Tales from the trenches, stories forged in the fires of experience.
This episode brought to you by meanHVAC, providing industry-leading residential HVAC design training.
Learn more at meanhhvac.com.
All right, everyone.
Thank you so much for joining us once again on Did You Know?
The ESCO HVAC Podcast.
So we're hanging out with Alex Meaney from meanHVAC.
How's it going, man?
It's going well.
Clifton, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
So we're hanging out here at the 2024 National HVACR Education Conference.
You'll probably hear some background noise as people are tracking through.
But we're having a lot of fun.
We're spending a lot of time focusing on education, focusing on how to better deliver content,
spending time with our manufacturers, looking at new technologies and new refrigerants and
innovations.
And that's wonderful stuff.
But sometimes we overlook some of the simple stuff in life, don't we?
Yeah, for darn sure.
So let's spend a little bit of time doing some, I think that's almost like myth busting.
It is a bit like I've called it myth busting more than once in the past.
It is a pretty apt term.
Yeah, because when we think about where our industry has came from and where it's going,
there's a lot of things that have changed in our industry over time.
So like the transitions we're doing now, it's nothing new.
We do it all the time.
But there's some things that just kind of linger around that never get weeded out.
And a lot of times those are bad habits.
And the reason they're simple things is because they're buried pretty deep.
Yeah, absolutely.
They're foundational pieces of information for some of us.
And it can be tough to think about those things not being true and what the implications are
for everything else you understand about the industry.
It wasn't until I was an educator that I started learning my bad habits.
That's really when it happened.
It's not great advice for the people receiving the education, but if you want to learn something
well, try to teach it to somebody.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
You will start to understand it.
I understand this.
I can teach it to somebody.
And then you have to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and talk about it and think about
it from their perspective.
It always gives you a new perspective on the topic, no matter how deep of an expert you
are.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's very important that we do that.
For me, the first time I started relooking at myself is I started focusing on our, at
that time I wasn't even working for ESCO, was for the certified subject matter expert
certifications, just to test myself, to see how I was.
I went back to school for two years of night school and I got a master electrician license
and I was like, shoot, I'm going to start on electrical.
And I started on electrical and I went, oh my gosh, I really don't know a lot.
I can really take it deep.
I can really take a deep electrical.
I wrestle with that a lot myself.
It was actually one of the places I'm like, you know, I need to be a little more involved
with the knowledge from the field.
Most of what I do is pen, paper, computer stuff.
And I'm always looking for ways to tie it closer to the day to day job.
And so I would try to learn some aspects of this.
Absolutely.
Modern refrigeration, all that stuff.
And when I thought, yeah, I'll start with electrical.
I think I understand the basics of this.
I tinker, I do some stuff, some low voltage projects and things like that.
And then, oh my goodness, did that just smack me in the mouth as soon as I said, oh my God,
I thought I understood this.
So what are some of the biggest, I think probably pet peeves of some of the things that are
in the industry that we really should take some time and refocus on them?
Well, it's one of those things that we end up with these misconceptions because somebody
taught them to us.
You probably use the phrase a lot, tribal knowledge is often how we describe how most
people learn the HVAC trade.
And by the way, you don't have to be an educator to be educating.
If you've got a helper on the job site, you're an educator.
You are there.
Yep.
And so we are often taking people with maybe a little bit of mechanical aptitude and a will
to work for sure.
And we need to get them over the other side where they can be a skilled technician and
be able to do those things.
And man, there's a lot of really complicated like math and things that go between those
two points.
And we want to get them over to that other side real fast and get them productive and
contributing and whatnot.
And so we arm them with these rules of thumb and say, okay, so this is how many square
feet you need per ton.
And a lot of the people who are pardon the expression of guilty of doing this really
only intended as like a placeholder.
It's like, for now, but they don't always do a great job of saying this is just a placeholder.
Like this isn't exactly true, but this will get us through.
They don't take the time to be like, hey, don't put too much weight on this.
You're going to have to learn more about this later.
But for now, we can talk about it.
And like, if I could have like one thing I could say to the rank and file of people who
are showing people around the job is be aware of that.
Like, you know, it's not necessarily true.
And it's a pain in the butt to always preface what you say with that kind of thing.
But it's really important because we will then have people walk away from that thinking
that what they learned was that that's how it works.
And then they build another piece of knowledge on that and another piece of knowledge on
that and another piece of knowledge on that.
And you come to knock out that base, right?
You're going to pull the Jenga block from the bottom of the tower and you can knock
a whole bunch of things over.
