Tech Tips

Business isn’t easy. Generally, when I look back at how much work it has taken to get a business off the ground, I wonder what I would have done if I had known what I know now. I wonder if I still would have been willing to put in all that work all over again. […]

Newer technicians often get hung up and frustrated when searching for low voltage shorts. This is understandable due to the broad spectrum of possibilities for the location of the short. However, this doesn’t mean that the process needs to be complex. The time it takes to find a low voltage short may vary greatly depending […]

Fan laws and fan curves are a deep subject with a lot of nuance and variation. Just to get our heads around the subject, let's focus on two different types of fans that we see all the time in HVAC: the prop/axial type and the radial/centrifugal type. Centrifugal/Radial As we increase the pressure differential across […]

When you first start checking your supply air with a thermo-hygrometer, you may notice that the relative humidity is REALLY HIGH. Often, the RH in a supply duct will be between 85% and 96% relative humidity on a system that is functioning as designed. The reason for this is fairly simple: In order for dehumidification […]

This article was written by Jeremy Smith CM, an experienced refrigeration tech and all-around great dude. Thanks, Jeremy. A very common means of control seen on refrigeration equipment is the pump down control. Why do we use this rather than just cycling the compressor off and on like a residential HVAC unit? Since most refrigeration equipment […]

The old adage goes: “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  For some techs I know, even having a hammer can be challenging. I was pretty new in business, and my first real “employee” hire in the HVAC part of Kalos was my brother, Nathan. Many of you know him, […]

Almost nothing is as de-motivational and soul-sucking as boredom and complacency, and there is often no other place that we experience as much monotony as our work. Here is my top list of four ways to keep from dying of boredom in business. 1. See the Art in Your Work Many of us may be […]

If you live in a dry climate, a humidistat is pretty straightforward; it just turns a humidifier on and off. That's about as simple as it gets. If you are in a humid climate, some people have taken to wiring in humidistats as dehumidistats to help control humidity when they are away. The first thing […]

We can all agree that the future we all would have expected for 2020 when we rang in the new year isn't the one we got. We are all worried and looking to hedge our bets or cut our losses in one way or another, which makes sense. Given what we now know, let's look […]