HVAC/R and Air Conditioning - Why survive SHTF if it gets hot

FieldPiece said:
But haven't done shit with sheet metal/ducts and my school only covered it in the book. For service stuff how often are you gonna be working with sheet metal? Don't want to show up on the first day and look like a total retard.
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Damn near nobody wants to pay for the time/material/labor to get metal ducts installed when you could train an actual chimpanzee to run flex duct. It's just out of fashion. Supply plenums are insulated sheet metal, but you can just buy one that should fit the installation from the supply house you get your equipment from. You just hammer that together into a rectangle. Gone are the days where the boss's most incompetent son would just be banished to the back of the shop to the sheet metal break to smoke weed and make metal bawkses.

Maybe once every ten years some ancient boomer will want to have metal ducts put back in, because that's what he had before, so by God that's what he wants again. But it's just not something that comes up often, unless you're working commercial. It's something you'll learn on the job when it comes up. Learning your way around ductboard and a kerfing tool and duct knife will probably happen long before you ever touch metal ducts beyond the supply collars in residential applications.

As for tools:
A SMALL ICE PICK
Always fucking HATED when screw holes were out of alignment on the cheap wracked ass shit equipment they make, you can use a pick to go through a screw hole in the door cover to the corresponding screw hole in the equipment and force the holes into alignment, that way you dont spend half an hour fighting a fucking door on some banged up piece of shit.
 
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Lmao got the job but it's like 90% dealing with ductwork, one of the things my school didn't teach that much about. They say I should have a Panduit gun which is something I'd never even fuckin heard of before but is even more expensive than my gauges for some reason based off a jewgle search. Eh whatever it's a foot in the door.
 
Fuck I dunno if I can handle this shit. Working on a roughin right now and the plumbers are here. Fucking pajeets. All the windows and doors are boarded up with plywood and I walked into the house and I swear the whole place stinks like poo. It's fucking nasty.
 
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Grub said:
Fuck I dunno if I can handle this shit. Working on a roughin right now and the plumbers are here. Fucking pajeets. All the windows and doors are boarded up with plywood and I walked into the house and I swear the whole place stinks like poo. It's fucking nasty.
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That’s why I stick to service. I don’t miss construction.
 
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Pretend To Imagine said:
That’s why I stick to service. I don’t miss construction.
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I don't mind new construction sometimes. It's nice working on a jobsite with other people and music going and shit. I live in a small town so it's mostly the same tradespeople you see so you're all kind of buddies. The pajeets were from the city. Working in people's houses can be stressful sometimes and you have to deal directly with the customers and people are fucked and some people are just fucking nuts. Personally, my favourite installs are single head minisplits 12,000k btu or smaller so the pipes are 3/8" and 1/4" in a house where nobody's home and it's just a straight shot from the head to the outdoor unit with maybe the electrical thrown in so you can make a full day out of it.

We do installs and service at the place I work. Installs are nice when you finish and the customers are stoked on their new equipment. They can also be huge nightmares. Service can be disheartening. It feels super good when you can fix the problem. But telling the customers they're going to need expensive parts or the regular fuckups from the distributors that lead to more visits and bullshit. Then there's the actual troubleshooting shit. Especially with the fucking digital stuff or anything to do with in floor heating.

We had this customer, we installed his HRV, his general contractor was fairly shady and did the in floor heating himself. He cheaped out and instead of getting a boiler or even an air-water heat pump, he used an electric hot water tank with a buffer tank. It was a $3 million dollar house. It's a big house with two floors. It has like 7 or 8 zones or something like that. The whole fucking thing is just a mess. It's disgusting what that dude did to them. He used janky Chinese pumps instead of grundfoss ones, janky Chinese zone valves, weird red pex piping that wasn't rehau or ipex or any name brand piping that had actually deformed from the heat.

