Tales from the trenches, stories forged in the fires of experience.
Education is a lifelong learning experience.
Learn more about Harvey and what he is doing to educate the industry at certified HVAC
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All right thank you all for joining us once again.
We're hanging out with Harvey Kaplan.
Harvey how are you today?
Oh I'm doing well this morning.
Nice to see you.
Harvey we spent quite a bit of time at the National HVACR Education Conference talking
about how training and training programs have changed over time and through different generations.
Could you tell us a little bit about what education and what the training of a HVACR
technician looked like when you were coming into the field?
Sure.
I started out as an electrician working doing mostly residential little light commercial
electrical work and I had a reputation of being a pretty good control guy.
And back in those days when you bought an air conditioner or what have you or a boiler
or a furnace in that matter you got a box of parts and you got a water and things.
You didn't get a package unit as almost everything is today.
So after a few years air conditioning was a virgin industry and I was offered a job
which gave me a third raise and I had a wife and two children and you know and a mortgage
payment and all those good things that came with making two dollars and fifty cents.
What year was that that you started Harvey?
1961.
So you've seen a lot of changes in your time frame.
Oh I've seen it and so anyway when I went to work for the first company in air conditioning
and refrigeration we had to learn mostly on the job one of the stories I'll tell you this
and you'll love this one.
One of the guys that I was working under at that time it was eight nine ten o'clock at
night it was dark and we were up on this roof and we took 16 screws out of a door and hinges
on it in those days.
And now it's late at night I want to get out of there.
So I figured we don't have to put all ten of those screws back and I threw half of them
off the roof.
Then the guy that I was working with got really upset he went down to the truck and brought
up new screws because those screws have to go back in there so you'll learn something
with that too.
So that was part of the training was on the job training but the boss handed me I don't
know probably during the first week a copy of modern refrigeration and said you need
to learn stuff.
And so you know I'm an anal person and I and started reading that and spent probably the
next couple of years going through that book to learn so that could be better.
I wanted to be as good in air conditioning and refrigeration as I was in electrician.
So and then that's how I got started in this business.
I myself started on modern refrigeration.
We had a copy on one of the shelves in our office and when we had questions we sat down
opened up modern refrigeration and we learned about things.
Yeah and well you know it was kind of different in those days because you know there were
not as many air conditioning companies back in those days doing residential.
I mean I often tell the story when I'm teaching a class that we carried at least 100 belts
on the truck because all the blowers and the furnaces were belt driven.
Oh yeah almost every day.
They were either a 48 or a 56 frame motor generally around a half horsepower.
When we put the air conditioning we had to change the motors because they would be really
a fractional of maybe a quarter to a third prior and we couldn't move enough air.
Exactly.
And you know in this day and age it's my opinion it's 75 percent of the issues with service
is airflow.
Airflow airflow airflow.
Yeah so and I generally always ask the question well what do we do with about airflow and
half the students will miss the fact that we have airflow outside.
That's right.
Okay I just put out a video on capacitors of checking them and the reason is if you
don't check a capacitor while the unit's running how do you know if that room fan is running
too fast or too slow.
Yeah very true checking it under load.
You know a lot of people don't teach that and it's very important to know how a motor
is operating while it is running with the capacitor.
I don't know if you saw the video or not I just put it out the other maybe last week
or the week before.
I'm an old man I get to be forgetful.
You know but it's wonderful to know that you know we are never too late in the game to
learn a new technology or new innovation.
You know our industry is moving at an incredibly fast pace but we've always had change and
we've always had new things coming to our industry.
We just have to embrace change.
I can only imagine the different things that you've encountered along the way.
So tell us how you how you prepared how did you get through these changes.
Well let's look at this in the beginning we were looking at R12.
That's right.
Okay and you know and you still remember certain things you remember the fact that in R12 in
air conditioning your coil was somewhere around 40 PSI's 40 degrees rather and actually it
was 40 PSI's close to that and then we went to 22 which was supposed to be the answer
to every day.
