Tech Tips

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 […]

I wrote this years ago, but now this feels like a season of tough decisions. I hope this helps. When you run a small business, you are called upon to make hundreds of decisions, both large and small, but sometimes, there comes a tough decision you REALLY don’t want to make. It’s times like these […]

This picture is from a recent call I ran that clearly had an interesting past. It had a condensate pump to pump the water just a few feet up to a drain that went to a common drain. The “cleanout” after the trap is supposed to be a vent, not a cleanout, which means it […]

Today, I ran a service call with another tech where the previous tech had diagnosed an intermittent piston restriction. I read the history beforehand. For the past several years, there were many assorted comfort complaints and a lot of minor charge adjustments in both the summer and winter. It is worth noting here that the […]

I’ve always opposed the practice of grabbing a hub puller as the first method of removing a blower. This video by Brad Hicks with HVAC in SC on YouTube demonstrates the exact method I use to safely remove a blower wheel without damaging anything. Thanks, Brad! Transcript What’s going on, guys? Here’s another 60-second tech […]