And so like I over the years, you got your how many square feet per ton?
How many CFM per ton?
What what what friction rate?
What a lot of people call the static pressure, but it's not what you're called out by a few
people in the industry.
I mean, I'm in there.
Yeah, static pressure per 100 feet.
Yeah, or static pressure loss per 100 feet.
But basically what duck you later number should we be using?
And the thing is, is we all know that, well, none of those things are like true, right?
Like my favorite mental you can do this without looking at anything.
My favorite mental mental exercise for coming to terms with it's not about square footage,
right?
Like a lot of us kind of already know that.
But some of us are like really adamant that this this many square feet needs this many
tons.
And so I tell people I want you to picture a two ton house.
And we're going to pretend there's such a thing as a two ton house.
This is me doing that thing.
It's more complicated than that.
But let's say there's such a thing as a two ton house picture it in your head, make it
a one story and rectangular shaped.
And then I don't care how big you make it out of your windows you put in it.
This is in your mind, a two ton house.
Now picture four of those on a two by two grid.
Okay, one, two, three, four, two by two grid makes a big box.
Now smush them together and make one big house out of that.
Okay, what just happened to half of the walls and windows of that building?
Yeah, they disappeared.
They just disappeared.
Yeah, that is not going to be eight tons.
It's probably going to be closer to five.
This is a whole lot less window and wall area.
This is that is that's making your first jump into a very large home.
If you've been dealing with small scale buildings a lot is terrifying because the building is
big.
And homeowners are rich.
They look at that and they and maybe they do math, maybe they do a load calculation.
And they go, you got to be kidding me.
This needs half the amount of tonnage per square foot as these other crappier buildings.
That doesn't make sense.
But it's it's because there's less outside area for all the inside area.
But and you don't have to take huge lessons away from that.
The only thing I want to take away from that is like, oh, maybe I shouldn't rely on square
footage.
It's not very reliable.
And it's not.
You can you can look at, oh, well, the Ford or CFM Bruton thing is open a book like that.
That one is the manufacturer's guidelines.
We lost Ford or CFM Bruton a long, long time ago.
And I like to think of it as this is this is a tool in your hands, man.
Using airflow allows you to boost efficiency or boost latent capacity, a.k.a. moisture
removal, change noise, you know, issues.
So like this is something it's not always needing to be this thing handed down from
on high.
Different air flows cause different results.
And if you look up what the performance is, you can get those results like we're in.
We simultaneously will believe I'm in control of this, but also that every, you know, two
tons system is 800 CFM.
Yeah, right.
I'm guilty of that myself.
I can remember being taught in the industry that if it was AC in the Midwest, it was 400
CFM of his heat pump.
It was 450.
And it was a decade later before I realized that that was just a placeholder.
And there wasn't any calculation in that.
And it was the cheat sheet that really didn't have much benefit because I didn't learn what
it did.
Yeah.
And when you're when you're on a job site and you need to do some quick and dirty back
of the envelope, cocktail napkin math.
I love these things.
I'm not saying like there was a point where, you know, the real big one is 12,000 BTUs
in a ton.
Yeah.
That one is that one's tough.
And maybe we'll we'll address that.
But like when you are out there and you need to get the job done and you don't have access
to the manuals in the books and the things that you need, there are tools out there,
by the way, that will help you with that.
Yeah.
Want to look into them.
Having access to something quick and dirty, but ballpark correct is extremely useful.
But treating it as though it's something other than, you know, like a given ballpark.
Yeah.
That's where you get it.
That's where you get into trouble.
The BTUs for ton thing is probably the biggest one.
I I tried to eliminate the term ton from my vocabulary.
I get that.
Wow.
Yeah.
Just to see if I could do it.
Turns out I can't, by the way.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
No, BTUs didn't work for you.
You know, if you want to have a conversation with somebody in the HVAC industry, it's just
not possible.
They don't speak.
Yeah.
It's not impossible.
Well, I didn't speak it.
Yeah.
Right.
Like it wasn't them.
It was me.
Like I wanted to say this three ton unit here.
I was saying what was I going to say at thirty six thousand me to unit?
No, that's the whole point.
It's not right.
So what am I going to call it?
Right.
The unit that has a thirty six in it, like the term tons as a ballpark tool.
Very useful.
The term tons as something that implies any amount of precision and calculation.
Yeah.
That's where we start to run into trouble.
So like everybody, anybody who's ever looked at like an HRI certificate or an HRI number
or whatever knows that like three tons is a thirty six thousand.
