Tales from the trenches, stories forged in the fires of experience.
Many of us don't actually plan on being in HVAC, we just end up in the HVAC and refrigeration
industry.
To learn more about HVACR, visit escogroup.org.
All right, thank you all for joining us.
We're hanging out with Ranger Norbert.
Ranger, how are you today?
Good morning, how are you?
I'm doing good.
We had a really interesting conversation when we were hanging out at the AHR Expo.
Many times we talk about how we end up in this industry and it's kind of funny when
I start calculating the amount of friends that I have that ended up in the industry
that didn't plan to be in the industry, it's pretty significant.
Yeah, it's funny how life kind of molds your course.
I mean, you have some control over it, but sometimes I guess you can chalk it up to feet.
The only people that I have that conversation with that say, oh yeah, I planned on spending
my career in HVAC were maybe the ones that started in an HVAC family owned business,
but the rest of us, we just end up there.
So tell me a little bit about how you got into the industry because I love this.
This is just a prime example of how fascinating HVAC and refrigeration is and so sometimes
it just hooks us when we least expect it.
So way back in the day when I was in high school, I really had no particular career
path planned out and my father who was prior military, he had suggested that maybe the
military would be something that would be in your interest.
And I agreed and two weeks after I graduated high school, my father drove me down to Cape
Ames, New Jersey, which is where the boot camp is for United States Coast Guard.
And he dropped me off and said, come back better boy.
So I made it through boot camp.
Funny thing is I personally, I actually enjoyed the experience and I was fortunate enough
to out of boot camp, I was assigned to a ship and when on the ship, there's two different
engineering divisions.
One's called main prop and the other one's called A-Gang and main prop basically works
on anything in the engine room itself for propulsion and A-Gang works on everything
else.
They work on the air conditioning, all the steam.
HVAC plumber, electrician.
No, not so much plumber, but air conditioning, the steam kettles and equipment in the kitchen,
the sewer system, any kind of auxiliary equipment we took care of.
And as we discussed before, I had no prior knowledge as to how an air conditioning system
worked or the refrigeration cycle or anything.
My kind of thought in my head at the time was I wanted to be a heavy equipment operator
and a mechanic.
And I'm glad I didn't pick that course.
Well, I mean, to be fair, when you're a young guy, you can lay on a concrete floor for hours,
but as we get older, not that our industry isn't tough on our physicalness.
But some are definitely harder than some.
Anyway, so I fell into air conditioning just by that.
And as we spoke, or the story I tell, my first experience on the ship, I'm a young guy, 17
years old.
Okay.
And they took me aside and said, your first job is to go down.
And I had to learn all this terminology because I didn't know anything about it.
So your first job on the ship is in every morning when you get up before you go to breakfast,
you need to go down to dry stores.
And we had one walk-in freezer and two walk-in refrigerators down there.
And every morning my job was to go down.
And they gave me a little wrench, similar to this one, which I'll tell you the story
about this as well.
But they gave me a little crescent wrench like that.
And they said, Ranger, your job is to go down.
Actually, they don't claim it first name, a fireman, not a ranger.
Your job is to go down.
And they walked me up to one of the expansion valves that were mounted on the, actually
on the outside of the walk-in core, which is kind of odd too.
So my job was to take the end nut off and back the expansion valve out all the way and
count the turns.
It's real important you count the turns.
And you could hear the moisture.
I was lice at that time.
It would just let loose.
Right?
And I was like, wow, that's weird.
That's interesting.
What's this?
And then make sure you count the turns when you turn the step back.
Right.
And then I would go down to whatever it was, six or seven and a quarter.
And I did that religiously for about six weeks.
And then another new guy showed up and that now became his job.
And then they found something else for me to do.
Never really explained what you're doing.
This is how it goes.
No, this is your job.
And later on, I realized, well, obviously the thing was full of moisture.
Exactly.
And I understand the mentality of the military is that they'll do things like this knowing
that it's incorrect, but it gives somebody something to do.
And maybe hopefully they understand why you're doing it.
Right.
Kind of like swabbing the deck.
I mean, obviously the right answer was to remove the moisture from the refrigerator
and recharge it.
Right.
And then they wouldn't have a job for these young guys that come on the ship.
They have no idea.
That's crazy.
So that was my very, very first job in the industry.
Since then, I've learned a boatload of stuff about air conditioning refrigeration on the
ship.
