Tech Tips

Not if you are hungry, anyways— A true story. I have a good friend who owns an HVAC company. Not much of a Ph.D., but he is known to be honest, doesn’t pull vacuums through manifolds, and claims to almost always use American-made capacitors. We’ll call him Captain Kirk. He called me recently, quite worked […]

This tech tip video comes from my friend Andrew Greaves of AK HVAC and HVAC Comedy on Youtube and the HVAC Vehicle Layouts group on Facebook. Many residential techs get confused when they see these multi-position valves in larger equipment, and Andrew does a great job of demonstrating the basics in this video. In the […]

Nomenclature on HVAC/R equipment is a sequence of numbers and letters a manufacturer uses to speak directly to the technician. Lots of initial upfront information is handed to the technician by the manufacturer the moment the technician reads the nomenclature in the model and serial numbers. So, how do we make sense of these seemingly […]

I’ve seen a lot of guys recently who reach for the motor puller tool first thing when attempting to remove a blower motor from a wheel/fan blade. Motor puller tools are an awesome backup tool when needed, but using a motor puller tool shouldn’t be the go-to method of removing a motor. The main issue […]

When I started in the trade in 1999, there were still many oilable blower motors in service. As part of the maintenance, we would remove the housing and oil the motor. We would also vacuum the motor and wipe it down. As oilable motors have become extinct, I see fewer and fewer techs pulling the […]

Dielectric grease is an often misused and misunderstood product that could easily benefit HVAC/R technicians in various ways. From food service to electrical connections, dielectric grease can help lubricate mechanical components and prevent corrosion on electrical connections. But we need to understand what it is in the first place before we can properly apply it […]

I had an old-timer tell me that you can never connect two transformers together because they will “fight one another.” If you are anything like me (and heaven help you if you are), a cartoon in your head starts playing whenever someone says something like that. In this case, I imagine two transformers with boxing […]

In Florida, there are not many gas furnaces—at least not as many as up north. Sometimes, we can look like real dummies compared to techs who work on them every day. One thing to know about 80% gas furnaces with cased evaporator coils is that you can often check the evaporator coil by removing the […]

Let's get something out of the way right off the top: saying that we learn best “hands-on” is sort of like saying we prefer to breathe air. WE ALL NEED TO APPLY THINGS TO LEARN THEM DEEPLY! David Sandler wrote the book You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike in a Seminar, and […]