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Welcome to the Windshield Chronicles, a mental sequence of operation.

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This episode brought to you by Full Airflow Zone Systems, providing a new perspective on zoning controls.

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Learn more at fazscontrol.com.

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All right, everyone. Thank you for joining us again. We're spending some time with Don Prather.

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How are you doing, sir? I'm doing great. Thank you.

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So we're spending a lot of time looking at new innovations and new equipment, new refrigerants coming to the industry.

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And our industry is very much about innovation.

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Many of the things that change in our industry actually come from us.

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It comes from people within the field that recognizes a difficulty and creates a solution.

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And you, sir, have been spending a lot of time yourself creating new innovations. Let's talk about that a little bit.

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All right. Well, thanks for asking. I'm really happy to be here at the Educator's Conference.

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I just want to say that, first of all, there's a lot of great people here.

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And when you walk through the tool room, you see all the stuff that guys invented because they had a problem they wanted to solve.

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I was working at Air Conditioning Contractors of America for 12 years as technical service manager.

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And I loved it because I got to work on the standards and the codes.

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And I learned so much from all of these really brilliant people who are altruistic and donate their time to the industry.

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Yes. Our company owners. And it was just great.

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Yeah. So in that process, though, we sometimes recognize things that need improvement.

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And then we decide that we want to do something about it.

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And that's a difficult thing for many people to step out of their comfort zone and go, OK, I see a problem and I'm going to come up with a solution.

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Well, I wish I was one of those people that was that smart.

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But I was told we had a problem. Yeah.

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And the problem was that there was no way they were working on a low load home book.

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Now, what a low load home book is a fairly large home that has a very small air conditioning system.

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So you might have 1200 to 1500 square feet per ton.

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And that's the way they're building net zero homes. Yes. Energy Star homes are very close to that if they're built properly now, too.

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They're around 1200 square feet per ton, most of them when I do the low calculation.

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So I was told that they had a problem and I thought about it and I even prayed on it.

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And I had an epiphany from God and I saw the whole thing three dimensionally how it worked.

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And I wrote it down and I took it to my boss because I thought it was simple.

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It was just so simple. Why are we doing it this way all along? And my boss said, I don't understand it.

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And he's a genius. He's one of the smartest engineers I know. So I knew I was in trouble.

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What is this actually going to work? Because it seems like it to me, but I really need some some verification and validation of this.

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So he humored me and he, you know, I don't know what he thought about my epiphany statement, but he said, put it down in engineering terms.

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And we'll hand it to Hank Rostakowski, the author of JDS and pretty much everything that ACCA has.

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It has to do with engineering. And he's a total genius.

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And so I said, OK, well, this will check out this epiphany. Am I hallucinating and, you know, need some mental health?

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Was this just a really good dream or is this reality?

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Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, this is the test here. If this doesn't work, you'll find it.

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And so I took the thing and I did a flip this house on the long house, which is in manual J.

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It's one of the sample problems. And since I watch a lot of these flipping shows because I get a kick out of how they mess up a lot of times.

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But also because I learned stuff that I didn't know.

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And I wanted to add a master bedroom, master bath into there and expand the closet and open up the space and finish off the basement and put a powder room down there.

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And then put my system in there, the design. And so I did that and I handed it to Hank.

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And his first impression was it's not going to work.

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So he cranked on it and did the numbers and he gave it back to Glenn.

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And he says, this works better than anything we have. And it's exempt from our diversity exceptions.

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So diversity is when you have rooms that have different loads at different times of the day.

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And that they get outside of the range of the airflow that's designed when you design airflow.

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And the basic concept of this idea, which is why everybody finds it so strange and they don't want to that they can't wrap their head around it when they first hear it, it sends all the airflow to one zone at a time.

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And why that works is the low load home has this low airflow in one zone at a time. It doesn't have enough air.

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Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Okay.

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But the first people that found me are using this for problems where they have different loads for upstairs and downstairs on the home.

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And they want to change the airflow so that in the summer they're sending more of the air upstairs to do the cooling.

