We’ve done it again! It seems to be about a pattern right now, running like clock work. Every two years or so, we tear up our site and build it anew. It’s exhausting, but it keeps us on the cutting edge of technology. We’re always looking for the next big thing to make everyone’s lives just a little easier. A Brief History of Our Site 2010 – Procure Inc. Goes Digital This brings back some memories. Our first take on a website was definitely a product of it’s time. It was a simple, static web site coded in bare bones HTML 4, running on a tiny shared hosting set up for $8/month. Life was a little simpler back then. Most kids didn’t have smart phones, Netflix was still better known for their DVD service, and most of our orders were faxed in. (A note from Scott: This may have gone live in 2008. This is just the last archive copy of it.) 2012 – A Real Store Quite a leap forward from our last update. In 2012 the store moved to an actual store platform. Our lines were online, you could login, place orders, and search our product offerings. It was the first actual store we had. No longer just some simple ad floating on the internet. 2013 – The First Face Lift This is getting to look a bit more familiar. Running on a dedicated platform made it MUCH […]

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We’ve covered how Radon is bad for your home and business. We’ve covered how IAQ is important. What about the one place where the two mix: history. The greatest development for air quality, the High Efficiency Particulate Air Filter (HEPA Filter) exists because of radioactivity and a need for workers to survive in a very, very dangerous workplace. Working With Atoms In the 1940s the world was at war. Numerous countries were deep into nuclear research. The US had its Manhattan Project, Germany had the Uranprojekt or Uranium Club, and Japan had Ni-Go. The problem with working on nuclear materials is that they can kill you before you’ve ever noticed. They directly emit radiation, but far more deadly is the potential to create radioactive dust and gasses. Little chunks of your nuclear material or nuclear byproducts that float in the air. This is the same issue you face with Radon. Uranium and other nuclear materials produce something dangerous that gets into the air. The issue is a bit scarier with things like the Manhattan Project. At least in your basement you’re dealing with lesser radioactive gasses and particles. Still deadly, but at least you can’t expose a sheet of x-ray film with them. In the lab and nuclear production facilities, this wasn’t a matter of working through allergies, though the causes were the same size. This was a matter of walking into a room, taking a breath of contaminated air, […]

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Now is about the best time to be upgrading your air conditioning hardware, at least for the Northeast US. If you’re going to install a new air conditioner, you want to do it when the weather is warm and pleasant. If you don’t need the AC, good time to install new hardware. If the weather is nice, good time AND it’ll be easier for your contractors. That really only happens about once a year: spring. Of course, what do you do if you’ve blown through that window? It’s going to be 100 degrees out, the air so humid you can practically drink from it, and neither your customers nor your employees will want to work in a 120+ degree building. You can’t afford to not have AC, can you? Traveling AC Luckily for you, even industrial air conditioners are relatively light. Yes, an industrial cooling system STILL weighs in at tens of thousands of pounds, but we can put that on a trailer without too much hassle. It’s portable in the sense that it costs thousands of dollars to ship instead of being a multi-hundred thousand dollar project like fabricating a custom solution on site. It’s something feasible for your business. In these circumstances, there are specialist providers who have literally designed full HVAC systems to fit into standard semitrailers. Typically these systems are designed to interconnect to scale up capacity and require relatively minimal work to be installed. In […]

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You’re going to upgrade your facility with a new, rooftop packaged system or air conditioner. The inspectors are coming, they’re going to do some measurements, and ask ‘if I put 12 tons of metal on this roof, what’s going to happen?’ For the common person, two thoughts probably spring to mind: ‘this ends in tears’ or ‘that roof’s been there for 50 years, and it’ll be there for 50 more.’ For the scientist and engineer, we look to numbers to find out. Basic Principles We’ll start with the concept of load. A load is anything pressing down on our structure. We have two types of load: dead load and live load. The dead-load is essentially the structure itself. It’s the weight of the rafters, walls, structure, everything that is the building. Live load is everything we put on that structure, everything that the user could move or have moved. In working on the building, we need to first understand the forces it puts on itself. You find out what materials are in play, calculate approximations of their weight, and then you can say “these two stretches of roofing material are applying a force of 3 kN on the two beams under them.” Then we can say “each of these beams is putting down 1.5kN + their weight in KN on the walls/supports holding them.” We essentially build a map of where the forces are all going, and how big those […]

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Fuel-based heating systems are straight forward, right? We blast a fuel source into a combustion chamber, then we expose it to a low flame, enough electricity to disintegrate Zeus, or a really hot heating element, and boom, it combusts, creating heat and exhaust. What about electricity though? We can’t burn that. Friction is Key There are a lot of set ups available to create electrical heat. You could use an electrically powered heat pump for example. That’s not really electric heat though, it only works if there’s somewhere to take heat from. It’s electrically facilitated heat. What makes heat directly from electricity? The short answer is friction. When we move an electrical current through anything, we are moving electrons. The electrons are gong to effectively slide against or impact the molecules in the wire. This causes the electron to lose some energy to those particles, giving them energy, and causing the material to heat up. Resistance is Futile The friction in wiring like this is called Resistance. We can measure it in ohms. More ohms means more heat and a lot less current passing through the resistor. Most resistors are small components inside the electronics around your home or office. They can be used to lower currents, divide voltages, and other work in small electronics. A big resistor however, can be the heart of a furnace or portable heater. A heating resistor like this is going to work one of […]

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