Then it went up and you know what they said then how are we going to deal with these high
pressure.
Oh my goodness look how high these things are.
That's from 40 to almost 70.
It was like why why would you do that.
Was there a lot of grumbling in the industry.
No I don't really think so because it was a different breed of people.
Okay.
The majority of the workers were just workers you know and they didn't learn the service
and which is probably as far as I'm concerned the best thing to be.
Yeah so do I.
Okay so they didn't want to learn that.
I'll tell you this story about I went on vacate when I was in business for myself and one
of my friends called in and my head guy went out there and he's in the my friend said to
him just put a whole new system in.
He said I can't do this.
I know you're Harvey's friend and he says now it's okay I'm authorizing it.
He would not do it.
My best guy would not put a new unit he says because Harvey always has will come back and
do something in this unit will ruin.
So and I did.
When I came back I went there I put a hard start kid on there and it ran for three more
years.
Right.
Absolutely.
I to this day tell everybody in every class that I teach do not put a unit in the air
conditioning wise without a hard start kit and if it's got a scroll or a reset compressor.
Okay.
You really need that extra push it.
Even though you got all these timers on thermostats or on boards or things of that nature.
You know so I tell him hey you got to have a hard start kit and today it's easy because
you don't have to put a potential relay in all that stuff that we did and I still teach
the fact of how a potential relay works.
It's fun to ask them is this a normally open or normally closed switch and they can't figure
that.
You guys see.
Yeah.
So there you get to teach the back EMF.
Yeah that's right.
So but now technology is changing now we're going to variable speeds but at any rate those
are some of the things that guys just don't know but and then I look at some of the stuff
today and some I see these bad installations.
Oh you mean on like social media.
Yeah I saw one on Facebook the other day an attic installation where I guess it was a
replacement and they put the furnace in upside down or the air hammer and a drain was coming
out the top.
This is a unique way of.
I mean that's going to be unique.
And you see these things and you say who's doing it.
What it was me the most.
OK.
Is our industry is saying hey we don't have the workers or the amount of people but I
think there's a there's a good labor market out there that I don't see people going after
and that's the veterans that are coming out of the service.
I really believe that we can give some of them a job and get them trained.
Get them.
I'm a big fan of apprentice schools.
Yeah absolutely.
I'm involved with one now.
I think some of the community colleges that are teaching HVAC don't have a lab.
How do you teach without a lab with the hands on it because the majority of new people that
we get are hands on type of learning.
Oh absolutely.
We've definitely seen a change in that if we think about the programs that we had even
just in high school.
There was a time when shop classes and mechanical classes and even electrical classes were the
norm.
I think that my generation I'm a generation X we were probably the last ones that witnessed
that type of curriculum that was really being promoted in the high school environment.
I myself had basic electrical and electricity classes in high school where we were actually
tearing apart control boards and building small solid state circuitry controls.
As freshmen by the time I had graduated that class wasn't even in existence anymore.
So we've seen a departure from a lot of those fundamental hands on mechanical and interactive
courses that went away that we are starting to see again.
Even here at HVAC excellence we're starting to see more high school programs that are
building in HVAC and refrigeration and even some of the newer innovative sciences for
like solar photovoltaic that is emerging technologies that are being introduced at high school and
our vocational levels.
Oh I think so.
It was an interesting fact that came out this week from I don't know some federal agency
that said it's the lowest level that are going to college this year.
It's down to 62 percent.
A lot of the students are into the blue collar jobs.
So I mean I heard that this week.
I don't know how true that is but it certainly makes sense to me.
So yeah I mean absolutely.
We think about college for decades we push that college was the only path to go for education
after your high school diploma.
So we really pushed people to go to college.
Pushed to go to college.
Well I was one.
I went to college just to get there and find out that I really just wanted to work on stuff.
So I ended up getting into the mechanical fields which ended up being the trades and
went oh wow this is really where I wanted to be.
But I didn't even know what my resources were until I actually got into the field and went
oh well this is what I'm good at.