You look at it, it's like a three thousand.
Oh, this is only a thousand BTUs away from a three and a half ton.
But it is a three ton.
Yeah.
And here's the thing.
That's actually be two and a half.
Yeah.
It doesn't go down.
But yeah, you're close to something else.
But if you if you look at that number, even that number is useless.
HRI data is not meant for HVAC contractors.
It's meant for power companies and homeowners.
For calculation.
Yeah.
And yeah, not load calculation, not design calculation, just energy calculation.
We just say that.
Yeah.
HRI test the equipment with a steady state return, meaning constant temperature and humidity
return of 80 degrees with a 67 degree wet bulb.
Right, well, that's 50 percent relative humidity if your homeowners are keeping their house
at 80 degrees.
Yeah.
Got a lot of homeowners keeping houses 80 degrees.
Last time the homeowner said 80 sounds great.
Yeah.
Now you get somebody down in Florida, you know, senior living.
Sometimes that is actually that is what they're shooting for.
But that's the conditions they tested on there.
If you go to the manufacturer's data and you look up what it is in the real world under
your conditions, you can find shocking drops in capacity.
Isn't it crazy?
I used to have a devil of a time training load calculations in, well, a place like we're
in right now, Las Vegas, right?
Or Arizona or someplace like that.
Because you do the load calc and you look at the numbers at the end of the day and there's
no way if you if you started by thinking HRI gave me some useful information and then you
looked at a load calculation you did, you are going to undersize the ever living heck out
of that system in a desert climate.
Like it's going to be bad.
The problem was that people were blaming the load calculation for being wrong.
And in actuality, the load calculation was great.
The wow, that really picked up.
In actuality, the load calculation was great.
It was it was fine.
It was accurate.
What was inaccurate is these capacity numbers that we assumed were from that we assume were
correct from HRI.
When it's 105 degrees outside or more, your BTUs per ton is going to be closer to 28,000.
I mean, excuse me, 8,000 BTUs per ton.
Sorry, in my head, I was doing three times again.
So when you're in places like like where we are now, Las Vegas, Phoenix, dry, yeah, hot
and dry, that's actually a really big part of it.
You can do so I teach load calculations is one of the things I teach.
Yeah, probably the main thing I teach.
And you can do a really good like let's just say there's such a thing as a perfect load
calculation, you could do that.
And if you live in in Las Vegas or Phoenix or one of these places, it's going to tell
you that you know, you need 25,000 BTUs of cooling, right.
And all of that sensible, no latent.
And you're going to look at that and you're going to say, man, that's a three ton unit
all day.
Like I've been working at they've built like nine versions of this house.
And it's all over the same actually both of these cities are places where you get like
the same house over and over and over.
You've been inside this same house, you know, 10 times in the last week.
It needs a three ton.
Yeah, it does.
Because in the desert, you're not going to get anywhere near 36,000 BTUs or even anywhere
near the HRI rated capacity of the unit, because it is more energetic to remove moisture from
the air.
Right.
If hot, if you like one of my favorite ways to think about it is you're making Thanksgiving
dinner, you preheat the oven, you open the oven.
If your face is too close to the oven, you're going to blast a hot air in the face.
It's not that big a deal.
And if you put the oven in the turkey in the oven, you leave it in there for a couple hours
steam up a little bit of steam up a little bit, you open that up and it's steam hits
you in the face, your face might be red for the rest of the day.
It's a much that condensation is a very energetic reaction.
And so when you take it away, the air conditioner is not absorbing as much heat.
And so the BTUs go down.
Right.
And now I have to reject that heat to get rid of it.
Right.
And so I'm going to go outside, well, is it easier to get rid of that heat?
You know, if the job of the outdoor unit is to get rid of heat, aka cool things down,
is it easier to cool down on a 90 degree day or 110 degree day?
Right.
It's a no brainer.
Yeah.
But we've learned that this is a three ton unit and it has 36,000 BTUs.
And so it really looks like that's a terrible load calculation.
It's all wrong.
And this is all BS.
Well, you're part right.
It's not all BS, but what you thought was BS was the right part.
And what you thought was the right part was incorrect.
Yeah.
It's that 12,000 BTUs per ton.
Yeah.
And that's so a three ton in Indiana is not a three ton in Texas.
Yeah.
And probably neither one of them were actually a three ton.
Well, and that's the thing.
The term ton.
All right.
So it would just one on one.
I don't like to ask trick questions of large groups, but how many BTUs are in a ton?
