Establishing Your Lifelines

All indications are that the HVACR Industry wants to help more people become involved in the HVACR trade. Their motivation is not founded in philanthropy, but self-interest. Unions cannot prosper without skilled members, contractors cannot prosper without skilled workers, and everyone needs skilled technicians to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer (unless they live in Australia where keeping warm in the winter is not a problem). Howard Weiss of the ESCO Group recently sent out an message encouraging everyone involved in HVACR to step up to the plate and contribute to the education efforts in our industry. He points out the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 65.6% of HVACR service personnel in the industry in the year 2020 will be people not in the industry today. The whole industry has a stake in education. I believe that one problem is that many of the organizations who are already involved and contributing the HVACR education efforts often have a difficult time getting the word out. Teachers are often busy keeping up day to day and don’t always have the time to investigate instructional materials, scholarships, industry sponsored training, or equipment donations already available. I find that sometimes companies and organizations can’t understand why more schools, teachers, or students don’t respond to their offers. What we have here is a failure to communicate.

Anyone wishing to get instructors involved in their activities needs to plan ahead. Early notice is essential to educators. The educational bureaucracy moves at a slothful pace. The first time I went to the AHRI Instructor’s Workshop, the president of my school had to obtain permission from the state for me to go, even though Pearson was paying my way and I would be speaking at the conference. We have to know months in advance to make things happen.

For manufacturers and trade organizations, you need to market your help the way you market your products and services. One or two e-mails or flyers is just not going to get the job done. You need to make pests of yourselves! It is also a good idea to use more than one method to notify us and to make each promotional piece a little different so that it will be noticed. A good example is the National HVACR Educators and Trainers Conference sponsored by the ESCO Group. They put out e-mails and flyers on a weekly basis months away from the date of their conference. The result is that their conference has sold out two years running in a very tight economy. I know that marketing free or low cost products and services might seem counterintuitive. It is really simply a matter of following a successful model. Persistent marketing works.

As instructors, we need to recognize that we must invest time developing a network of support for our programs. If we wait for the resources we need to just show up, we won't have much to work with. I have several local contractors who donate materials and equipment to my program. A local contractor on my advisory board recently gave our program one of the new Trane Communicating touchscreen thermostats that look like an ipad. What does the contractor get out of the deal? He and most of his employees are graduates of Athens Tech. But all donations do not have to be so elegant. A recent graduate now working in the field brought us a 3 ton ICP heat pump that is less than 2 years old. It was involved in a house fire and was being replaced. Students who needed a job cleaning coils cleaned it up and a student who needed a job installing a split system installed it. I am proud to say that the newest addition to our shop runs great! If you have needs, let someone know. Below is a small list of organizations you can use to start your HVACR support network.

Instructor Networking

• Council of Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Instructors  CARE
• Refrigeration Service Engineers Society RSES

Conferences

• RSES National Conference, November 14-17, 2012
• HVACR & Mechanical Conference, March 11-13, 2013
• National HVACR Educators and Trainers Conference, March 17-20, 2013

Equipment Donations

• AHRI has a program connecting equipment manufacturers to programs with equipment needs. AHRI Equipment Donations
• Appion will donate an Appion recovery unit to your school. Also, if you buy their speed kit, they will donate one of their vacuum pumps. Appion Donations
• AMRAD builds the Turbo 200 multi-capacity replacement capacitors. They will give you one for your class. They will also come to your school and do a class on how to use them. AMRAD donations

Scholarships

• AHRI Rees Scholarship literally has more money than they know what to do with because too few students apply. Let’s change that.
• PHCC Scholorship Foundation gives scholarships each year
• Grainger awards many Tools for Tomorrow scholarships throughout the country which include both financial support and a tool kit

Expensive Top Offs

For years, many technicians and customers have been content to “top off” leaky air conditioning units, feeling the time and expense required to find and repair small leaks exceeded the inexpensive price of adding a few pounds. After all, adding refrigerant is pretty easy, does not take long, and most customers were perfectly happy to have their systems gassed up every so often. With the cost of adding refrigerant steadily rising, the era of cheap “top offs” is coming to an end. Newer units also hold considerably more refrigerant than older models, and the refrigerant is quite costly. A bill of $500 for “topping off” a system is quite possible. At $500, I don’t want to call you back next month for a repeat performance. I want the problem fixed. Customers are going to start demanding that we fix the leaks – not just gas up the units.

The temptation to just add refrigerant is strong. Locating and repairing leaks takes time and there is really not a sure-fire leak test that can prove a charged system has no leaks. We detect the refrigerant coming out to prove a leak. However, not finding any leaks does not necessarily mean there are none – it just proves that you did not find them. Like many things, better tools often yield better results. Everyone should have a good electronic leak detector and good quality soap bubbles that will form micro-bubbles. An ultrasonic detector is also a good idea for detecting leaks using nitrogen. You also need to use the tools enough to feel confident and comfortable using them. A fancy electronic leak detector is not much help if you don't trust it or use it .

