Building Controls

Upgrade Season

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It is almost comfortable outside. Mother Nature hasn’t yet committed to the warm 70s, but we have a good few days of 50s and 60s ahead. We’re going to have about two months where our HVAC systems can sit nearly idle, untouched and unneeded. This is your ideal corridor for major maintenance and installing new systems altogether. Depending on the scale of your facility, you may well need it. Perfect Weather From a comfort-perspective, the very beginning of Spring is an ideal time. We’re well acclimated to cool weather and the slow move into the low sixties and seventies means we can be comfortable without any HVAC equipment. We can open the windows for a few days and no one is going to be inconvenienced by it. We can shut down the building’s plumbing and install temporary accommodations outdoors and it won’t be painful or disruptive to your employees for a few days. This rare window is different from the fall. Being cold is inherently uncomfortable and harder to compensate for than being too warm going from winter into spring. In the fall, if you get a very cold day, there’s little you can do to heat the building without buying every space heater in the city. In the spring if you get a warm day, tell your employees it’s Casual Friday all week, shorts and t-shirts approved. Open a window or leave the front doors open. The shifting weather […]

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Cooling Tech

Why Are Compressors Measured in Tons?

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When we look at compressors, there are a lot of numbers going around, but one of the bigger ones is the Tons. We sell compressors in all manner of weight-ratings, from less than a ton to hundreds of tons. The thing is though, this doesn’t mean we need a crane and a massive truck to load the compressor before it ships out. Compressor tonage is not actually a measure of weight. In fact, it is the result of some weird and convoluted math and history.   Old Fashioned AC Before we had the modern air conditioner, there were just a handful of ways to actually cool a room or a building. You could open a window, sit in front of a fan, use an evaporative cooler, or get a block of ice. That’s right, once upon a time we didn’t just have “ice boxes”, we had ice-conditioning too. The precursor to modern refrigeration was massive chunks of ice, usually cut from frozen lakes in the north and hastily delivered anywhere cooling was needed. You would go down to your local ice house and buy however much your fridge or cooling system needed. For building-scale cooling, there would be a block of ice essentially placed in a special cabinet in the air ducts and fans would blow air over it. The ice would remove heat from the air and melt. The air would be cooled and circulated around the room or […]

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Cooling Tech

What About the Other Compressors?

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Just how many ways are there to squeeze down a gas? If you look at the entirety of the industrial world, there’s probably a few hundred different devices. If you look at HVAC, luckily the list is a lot shorter. The air conditioning world relies primarily on five compressor designs.   Reciprocating This compressor works pretty much exactly the same as a car engine does, but without the gasoline and combustion. Inside a car you have your cylinders and pistons. When the piston moves up it compresses, when it goes down it sucks. The same principal is used in a reciprocating compressor. At the base of the compressor there will generally be an electric motor, which turns a shaft. The shaft has a bend in it to allow for offset motion. At the bend there’s a connecting rod, which links the shaft to the piston. When the shaft spins, the piston moves up and down. On the downstroke, fresh refrigerant is pulled in. On the up stroke the refrigerant is compressed and injected into the refrigerant loop. This particular design is popular in residential scale compressors. There are more parts involved, so there’s a greater chance of hardware failure, but the well understood nature of the piston and cylinder as well as massive manufacturing tolerances make them cheap to manufacture. Consider, steam engines were around in the 1800s, and this is the same principle as their driving pistons. The complexity […]

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Air Tech

Multizone Systems: The Single Flow Problem

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Over the past several posts, we’ve been hitting on the big deal with multi-zone HVAC Systems. You can attain amazing levels of control over how hot or cold any given room is. That is, except for one problem: you can only really push one “direction” at a time without making things incredibly complex.   One Temperature Change Suppose most of your building is set around sixty eight degrees. Maybe one room wants seventy four and another sixty. The temperature outside is a warm but not unbearable eighty seven degrees. Our multi-zone system kicks in and sends exactly the right amount of cold air to exactly the right rooms as needed to achieve those desired temperatures. All sounds good, right? What if someone wanted their room to be ninety eight degrees? Maybe they’re curing concrete or they’re homesick for some equatorial inferno. This shouldn’t be a problem for our amazing system, right? Just raise the thermostat and hot air will come pouring into the room? We’ve been presenting the most straight forward, affordable, and common multi-zone system: one set of ducts, and one set of pipes. In order to heat that one room above the outdoor ambient temperature, the furnace and cooling system would be running at the same time. They would both be pushing hot or cold material into the building’s one distribution system. The air or water would mix and become the median temperature, something neither hot nor cold […]

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