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And in the winter they're sending more of the air downstairs.

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And so they do that with zone systems now. But this system does it with even greater ability since the zone shut off.

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And that's the whole trick to it is their priority systems and the zones shut off.

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So we're designing each zone for full load capacity essentially.

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Yeah. And that's why I kind of upset everybody.

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On our website, I say if you don't do manual J, you don't do manual D, you don't know what ESP is, that's external static pressure.

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You can't measure it. Go somewhere else. This is probably not going to work for you. Exactly.

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So I'm looking for just those few people and it's very few people actually, it's unfortunate, that are actually doing these things right and doing the designs right.

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So the way this system works, the smaller the system is, the better. So you want to be on the smaller side of the manual-esque equipment selection, right?

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Yeah. And I get that. You know, when we look at the contractors that are going to be designing these new style homes, which we are starting to see a lot more of,

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you know, we're talking advanced contractors and we're talking sometimes even engineering firms that are doing assistance with the design and construction of it.

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But when we think about that reduced capacity, when we talk about the ductwork that could be potentially going into each one of these zones,

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well, if it was not a low-load home, you know, the ductwork was probably going to be about the same size as what we're talking about by putting a full load on a lower capacity system.

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Yeah, that's actually true. It's the ductwork is actually smaller than the homes that were built in the 60s.

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How much?

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So the other critical factor is you need to have return. And so all these zones, any place there's a bedroom door or whatever, you need to put a return that size correctly.

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And I would go with allowing a higher static pressure on those rooms than what they're currently allowing for the Energy Star homes,

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because the Energy Star home static is based on zone systems are kind of exempt. So if they're over 150 CFM in a room, they're allowed to have 0.02 inches of static pressure.

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And that's with all the ducts open on the zone system. Well, mine, that's impossible. They're never going to be all open. They're going to run for a short period.

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So if you need to put bigger ducts in to make it work for Energy Star, that's that's that's one one solution.

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The other is to adjust Energy Star for this type of product, which didn't exist when they wrote the rules.

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OK, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, makes sense. So coming up with a solution to new designs, we look at the new innovations.

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We have so many things coming to our industry that makes us rethink traditional processes, makes us look at our calculations going, well, we've been using this for the last 50 or 60 years.

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Is it still relevant or is it time to look at things with a slightly different perspective than we have in the past?

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Yeah, people. People. The first question I get out of most contractors is what about short cycling and short cycling is what all of our equipment does.

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Ninety nine percent of the time we design for the one percent load. Right.

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And so I did I did consider that when we built it and we put in a time delay.

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So once it once the system starts up, it starts timing.

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And if it if it doesn't run, if you know, if it runs for a certain period of time, then it will shut it off for a certain period of time.

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It shuts off for a longer time if it's switching from heating to cooling. OK.

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And that brings up another question that was asked by Wes Davis, who many of you may or may not know, but he's a CCA.

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And he said, well, what happens if you have like a basement and a basement apartment for a grandma and she is always cold and she wants to run hot all the time and the upstairs needs air conditioning?

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The way I originally designed the system was to have a tent, a manual bypass on it so that a small amount of air was due circulation.

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And the answer to that's pretty simple. You don't have the bypass on a system where you're going to be running back and forth between heating and cooling all the time.

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You don't want to doling. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we think about bypass dampers, you know, bypass dampers are there for ductwork that's not designed for full load condition for the zone.

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So once we get to the point of redesign in the load at full capacity for each zone on this reduced capacity system, you kind of will eliminate the need for a bypass system.

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You could put one in according to Hank and you can also put a dump zone in, but not required. Right.

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He said you don't need it with this system. It becomes obsolete.

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So if you had a problem with undersized duct somewhere and you wanted to add it onto an existing system to force more air upstairs, which some guys did do, but bought the control from me.

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You can do that. Okay, very interesting.

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So where do we learn about your new invention and your equipment?

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Well, I've got a website that I developed and on the website there's a training manual, but it's actually it's called the installation guide.