The system basically didn't work at all. The house was basically just constantly cold. So, we got asked to come in and try and fix it. The dude had basically spent all his money, they'd gotten it from an accident settlement, and couldn't afford to replace the equipment or the work it would take to fix it properly, so we had to try and make what he had work. The first thing we found was that three of the pumps had burned out within less than a year, one of them had been shorting out, the electrical terminals and the wiring was black inside of it, it could have burned the fucking house down. Two of the janky Chinese zone valves were dead.

We ended up replacing all of those and then we needed to bleed the system because we figured out there were bad air locks everywhere. He didn't do his manifolds or any of that shit properly so bleeding it wasn't easy. It was like 2 or 3 weeks of stopping there every other day or so and bleeding the pipes and checking every zone to see if it was getting hot and every time it would and still every time we would go back and there'd be more air. Throughout those weeks of bleeding the lines we pretty much determined he fucked up the piping in the floors too. A few of the zones are way too big, the runs are too long and the spacing is fucked. The way he put everything together in the mechanical room was fucked too. Well, it was more like a tiny closet than a mechanical room. By the end, we did the best we could. It was heating up some of the house well other parts not so much. But the whole thing's basically still fucked and needs to be completely redone and even then, still won't work as well as it should because the piping in the floor is fucked too.
 
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I always preferred service to installs.

I had a lot of customer service experience though, and enjoyed the troubleshooting/problem solving aspect so it suited me.
 
I should’ve also mentioned I prefer commercial to residential.

I’d rather deal with people who are spending other people’s money.
 
Worked my new job for a week. Almost nothing from schooling has been applied since I'm doing commercial shit not service shit. Fucking loving it so far though. After working in godawful menial jobs for years where you just do the same shit day after day it's super satisfying to have a job where I'm learning something new every day. All my coworkers are felons but they're funny as fuck.

Is using a grinder to cut round duct standard? It's what we've been doing and I've been wondering why we don't just use a reciprocating saw instead. Don't mind it since using a grinder is always fun (ooooohhh pretty sparks) but it seems like a recip saw would do the job faster.

I feel like this shit is genuinely improving my life. Felt happier than I have in a long time ever since the first day.
 
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FieldPiece said:
Is using a grinder to cut round duct standard? It's what we've been doing and I've been wondering why we don't just use a reciprocating saw instead. Don't mind it since using a grinder is always fun (ooooohhh pretty sparks) but it seems like a recip saw would do the job faster.
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Grinder for heavier gauge, electric shears for lighter gauge. The saw is a little less messy, and will work, but the grinder is easier.

Wear hearing protection unless you wanna end up with tinnitus. I have tinnitus and it’s not fun. Also eye protection, because having someone use a scalpel and tweezer to remove metal from your eye isn’t fun either.
 
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FieldPiece said:
They say I should have a Panduit gun which is something I'd never even fuckin heard of before but is even more expensive than my gauges for some reason based off a jewgle search.
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It's a strap gun/tie-tensioning tool, homie. Google sure will recommend you some clown ass looking shit. Hope you didn't already buy a $400 strap gun, when you should be able to get a normal hand-ratcheting one for about $30~40 or so.

panduit gun.jpg
 
My HVAC guys are offering me a deal on a Reem Halo UV duct purifier thing. It sounds cool but reviews on this kind of technology are hit or miss. Opinions?
 
Schpoots said:
My HVAC guys are offering me a deal on a Reem Halo UV duct purifier thing. It sounds cool but reviews on this kind of technology are hit or miss. Opinions?
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Who knows. Is it always on? How much of the air is exposed? What's the frequency of light? What's the power, and how long do you expect it to stay at that power?

Anyway, for all UV stuff, you need a filter before it for sure. Otherwise the UV will mostly be hitting dirt and not germs.
 
I HATE DOUBLE WALL SPIRAL PIPE
I HATE DOUBLE WALL SPIRAL PIPE
I HATE DOUBLE WALL SPIRAL PIPE
 
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