Some leaks are really not repairable. Take for an example an evaporator coil with multiple pin-hole leaks. Plug a little hole today and a new one springs up tomorrow. The repair is to replace the coil, which is expensive. However, not replacing the coil is also expensive. Not only is the cost of adding refrigerant quite high, so is the cost of electricity. A system with a leak loses capacity and efficiency from the day it is charged. The unit has to run longer and longer to accomplish less and less, until it simply can’t meet the demand. The combined costs of added refrigerant and increased operational cost can add up to the cost of replacing the coil. Topping the charge off is no longer an easy and inexpensive solution. It is now just the lazy and expensive cop out.

A Father's Perspective

I have a tradition of posting to my blog on father’s day. Typically, I write about what I see from the perspective of a son. This year I am looking from the perspective of a father. I have two children. Both are very talented and have an impressive record of achievement. My daughter just graduated from Vanderbilt which a degree in Biomedical Engineering. My son, a rising junior in high school, was recently accepted to the University of Georgia as a dual enrollment student. He will start taking freshman college classes while he finishes high school. They are both wield more academic prowess than their dad who took 20 years to get his bachelor's degree. 

Music is a family tradition and both my kids are excellent musicians. There is nothing more satisfying than performing with your family. After a recent band concert in which both my son and I played, we took a picture of Grandfather, Dad, Son, and Daughter. A love of music passed from each generation to the next. I believe that my children's musical training has helped them immeasurably in their academic success and their poise. They are both natural leaders – inspiring the people around them to excel. Best of all, they are really nice people. I can't tell you how many times other parents who have had the opportunity to spend time with my kids have told me how impressed they were with them. 

Of course I mention these things to brag, but also to point out that these two outstanding young people are my father’s day gift 24-7. Nothing they can buy can compete with the people they have become. I don’t believe anyone can express in words the emotions, pride, and love a father experiences seeing the babies that he held become an engineer, or rip through a Scott Joplin rag on the piano with gleeful abandon. Although I am in no hurry to be a grandfather, I do hope that my children will both raise children one day. The truth is, you can’t really know how much your parents love you until you are a parent yourself. My children have the intellectual, creative, and interpersonal gifts to make the world a better place for the rest of us. Come to think of it, they already do!

Are You Giving Grades or Recording Them?

I have a sort of electronic life-line to several instructors around the country. They send me ideas, links to helpful information, and point out issues in the book or on MyHVACLab that they would like addressed. One of my e-mail buddies, Gary Reecher at Scott Community College, sends me things from time to time that he believes would help other HVACR Instructors so that I can share them with more folks. Recently he sent a link to an article entitled “Why Some Students Need to Fail” by Melissa Nicolas. If you have been teaching any time at all, you have probably experienced a student who is desperately seeking a lifeline to pull them through the course. The compassionate nature of most teachers tugs at us to help solve the student’s problem. Instructors should work with students who are struggling to help them succeed. However, this help should not extend to giving the student a grade they did not earn. An analogy might be the boat that accompanies a swimmer as they try to swim across the English Channel. The people in the boat can help the swimmer navigate the course, they can provide hydration so that the swimmer stays healthy during the event, they can offer encouragement, and they can rescue the swimmer should it become impossible for the swimmer to continue. What they may not do, is put the swimmer in the boat, deliver them to the opposite shore, and then declare that the swimmer successfully swam the English Channel. Giving a student a passing grade when they have failed is like providing a ride in the boat and then declaring they swam the English Channel. 

In her article, Melissa Nicolas suggests a helpful change of verb for the awarding of a grade. Rather than “giving” grades, you are “recording” grades. In fact, recoding is really a better description. Giving suggests that you are reaching into your bag of goodies and pulling out a gift for each student. Students who receive an inferior grade will naturally feel slighted by their less generous gift. “Oh I am sorry Johnny, I am all out of A’s. How about a nice C+!” They may also see grades as an indication of how much the teacher likes them. Receiving an F not only hurts your grade point average, but also hurts your feelings because the F indicates that the teacher does not like you. Students need to know that their grades are an achievement, not a gift or an entitlement. The instructor is not giving grades, just recording the grades the students have earned. When they make their A, they know that nobody gave it to them, they earned it.