Do you know the actual answer?
Was 11,009 change?
Oh, that's actually really close.
So it's, this is going to sound like a punch line.
That's really close.
It's actually 286,000.
But if you take 286,000 BTUs, which by the way is the amount of energy it takes to melt
one ton of ice.
Yes.
And if you divide that by the 24 hours in a day, you get 11,900 in a little bit of change.
And that's where our concept of a ton comes from.
Guys, if you're not using ice melting systems, it's a bogus number.
It's a rough number.
It's a very, very rough.
Right.
Now there are definitely patterns when you stop moving around the country like I do,
right?
Like this is outdoor temperature and your area doesn't change very much.
And so you'll see some, and hopefully your indoor conditions are mostly 75 and 63 and
that ballpark.
So you'll see some consistency, but it's not going to match AHRI and it's certainly not
going to match 12,000 BTUs for sure.
Absolutely.
Especially start crossing them state lines in a new territory being in states that have
different, you know, we were just talking here.
I didn't realize that we had snow in just outside of Vegas.
Oh yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
So, you know, elevation plays a big factor into that.
And so now we're relooking at the capacity of those systems.
And I think it's for too long, we've used some of those standardized numbers and never
explained.
Why were we even using them?
And again, I have no problem with their existence or their use.
Like I don't, it's possible that when I was younger and dumber, I would, you know, say
use them.
That's not correct.
No, no.
More like that's not correct.
And like be scolding and shaming.
Like you shouldn't, you shouldn't say that.
It's not 12,000 BTUs per ton.
And then I started to realize, wait a minute, we're taking a kid who, you know, knows nothing
to start with and we're going to throw them out and we're going to have to start having
them diagnose systems within a couple of years.
We're going to have to use some temporary concepts to get them to that point.
I think the problem is, is we don't tell them it's temporary often enough.
No.
Right.
Some people do, but we very often, and that's the problem is it keeps getting passed down
that way.
Right.
Like I was having a conversation with somebody earlier, it was a local distributor in his
area.
And they charged money for the class and they told them one inch filters are less restrictive
than four inch filters.
Yeah, guys, that's not true.
Unless you're talking about a one inch blue filter.
Yeah, exactly.
If we're not, if we're not talking to the same media, the same Merv level or the same
as possible, but actually for the same Merv level in media, the four inch filter is actually
going to be the less restrictive one.
But like the people in that room paid money for a quote unquote expert to teach them how
this works.
And they just told him something that's straight up false.
Yeah.
Like the number of things we, and that person probably had the same experience.
Like it's, it's really hard to root this stuff out, but you know, it's something we have
to be very careful with because that's, it gets lost in the train.
The tribal knowledge process is things get lost in the translation as it gets handed
down, something gets tweaked chains, lost, whatever.
And it really ends up biting us in the rear later down the road.
I think technology and social media has actually given us the opportunity to challenge some
of that because there are so many things that we get used to and somebody else like yourself
says something and we go, I was never taught it that way.
Was I taught wrong?
Well, maybe not taught wrong, just not taught the entire scenario.
You were taught incompletely.
You were taught good enough to get it to here.
Yeah.
But if you want to go level up to the next level, you've got to go back and deep, more
deeply understand some of those fundamentals.
I had an interesting conversation a little bit ago with one of our Spanish speaking friends,
educator that has a school for teaching Spanish.
And I was asking him about what content he was our content that we needed to convert
to Spanish that would make his job easier.
He said, no, I will not teach in Spanish.
I will only teach in English.
I said, well, that's interesting.
So why is that?
He says, because if I teach them in Spanish, I'm not teaching them the full scenario because
they're going to go out there and they're going to have a book that's in English.
Exactly.
This and you're going to be working with English customers.
And so what I teach you in Spanish, you're actually going to have to relearn when you
get out into the industry.
So if I have opportunity to explain to you now, it'll make more sense later.
And I thought that's really interesting.
It helped my it changed my perspective a little bit, but it kind of goes back into this.
Why teach something that is not 100% correct unless we absolutely say this is something
to give you a reference for us to dive deeper later.
You know, I had a conversation with a trainer for a large contracting company and I will
leave the products in their brands out of it.
But there were two product lines and there are a lot of differences between them, but
one of them is significantly easier to use and the other is a little more technically
accurate and has more bells and whistles.
And I was saying, you know, it's great.
This other product, product A is super simple and easy to train and easy to onboard.
And he said, yeah, no, that's why we quit using them.
And I was like, what?
