade. A seal and wrap consists of removing the old duct insulation, sealing the duct, re-installing the old insulation, and insulating over the old insulation. The duct blaster is used to measure the duct leakage before and after the job to document the improvement. So even if you don’t work in Georgia, you might consider promoting duct sealing and insulation. If your competitors don’t do it, that is a way to differentiate yourself from them. Most homeowners can easily understand that leaky ducts cost them money. For many systems, sealing and insulating the ducts will improve system efficiency even more than installing a new high SEER system.

Making Connections

Most curriculums, courses, and books are organized in a manner that resembles house construction. You lay the foundation and then add to that foundation as the material gets progressively more complex. The idea is to present the information in an orderly manner so that complex concepts can be understood. I believe that teachers have been using this general scheme for centuries. I also believe teachers have been frustrated for centuries when they discover that the reason the students don’t understand a higher level concept is that they really don’t make the transition from one conceptual level to another. The problem is that learning is really not too much like stacking bricks, but more like wiring circuits. We have to make connections to learn. It is not enough to present material in an orderly and logical fashion, we must also make connections between different pieces of information. Every chance you get, you need to show how one piece of information connects to another. The more mental connections the students make, the more likely they are to remember the information. Students sometimes ask how a particular piece of information is relevant. I believe what they are trying to say is that they don’t have anything to tie the information to. Random, disconnected facts are quite difficult to remember, and are not normally particularly useful. I like the Bing commercials where people blurt out a series of largely unrelated facts that are essentially useless because there is no logical connection between them. To students, I am sure our lectures can sometimes sound like one of these commercials. I try to connect ideas together – showing how one part of a system affects the others, how pressure is related to temperature, how resistance is related to current – you get the picture. Relationships and connections between ideas are just as important as a carefully crafted sequence of information. This is not to suggest that building a foundation of information is wrong, I would just use the analogy of a framework instead. A framework can allow connections in more than one direction. Understanding a few fundamental physics concepts provides a framework for understanding both refrigeration and electricity. Taken by itself, physics can be pretty dry stuff until you realize that it describes the world around us. Once the students start making connections linking concepts together the whole process can go viral – they start finding their own connections and asking their own questions. This can be a bit scary because you no longer have total control of the flow of information or questions, but it produces an energized, lively class. More importantly, when the students start connecting concepts they are taking an active role in their learning and are far more likely to retain the information.

Electric Heater Resistance - A Moving Target

Most people know that inductive loads such as electric motors draw more current when they start. Did you know that this is also true of most electric strip heaters? The resistance of a conductor increases as its temperature increases. This is true of the nichrome wire used in electric heaters. The heater resistance is less when the heating coil is cold than after it heats up. The increase in resistance causes a decrease in current. In short: an electric heater draws a little more current when it starts than after it heats up. The difference for an electric strip heater is nothing like the huge surge that a motor has, but it is measurable. For incandescent light bulbs, the difference is huge because the temperature difference between hot and cold is much greater. An incandescent light is basically a heater that gets white hot and gives off light. Lights don’t work for Ohm’s Law experiments because their resistance hot is around 10 times as high as their resistance cold. Many years ago I tried having students do Ohm’s Law calculations with lights – it just does not work. The readings were so far off, that the results did not make sense.  I tried to put the difference down to measurement error, but the readings were always similar. Screw in cone heaters work better, but if you put enough current through them for them to get red hot, their resistance will increase and your readings will still be a little off. At least they are in the ballpark. It is something of a catch 22. To measure resistance an ohm meter puts a small amount of voltage across a resistance and measures the current, and then determines the resistance based on the amount of current that flows through the resistance. The problem is that the resistance changes when different amounts of current flow through the same device, based on the temperature change of the device.  Remember that the resistance is turning the electricity into heat, and the heat changes the resistance of the device. Fortunately, the relatively small difference we see in electric strip heaters does not create a substantial problem for us, but it does raise questions when trying to demonstrate Ohm’s Law. If you want to reduce the amount of error introduced by the temperature change, just work with lower voltages and current levels. Use a typical electric strip heater, but only put 50 volts through it. The current and voltage are still measureable and the results will be much closer to what Ohm’s Law predicts. I know there are probably many skeptics reading this, so I challenge you to prove it to yourself. Take a heater, a variable voltage source, a voltmeter, and an ammeter. Read the current draw of the heater at several voltages ranging from just enough voltage to get a current reading to the full voltage the heater can take. Then calculate the resistance using Ohm’s Law by dividing the measured current into the measured voltage. You should see that the resistance is higher at higher voltages because the heater is getting hotter. Have Fun! 

Combustion Air - Don't Forget It!

I am re-posting an article from October 2009 when I talked about combustion air because I believe failure to check the combustion air is a common error in performing gas furnace service.

The arrival of fall brings the start of gas and oil fired furnace seasonal checks. An easily overlooked problem with gas and oil furnaces is lack of combustion air. Although most technicians understand the necessity of adequate combustion air, it is easily overlooked if the technician views their job as servicing appliances rather than systems. Most school shops have no combustion air issues because they are typically great big leaky rooms. On the other hand, the newer homes your students are likely to see are typically very tight, requiring installers and service technicians to be conscious of the need for combustion air.  I believe we should stress the consequences of inadequate combustion air. Most students understand that air is required for combustion and that new air must constantly be brought in to replace the air that was just used in the combustion process. They should understand that the carbon and hydrogen in the fuel are combining with the oxygen to make carbon dioxide and water, the normal products of complete combustion.  You can then explain that if there is not enough oxygen, carbon monoxide and unburned carbon will start to form because there is not enough oxygen to complete the combustion process. As the combustion process continues in a room with inadequate combustion air, the pressure in the room becomes negative. This will reduce the effectiveness of the vent. In bad cases the combustion products can start to spill out of the vent. Now you have a scary situation: a combustion process producing carbon monoxide and combustion gasses spilling out into the room! I have heard of cases where smoke from fireplaces in newer homes comes rolling out into the room when the furnace comes on because the house simply does not have enough combustion air for both the fireplace and the furnace. Technicians should look for combustion air grills and vents when servicing furnaces. Typically there should be an opening or grille near the ceiling and another near the floor. If the grille opens directly to the outside the free area of the grille should be at least one square inch for every 4,000 Btuh of combined input rating. If the combustion air must travel through vertical ducts the ducts must also have a free area of at least one square inch for every 4,000 Btuh. If the air must travel through horizontal ducts, the grille and the ducts must be larger. They must have a free area of at least one square inch per 2,000 Btuh. Draft measurements and room pressurization measurements can tip off technicians to combustion air problems. Because a draft gauge measures the vent pressure relative to the room pressure, inadequate combustion air will cause the draft reading to decrease the longer the furnace operates. An absolute pressure reading of the room will show that the room pressure is decreasing as the furnace continues to operate without adequate combustion air. A quick test is to introduce more combustion air near the furnace by opening a window or door to the outside. If the draft increases when the window is opened and decreases again when it is closed, the room needs more combustion air. For more a more detailed discussion of combustion air check out Unit 37 Gas Fired Heating Systems, Unit 40 Gas Furnace Installation, Startup, Checkout and Operation, Unit 41 Troubleshooting Gas Furnaces, and Unit 44 Residential Oil Heating Installation in Fundamentalsof HVAC/R.