Summer is Capacitor Replacement Season

Any practicing service tech will tell you that service calls involving dead capacitors are common, especially in hot weather. The two most common causes of capacitor death are heat and over voltage. However, there is another less known cause: old age. Many capacitors have a shelf life. I have seen shelf lives listed as little as one year. The oxides on the metalized film break down when the capacitor is not in use, weakening the capacitor. They do tend to self-heal during use. That is why a capacitor which cannot sit on the shelf for longer than a couple of years can last for ten years in use.

Always check the capacitance of any replacement capacitor with a capacitor tester or the capacitance scale on a digital multi-meter before using the capacitor. It may have already died of old age before you install it! A capacitor is a pretty simple device, basically, it is a couple of rolled up sheets of aluminum foil or metalized film with paper or plastic between them. Although a capacitor is a simple device, it is an extremely important part on most air conditioning systems. A bad capacitor can kill a system’s compressor. To protect your reputation and your customer’s equipment, only use capacitors that can pass the EIA-456 Highly Accelerated Life Test. The HALT test subjects a set of capacitors to 125 percent of their rated voltage and 10˚C above their rated temperature for 2,000 hours. For example, a capacitor that is rated at 5uf/440 vac, with an operating temperature of 70˚C, is tested at 550 vac and 80˚C for 2,000 hours.  

Determining which capacitors to stock on your truck is another problem. There are so many sizes of dual capacitors that it is nearly impossible to have all the necessary sizes. American Radionic, AMRAD, has a solution – a multiple capacitor with enough sizes to cover nearly any application. Better yet, they will send instructors sample capacitors to use in your lab. These are great for demonstrating the effect of connecting capacitors in series and parallel. Their web site is AMRAD

Fundamentals of HVAC/R 2nd edition has coverage of capacitors and their effect in circuits in Unit 34 Alternating Current Fundamentals, Unit 37 Electric Motors, and Unit 88 Troubleshooting Refrigeration Systems.

Courage

On this Memorial Day weekend we set aside time to remember the men and women who have given their lives for their country. The bravery and courage of our fallen heroes will be mentioned in speeches, songs, and gatherings all across the country. In a culture steeped in action movies with larger than life characters portrayed by the likes of John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone, it is easy to imagine that the men and women serving in our armed forces are fearless; caring nothing for their personal safety as they conquer the forces of evil in the world. However, courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is fully understanding the peril about you and proceeding anyway to perform your duty. The brave men and women who gave their lives were not cinematic action figures, immune to pain, suffering, or terror. They felt fatigue, pain, anguish, and fear the same as any of us do. Despite all these very human feelings, they found the courage to perform their duty. I hope on this Memorial Day we will also find time to pray for the brave men and women serving around the globe. Every day, fully aware of the peril, they overcome their fatigue, pain, anguish, and fear to perform their duty. That is courage far beyond Rambo. 

Simple Troubleshooting

One of the problems with knowing a lot about possible complex issues is that we tend to look for complex solutions to simple problems. After learning how to measure superheat and adjust expansion valves, we send to see every problem as a problem with the TEV. This is similar to buying a car that you swore you never saw on the road before, and then by next week you notice every other car seems to look like yours. Our brains have a kind of data pre-fetch routine that tries to speed up our recognition of our surroundings that leads us to jump to conclusions. It is just how we are wired. Recognizing this, we need a system to prevent us from confusing ourselves by making incorrect assumptions based on very limited input. This is one of the reasons that systematic troubleshooting saves time in the long run. Having a system helps us avoid the temptation to solve the problem by guessing. Although there are many ways to approach a problem, I try to remember to check easy things first. If you are going to run down a list of things to check first, at least make sure the list includes simple things that don’t take long to check and should normally be checked anyway. For example, it is never wrong to check the air filter. You really should always do this anyway, and trying to check the system operation with a dirty air filter just wastes time. Dirty air filters reduce the airflow, causing a host of other problems such as low superheat, floodback to the compressor, furnaces cycling on the limit, burned heat strips, and generally poor heating and cooling performance. Similarly, it never hurts to take a look at the condenser coil to make sure it is clean. Dirty condenser coils can lead to units tripping on high pressure switches and compressor internal overloads opening. Always check to see that the thermostat is actually set to bring the unit on. Don’t assume that the thermostat is set correctly. Customers often don’t know how to set their thermostats, especially with the newer electronic thermostats. If the thermostat uses batteries, a fresh set of batteries will often cure a thermostat that is acting erratically. While you are at the thermostat, set the fan switch to on. If the fan comes on, you know that you have power to the indoor unit and also control voltage. With digital thermostats that have batteries, seeing a display on the thermostat does not necessarily mean you have control voltage because the display can operate from the batteries alone. If a unit will not operate, you need to check power to the unit first, and then check control voltage. The problem will often become apparent during these initial checks. Even if the problem is not discovered during these preliminary observations, you have eliminated many common problems in a relatively short period of time.