Oh yeah well listen you know there if they're into an apprentice program or they're into
just going to community college to get some of the fundamentals which is all good.
Okay although I'm a big believer in the apprentice program split.
But you need an organization to sponsor them.
Exactly.
So the community colleges aren't doing that.
But at any rate they need to learn the fundamentals.
I mean you know I'm a big believer in fundamentals.
If you notice when I do the instructor workshops it's always about fundamentals because if
you understand the refrigeration system, the mechanical refrigeration system because that's
what most of them are working on, totally understand it, what the condition of the refrigerant
is, what each of the component parts do, how that heat gets transferred and so on.
And why do we compress it?
Okay obviously we compress it to raise its temperature so that we can be higher than
the ambient around it.
Whether it's water cooled or air cooled it doesn't make any difference as far as why
we do it.
So those are the things that I always enjoyed service.
But if you don't understand what the condition of refrigerant is you can't do that.
I always used to when I was working the service desk for a couple of manufacturers and I would
get these calls in this day and age and they would say, hey you having a bad run of boards?
Why yes.
Well I've put in three and I still have the same problem.
Did you ever think it's not the board?
Hmm let me think.
I mean that's one of the things I enjoy teaching is how to serve the board.
Oh yeah absolutely.
The problem is they'll take their voltmeter and put it across R and C and say I've got
24 volts but I'm not getting the contactor to pull in over there.
Well you think maybe the contactor's bad?
Okay dragging down the board from the other side?
And so I go through this of showing them how to do it.
Of course one of the things that I really do not like is more X plugs but that's another
story for another day.
What I tell students to do if you're scrapping a furnace that has all X plugs.
Save some.
Save the plugs in with about six or eight inches of the wire as much as you can get
on it thing so that you can test those things and you know and so on and so you know that's
the world today.
I mean I'm an old man and I still enjoy doing the teaching I mean fortunately I don't have
to but I do it because I.
Exactly.
And it keeps me up to date with what goes on in this world.
That's right that it does.
You know and the technology today the tools that you have today and I tell these one thing
that when I was working service for companies and I would go out to a job because a guy
was having a problem that we couldn't solve over the phone and if he handed me because
I didn't I had a trunk full of tools but you weren't using my tools unless yours went bad.
So if you handed me one of them 39 cent screwdrivers you got at the drugstore I'd probably throw
it at you.
You're not tearing up my hands.
Yeah that's right I paid good money for this.
You're laughing but you know that that's a true stupor.
Oh yeah absolutely been there myself.
I mean and then you get the one when you go out there the unit's sitting in a 45 degree
angle and you know hey don't you take any pride in your work and there are a lot of
them and you see those pictures on the internet all the time on Facebook and YouTube and what
would that be.
You know one of the things I just absolutely cannot stand to hear is the term you can't
teach an old dog a new trick because there are so many things to learn and education
when done sincerely is a life long opportunity and you my friend are a prime example of why
we should never stop looking at the new technologies and the new innovations in our industry.
Harvey do you mind tell me how old you are.
I'm 83.
83 years old and you have your own YouTube channel and Facebook channel.
Harvey let's tell everyone where they can find you.
On either one it's under certified HVAC training.
Whether it's on YouTube or Facebook both of those are mine.
On YouTube it's just the videos you can go into videos.
On Facebook if you go to that you have to join because I made it a private channel because
there's too much BS on some of these sites that I get on where a guy says you know a
guy asks a legitimate question and then you get guys on there that say just berate him.
I can't say right now with some of them actually say and that bothers me and that's why I made
it private so that I could if you did that on my channel you're going.
Exactly.
I mean that's the way I am.
Harvey Kaplan you're one amazing individual and I'm grateful to know you.
Everyone check out Harvey at YouTube and Facebook and I look forward to seeing you next year
at our HVAC excellence conference.
I'm sure Randy won't be in there but it's always a pleasure to be with you.
Thank you.
You too my friend.
Alright.
Let's continue talking.