Welcome back to Teaching the Unteachables, where we dive into methods for teaching and learning for professionals like you.
This session was recorded live at the 2023 National HVACR Education Conference. To learn more about White Rogers, go to climate.emerson.com.
Alright, welcome everyone to the 2023 National HVACR Education Conference. It has been a bustle and a hustle.
And Jim Fulch, Memerson, we're here to dive into some perspectives to have on our classroom. So glad to have you here, man.
Hey, thank you.
It's been a lot of fun. We've had some good times here.
I've been walking by out front waving and everything else and I finally got you to bring me up here. Thank you so much for being able to participate in this. This is awesome.
No, man, it's been so much fun. You know, we typically see, you know, six, seven hundred people. We've got well over a thousand people here at the conference this year.
And it's just been a spectacular event. And you had a class today, right?
I did. I had a class this morning. It was standing room only, wall to wall chairs. It was absolutely awesome.
I hate that I missed that.
I was humbled by the turnout. I really was. It was really great.
Well, kind of give us a recap. Tell us a little bit about the class and what we were focusing on there, because you've got so many great perspectives to add for our industry and especially for our educators that are in the classrooms.
So and that's what this session was really completely geared toward was to give the instructors some perspective of what they're looking for to give the technicians when when the technicians leave the school.
And I was in the same boat, went to trade school in 1989. So it's been a long time, but I still remember a little bit of it.
That's called experience. That's a long and and there's little quips that I'll never forget from my instructor.
Things like the wire doesn't know what color it is. Yeah, that's true. It's just flowing. It's absolutely so.
So if you think that the green wire at the thermostat is the fan and it's green at the circuit board, you may be mistaken because somebody may have spliced it halfway through and changed its color.
So there's there's little tricks like that.
There's little things out there that you can always run into having something switched up or changed and making sure that your continuity is all the way through the way it should be is is is the real key and trick to that, especially with those tricky splices that happen once in a while.
You know, we've all ran into those wires and go, wait a minute. So what are you what's going on here?
Did you have that wire in your pocket or where does it come from?
Yeah, it's not original. So so a little bit of the class.
One of the things that I was really wanting to focus with the instructors on, we've had several great classes here on doing troubleshooting on reading wiring schematics and those wiring schematics are important to be able to understand to read that.
But what I was trying to share is the wiring schematic is not the peak of the education. It's the legend at the site. It's the thing you go to after you've decided what area of the furnace has the issue.
And the example that I like to give with that is how banks hire tellers.
When a bank when a bank hires a teller, they don't give them all this counterfeit money and say, here, study this. So if something like this comes across the counter, you know what it is.
Banks teach and train their tellers with the real stuff.
Oh, why? I mean, why wouldn't you? Yeah.
Well, so so what they're doing is they're getting the teller to understand what the text is, what the perceptions. Yeah. OK. And what it looks like.
Everything that is on that bill, all the serial numbers, all of the different points that that bill has, they get very, very familiar with the real thing.
Recognizing so that when the fake comes along, they instantly know.
OK. And and so that was my push was get familiar with all of the components of the system you're working with, not just simply their names, but how they sound when they run.
What's the normal sound of this particular thing?
And and and there's lots of little things. Most of troubleshooting is done through visual, through hearing, through through touch. Is that motor extra warm?
You know, is that capacitor bulging? Is the gas valve when the igniter is glowing hot, does it click? Do you hear the sound of that?
It's actually doing function. Absolutely. And so visual is 80 percent of troubleshooting. You bring out your gauges and your tools, not till most of the time you have an idea of where you're looking already.
Right. Right. Right. That's that's a secondary and needing that schematic can be part of that secondary in tracing a specific circuit.
But if you understand, and that's the interesting thing, gas furnace is what I was talking about. Sure. How many different things do you think we have in a gas furnace?
Different components. Oh, yeah. Hundred. Hundred and fifty. A lot of things going on. Two hundred. Let's name them. Oh, boy. Let's roll. OK.
Well, we got the heart of everything. We've got the integrated furnace control. Yep. Absolutely. IFC. Yep. We have one hundred and twenty volts going to it.
We have one hundred and twenty volts coming out of it, going to a transformer. Part number two. Transformer. Yep.
Then part number three, hot surface igniters. Another hundred and twenty. Let's go through the high voltage side. There's there's there's an inducer motor and there's the blower motor.
And and actually the flame rod carries somewhere between 80 to 100. I know a lot of people know that. I love teaching that.
Yeah. Grab your meter from ground to the flame rod wire on the board and you'll find out exactly what's happening on flame rectification. There's applied voltage.
So what are we at? Like six six pieces there. Let's go to low voltage. We've got two or three different limit switches.
So let's add those three. Maybe a pressure switch. We got a thermostat. What else we got? Got a gas valve. Got a gas valve in there.
That's about it. We're less than a dozen items on a typical furnace that operates. It's not like this big mystical behemoth machine that's full of all of these different parts everywhere.
They're really very simple. And once you can get your mind around a whole picture and be familiar with all of the components, it makes it so much easier to understand.
It does. It does. You know, a dozen different items and they're located in different parts of the furnace. If you're changing out the IFC, the simple thing is pull one wire off, put that wire on the new board.
In reality, you're not even talking about a dozen different things and you can pull them off in groups. You can pull the blower motor wires off in groups. You can pull the igniter, the inducer.
They're all groups that you can pull off and then put on the new board. And if you understand their function and what they do, the boards are all silkscreened to know exactly what they go on.