I had really good mentors on the ship and they got me interested in it.
And I kind of had an affinity for it.
It's the first time in my life that I felt that it's something I understood.
You're a part of something.
Yeah.
But I understood it.
I mean, I'm dealing with engines and all that and I did diesel work too, but I really understood
it.
I had it in my mind's eye and I was like, wow, this is kind of cool.
And just from there, I was on the ship for 18 months and then they sent me down to New
York, town of Virginia.
I went to A school, which is that kind of qualifies you for your job when you become
a petty officer.
And part of that, there was refrigeration and heating and air conditioning and that
as well.
So you got into the instructional side of it.
Well, no, I didn't get the instructional side.
I got more training on it, more formal training.
And then I decided not to make the military my career.
I fell in love.
Boy, doesn't that change things.
Yes, it did.
I made a conscious decision that it wasn't going to be my career path.
And I had made arrangements a year before I completed my enlistment obligation.
And I signed up for air conditioning school in Pensacola, New Jersey, which at the time,
I believe it was Lions Tech and then it was bought out by Lincoln Tech.
Oh, yeah.
And one of my personal friends growing up also was a student that at that time at the
school that was at Genoa.
So we actually met and I've known each other since we're, you know, almost just out of
10, 11 years old.
And, you know, it's just funny that we all fell into this right at the same time.
So anyway, and then after that, I was going to I was going to set the world on fire.
Yeah, exactly.
In the air conditioning industry.
So here I am.
This will be my this is my 41st year.
Holy cow.
So you've seen a lot of changes along the way.
I mean, from turning a wrench on an expansion valve to let the moisture pass through because
it froze overnight and the probably in the metering device to dive in deeper into what
those devices are.
Oh, my God.
I've been well when I started, there was four refrigerators.
There was it was 12, 502, 22 and 500.
Those are the four.
Exactly.
You know, and that was the days of, you know, purge and go.
I mean, that's what it was, you know, right, wrong or different.
And I also had was fortunate enough to have a lot of great mentors in my career.
I got to work fortunately under Jack Rice for two years.
I had some I had a really good service manager that we worked together in two different companies.
His name was Jeff Crane.
And he's the fellow that, you know, instilled in me.
And this is in the mid mid to late 80s.
You know, you need to use micron gauge.
You know, you have to evacuate.
Yeah, you know, as practice, you got to use best practices.
And that was instilled in me right literally from the beginning.
Me leaving the military and starting out my career on the civilian side.
So I was very, very fortunate to have those type of folks to be able to learn from them
and work from them and instill that ethic.
It's interesting to to recognize that we were, you know, some of the industry was teaching
best practices even then.
A lot of people think about the old times ago.
Oh, you guys didn't do anything right.
Well, it was a lot of emerging best practices and emerging best technologies.
We were transitioning into a new era of refrigeration and air conditioning.
And so a lot of times we weren't taught things, maybe not properly.
You know, if we think about that whole mentoring side that you're talking about, a lot of people
didn't have good mentors and good education early on in the industry.
So a lot of bad habits were formed along the way.
So you're fortunate to be able to have a mentor or some mentors along the way, which is what
we're really trying to encourage is for people to find mentors, find those people who are
doing things right and just draw to them.
I mean, and I agree.
I think that the boy I know that all the things that we know today were around 40, 50 years
ago.
No, they weren't.
That was our industry.
The industry, unfortunately, at least at that time, was an industry of shortcuts.
Yes.
All right.
This is what we need to do, but what can I get away with or what can cut my time down
or what can make, you know, get me out of the job faster?
And a lot of, how ever you want to look at it, those original, the CFCs and the HFCs
were pretty forgiving for a lot of things.
So we got away with a lot of sins.
We really did as an industry.
And now our industry is at the point, sophistication wise, where that's just not possible.
No, it's not allowable.
It's not.
No, it's not.
And I think that we're in for a very exciting time and a very challenging time.
It's going to be a challenging time.
Yeah.
I mean, so I mean, I also am an instructor at Model Academy Locational.
I teach the second year apprentice program.
I've been doing it for about eight, my eighth year.
And I enjoy that too.
That's one of the reasons I do it.
I don't do it for the number one reason I do it.
I just enjoy it.
And I enjoy passing down everything that I've learned to some other folks.