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Oh, sure. And it actually has design and it's got pictures, step by step pictures of how it works. Okay.

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And I'm at phase control dot com. Excellent.

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And my phone number is toll free. 888-742-3061. All right. And that you can also get on the website as we go there.

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However, if you want to talk to me, just pick the general questions because my son will answer if you ask for somebody to technically help you troubleshoot them.

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Right. All right. I get it.

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Okay. So what's next for Don Prather? What are we looking for for next adventures in the HVAC and building sciences industries?

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Well, I'm just going to go out and try to get this accepted as a option. My goal is to be there.

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There are about 600,000 zone systems sold each year.

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And my goal is to be about one percent of that and a market that doesn't exist. Yes. The low load home market. Right.

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And since you can't use forced air systems, you can't use the zone equipment. Okay. I gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah.

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Okay. All right. Very intriguing. I'm glad you hung out with us today. Is there any classes you found particularly interesting?

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Well, I've enjoyed almost all the classes. What I find when I go to a conference like this is there's so many things that I have studied for many years that I don't gain as much fun of those classes.

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I like to go to the classes that are on stuff that I don't know anything about. Absolutely.

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And broaden my knowledge base, because the one thing I learned working on standards is you find out how other people see things, which is a lot different than the way you do in your little silences.

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It is so true. I grew up in the Midwest, in Indiana, and really wasn't exposed to HVAC and other parts of the country.

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So I knew my area very well. And it wasn't until I started becoming exposed to other people with other thoughts that I started thinking outside of my box and going, oh, I guess I forgot that there's other areas that have different climates and different.

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Yeah, I spent 10 years working for the Air Force Civil Engineer on a specialty team out of Tyndall Air Force Base that did test and balancing and test and balancing training.

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And also, we would go to wherever they had problems that they couldn't solve at the base level. And we'd take tools and we'd fix the problem.

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And it was really eye opening to go all over the country and just see the problems.

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You know, the same equipment, different operating conditions going, wait a minute, this thing doesn't work like this at home.

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And before I worked with them, I had done test and balance. I'd been exposed to it when I was younger.

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But the tools and the equipment are so much better today that you can actually, when you walk away from a building, if you set it up right, you can know what it's going to do under any conditions.

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Back in the old days, I used to get mad at the test and balance guys because it would take me two years to get a building straight now when they were done. And then you run.

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I had to wait for the coldest day and the hottest day. And then once I had it set, then the seasons changed. I knew what the settings were.

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Yeah, exactly.

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And I think that's one of the things that we have found the largest group of at the conference this year was not necessarily new new processes, just improved processes, ways to do things more efficiently.

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Yeah. And we've got the new refrigerants coming. And then I got thrown another challenge just the other day.

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I talked to somebody here who said that Asheray 15 is going to change all the rules for indoor air. Once they change the refrigerants, you're going to need to have an emergency set up where the dampers open and the blower stays on for X amount of time.

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And to make sure the house doesn't become flammable inside.

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Yeah, the refrigerant detection sensors going into everything.

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Yeah.

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So, you know, it's good to hear about these things so that I can plan for them and know I already have a workaround my boards got a safety probe on it, I can put something in parallel with that and shut it down.

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You know, get a lot of control. Yeah, so I get to write that up so that the first time somebody sees it, they'll have an answer.

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Yeah.

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So that's the question you have a solution. Yeah, that's the that's why we're here is like, you can't be everywhere. No, but you can talk to people who are a lot of places and get a real broad perspective.

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Yeah, you know, I keep saying that none of us can get through these transitions individually, but collectively, we can all get through it.

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Yep. And I was there my original 608 card didn't have the chillers on it because that wasn't part of the test I was grandfathered in. So that's how long I've been doing.

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And so, you know, it's kind of interesting. I've been through all the changes and I don't think this is going to be as painful as a lot of people think it is.

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All right, Mr. Prather, I sure appreciate you hanging out with us and look forward to learning more about your involvement in our industry.

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Okay, thank you.