It not only makes it easy to replace an exact board, but it also makes it super easy to use a universal because once you understand all those components, now you can use a universal.
And instead of carrying 200 boards on your truck, which most companies aren't really going to be excited about doing, and how about 550?
Yeah, exactly. Our new 50M56X universal integrated furnace control does both PSC blower motors and ECMX.
Okay, now we're getting some work. Yeah, constant torque. Cross-reference is over 550, so in one box you have 550 different controls. And if you understand all those parts, it's a walk in the park.
Yeah, let's take a look. I know what my control board does. Maybe take a different perspective. I've got this piece of equipment, what kind of control board fits it? Maybe I've got this control board, what can it fit?
There you go. Change our perspective into a different form of the same reality. And what we do at White Rogers is make that just so easy for the tech. This WR mobile app that we have, everybody that has one on their phone right now, a copy of it.
There's no registration, there's no login, it's a free download. And you can go in there and you can put any model number of a furnace control board, of a gas valve, of a thermostat. And start looking for our cross-referenceable items.
And it'll cross everything right for you. It'll tell you this is what is available to replace that. And not only will it tell you all of our parts, but it also has the installation instructions with everything. So say you have an older board, maybe it has dip switches or something, you don't know exactly what they all do.
How am I going to reset this up? I know that it fits, but now how do I time things? And so you have that ability. We need to stop while they make their announcements.
Somebody's going to miss their luggage if they don't get their baggage claim ticket there. That'd be a terrible thing to lose. So to wrap that up, really the ability to have that one control that can cover all of those different things. If you understand the complete system, it's a walk in the park. It's super easy.
You resonate so much to me. I was trained by a mentor that taught very much that. Understand what the equipment was. We worked on a lot of stuff. We worked on a lot of refrigeration in bars, restaurants, and family owned grocery stores.
I always remember with pizza ovens. I always had people approach me and go, do you guys work on pizza ovens? I go, no, not really. Unless you've got a bad ignition board, then I'll take care of you. They're like, what are you talking about? It's a gas fired appliance with a standardized sequence of operation. I know how it runs. So I know that I have controls that can operate single stage gas appliances. I can make something work when I know what my piece of equipment is doing and what the capabilities are of my universal parts that I stock.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And understanding that sequence of operation, understanding how those components flow, how they work. The more familiar at an event like this for educators, the more time they can give the technicians to look at the function, how it's running, how it's operating.
What happens is they give them an issue with a piece of equipment. They go out there, they spend all this time figuring it out. They get it back up and running and then they stop. And the time that you get of just saying, this is how this sounds, this is how this starts, this is how this cycles is very minimal.
And being able to say, how does that inducer sound? How is it running? Is it warm to the touch? There's been instances where I've found inducer motors that the rubber gasket going from the motor in through the housing got hard.
And the hardness of it was causing friction on the shaft, raising the amp draw and periodically causing the inducer motor to overheat. And then the furnace went in fire. And it was sporadic, so it was really hard to find out because the overamping was so minimal.
It wasn't out of... No, it wasn't anything crazy, but it was just that gasket seal that hadn't hardened. Just being able to know what are you listening for? How hot is that motor? Is that motor...
What should this be? Yeah.
Where are you at with temperature? Should you be able to touch a motor after it's running a while? Typically, most of the time you can tap it. And if it's too hot to touch, you got something that's going on in there that's happening.
Other examples of blower motors, whether it's a condenser fan motor or a squirrel cage in a furnace or a forced air unit. If you go out there and the capacitor is open or out and you think, oh, I got a bad capacitor, you replace that, you could be back out in a couple days replacing the motor.
What do you know? Well, the easiest way to know with a blower motor is spin it. And if you spin it and it keeps spinning freely, that means your bearings are still good. And more than likely, it is just the capacitor.
And if you spin it and it just kind of stiffens and stops, then you know, hey, the bearings are tightening up on this. I need to replace the whole motor because the capacitor went out because of the stiffness of the bearings of the motor.
So that little act of spinning that blade before you say, hey, it's just the capacitor, we're good to go, will save that additional trip. And given information like that to tech so that they understand that, so they know how it should be, how it should act, is huge to be able to help them when they hit the field out there and do real world work.
Yeah. And as they start, you know, hearing, seeing and feeling more of the environment that they work in and using those sensory receptors as part of the input for their own analytic.
And in reality, the trade says, well, we want somebody with these years of experience. Well, what do these years experience give them? They give them the knowledge of what the normal should be, what the real deal is that allows them to actually see and recognize the fake or the part that is not functioning properly.
And that's what the experience does. The experience gives you the real thing. So, yeah, it's, it's, you know, great. It's been a great conference.
Oh, my gosh, it's so much fun. And it's I'm so grateful you took the time to help us understand a little bit more about your class. I wish you were all here with us.
If you want to learn more about what's happening in the world of White Rogers and get in touch, how they get a hold of you. Yeah. Well, Jim dot folks at Emerson dot com is the email address and I'm on LinkedIn too.
So if you want to reach out on LinkedIn, I think it's Jim defaults is the end of the forward slash there on on the LinkedIn link. So, yeah. Well, brother, we appreciate your time here.
It's been wonderful. And yeah, let's a couple later and get another one in the books. You bet. Hey, it's been my privilege and pleasure. Thank you.
All right. And I'm, I'm, I'm here. I'm going with a guy with a white suit. I don't know. I hope the tomatoes aren't coming. Yeah. Bye bye.