But I have what I call Rangers 92-8 rule and 8% of everyone, and you could probably apply
this to anything in life, but 8% of the industry is right there.
They're on top of things.
They're constantly trying to improve themselves or trying to stay with everything.
And then the bell curve after that 92% falls off.
Oh, you're right.
So I try to, my personal thing is I try to elevate that as any way I can.
You know, when I, I also, part of my job role at where I work is, you know, to bring my
employees, as well as my customers up to speed.
And I'm like, guys, I'm here for you.
This is what we know today.
Take it for what it is.
If you don't want to adhere to what I'm saying or you don't want to, that's fine.
But I mean, you're going to get left out.
Suffer the consequences.
Yeah, it's exactly it.
It's just, you know, the, you know, I was thinking about the other day, I'm working
really hard to try and come up with some stuff, 5,000 foot view with ATLs.
And one of the things I recommend is your programs.
And there's a couple other ones that are great out there too, but you got to stay on top
of this.
It's still evolving.
It's an emerging part of our industry.
The refrigeration part of it is if you've been doing what we discussed before, it's
the no brainer.
It's not a big deal.
That's exactly right.
It goes hand in hand with it.
If you're doing all right, it's all the other stuff that we've never dealt with before.
That's still an unknown.
It's still, you know, we got to stay on top of it.
So when it comes time that we're as prepared as we possibly can be.
Yeah, on our live show later today, we're actually going to be diving into R290.
So A3 refrigerants and, you know, highly flammable refrigerants and understanding how to work
with those.
And the funny thing is, is just like with ATLs, it all comes back to if you're already
doing best practices, it's not going to change your life.
Correct.
And, you know, somebody else, there was on LinkedIn, there was somebody else that had
posted something about A3s.
And again, like I said, I had a lot of great mentors personally, and I had a lot of great
mentors that I read about guys like Gil Carlson and Dan Kramer and Jack Ries and all those
folks.
And Daniel Kramer, his family, if you don't know the background, they were the family
from Kramer Refrigeration, which is now Trenton Refrigeration.
Oh, okay.
Sure.
And Danny was a little, he was an attorney, but he was also a chemical engineer.
And he wrote, he has papers out there from 40, 50 years ago, trying to promote natural
refrigerants.
Absolutely.
I mean, that far back.
He's just like, this is the way the industry needs to go.
And they were talking in the 1960s, early 1970s.
But he was, until he passed, he was always a proponent of natural refrigerants.
So there's, that part of the industry has always been out there.
It's just a way to harness it and, you know, make it, you know, make it make sense.
Exactly.
And that's what we're here for is to help, you know, bring these nuances up in forefront.
We talk about like R290, we've been using R290 and other flammable refrigerants since
the late 1800s.
I mean, one of the reasons we came up with CFCs is to get away from the flammability.
You know, we've seen this year in March in Europe, we've seen most major manufacturers
in Europe introducing R290 standalone heat pump, air to water source units.
So basically an outdoor heater slash chiller, right?
For residential applications using R290.
We're going to see those here.
We have a bunch of our manufacturers of refrigeration, commercial refrigerations already R290.
We've been doing it for going on a decade now.
So we're going to see a lot of emerging refrigerants, flammables, mildly flammables, everything
in between, and making sure that we make these connections with mentors in the industry,
people who are progressing and trying to do things right and using best practices.
They're going to be the most important part of our success.
Yeah.
And it's funny you mention that because again, not to mention my friend Ed, but I will.
We've had many discussions on this subject when we get together and we still look at
each other and go, when is that going to happen?
You know, it's just, I mean, there's other things too.
There's CO2 out there.
There's, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on in Europe.
That's pretty exciting that I try and keep my eye on.
I do too.
You know, there's, there's more than one way to proverbially skin a cat.
And they're out there.
So I, you know, I think that short term, you know, we had to do what we had to do in this
country to conform.
But I think in long term, I think there's a lot of things out there that need to be
really looked at hard as future alternatives to what we're faced with now.
So absolutely.
Completely agree.
All right, Roger, we sure appreciate your time.
We love the conversations about getting into the industry and look forward to reconnecting
again sometime soon.
Absolutely.
It was an honor and a privilege and I'm glad we get to speak and hopefully we'll see each
other again soon.
Sounds good, my friend.
Thank you for your time.
Have a great day, everyone.
Mommy Boo-jang!