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
So we were using the product B, we switched over to product A and we could, man, we could
teach people how to do this.
Like we'd take them in an afternoon and we'd send them out the next day and they were doing
it.
And he said, and it made all of our techs dumb because they didn't have to understand
the damn thing.
Yeah.
They just had to do the fire up, make the numbers here.
And yeah, yeah.
And so when it came time for that next step of like, okay, so I have the numbers and I
did the tests properly.
Now what?
What do I mean?
Yeah.
What do I, how do I apply this?
How do I make it recommend solutions?
How do I, it took people way away from that.
And it turned out that it was a whole lot more difficult to get them because that next
level was making recommendations, making action plans, scopes of work, things like that.
Well, if, if your baseline knowledge isn't deep enough, it's really hard to get to those
things.
And so you can, you can learn the, some of these basic things and it will get you working
and it will get you in the field and you can do certain things.
But when it comes to that next level of like, I, everybody's scratching their head on this
one.
How do I diagnose this?
It diagnosed this.
It's the people who have that deeper understanding of the fundamentals who are usually able to,
to get it across that line.
Yeah, absolutely.
Fantastic.
All right.
So what else is going on in the world of Alex?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
This is where I have to promote myself.
Something I don't like to do a whole lot.
Right.
Well, so it's not super new.
Well, so I, some of you may know who I am.
I was the head trainer for Wrightsoft for like 15 years, something like that.
I left the company and no ill will towards the folks at Wrightsoft.
I had a bad manager who they fired after I left and my leaving had something to do with
it.
And everybody, everybody knows this in the small business industry, right?
Everybody quits jobs.
They quit managers.
Yeah.
So, so I left and I left so I could get back to teaching HVAC contractors.
The management at, at, at MyTech stole me and wanted to grind me up and feed me to production
home builders.
So, so I left and I started my own, my own company and not having the, not having a whole
bunch of people telling me how I should do my job who've never done it before was kind
of a nice place to be.
Yeah.
It was liberating.
Let me tell you.
I had to put together all these things that I thought we should have been doing all along.
And I created a, an online training platform for people to use, to learn how to use Wrightsoft
to do load calculations, doc design, equipment selection, manual J, S and D. And I built
a little studio in my house.
There's a green screen I'm doing.
If you've got kids out there, I'm doing video game streaming for Wrightsoft.
Yeah, platform.
It turns out the study show, only a handful of studies and careful with this, but studies
show that putting a face on the screen for a person to be able to see talking doesn't
improve retention at all.
And so a lot of people have dismissed it as a, as a thing to do.
And there's a handful of studies out there that show it really improves engagement.
Yeah, it does.
It really improves.
It's hard to watch the boring disembodied voice and the mouse moving around when there's
an actual face on the screen, especially if I have to explain something that doesn't involve
a lot of movement.
It's a lot easier on the, on the brain, if you will, to sit there and watch it.
And so I've built this whole tutorial platform that's got over what would normally be two
days of content that I do in live classes has got that plus all the stuff I wish I had
time for in two days that you can go to online.
And I'm incredibly proud of it.
Every time somebody signs up, I ask, I ask people, you know, okay, what makes this suck?
What could I do better?
You know, give me, give me some complaints, right?
Like I love the compliments, but I can do something about the complaint.
And the only major complaint I've been able to squeeze out so far is you go too slow.
It's not a common one.
It's only two people who've said it.
And literally there's a, there's a little note under all the videos with an arrow that
says this is the fast forward button because it's, because it's done at a pace after 15
years of doing this live, it's done at a pace that would be like I would teach it in the
live class.
So it's done at a pace for somebody to be able to follow along.
Absolutely.
And instead of like, because that's, that's the thing that the management used to tell
me it's like, no, the video has to be as short as possible.
Get all the content in there, pack it into five minutes.
It can't be longer than five minutes.
Like, oh yeah, yeah.
Let me just explain it.
Load calculations and five minute bits.
That'll go well.
Yeah.
Right.
So, so I put this together and it's a, it's a subscription service.
It's a thing you can do.
I still teach occasional live classes, but it's more focused on this and some, some other
little projects that I'm not allowed to talk about yet.
Okay.
But yeah, we're about in the next year.
That's what's a, yeah, we'll be back next year.
So yeah, that's what's new with me.
Awesome.
All right.
Where can they find you then?
meanHVAC.com.
Awesome.
Not, not too hard.
Mean like you mean person.
meanHVAC.com.
All right.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
All right, man.
Thank you.