EGIA
Cracking the Code Podcast
Author: Thomas Christian | Digital Marketing Coordinator at EGIA & OPTIMUS | April 26th, 2024

Design Principles for Residential HVAC Contractors

There are certain principles every residential HVAC contractor must follow when designing an HVAC system for homeowners. But there’s also specific ways to improve the quality of a system beyond being ‘up to code’ that will increase customers’ satisfaction

That’s why this week on Cracking the Code, HVAC design consultant and EGIA faculty member Drew Cameron joins the show to discuss how contractors can raise the quality of their service and stand out as a premium brand in their market.

Audio Transcription (in Beta)

On today’s show, learn the design principles for residential HVAC contracts. There

are certain principles we must follow when designing an HVAC system for our homeowners. Lucky for you, we have the master Mr. Drew Cameron and EGI member Eric Kelsis to guide us through it all. Take it away guys. Number one, what questions to ask, and the questions that you’ll see in this particular document are questions that you’re going to ask of the house, excuse me, of the customer, of the house, and of the system.

I don’t care how the questions get answered, one of them is going to tell me what’s going on here. But these are the types of things that I’m looking for and the things that I’m measuring and taking pictures of and gathering data on, and again, for time purposes, I’m going to just let you see that we’ve got this 36 page document that walks us through the entire process.

What to look for is you’re talking to the customer and asking the customer. And then what to look for is you kind of walk around the house. Uh, there’s some stuff on indoor air quality, specific questions in here, as well as comfort questions were prior to that, and then it’s like, okay, how do you perform the engineering analysis of the house, right?

What do you look for? What do you measure? What are you gathering data on? And then you go down a little bit further and we’ve got a whole document on again. So this is also so that you can do your load calculation by the way. And we got this other document tells you where to look for other problems here It’s just an outline and then it says what to look for once you get to the equipment as well And the duck work and gathering all that information.

So 36 page document there The questions that I extracted from that that are ones I typically like to ask the customer Are listed here. There’s about 88 questions. No, you’re not going to ask 88 questions some, you know Sometimes the way a customer answers a question kind of, uh, you know You Dismiss asking other questions or sometimes you ask them one question and they kind of go on a soliloquy And a narrative and they give you they answer like 10 questions for you, right?

That’s pretty common Yeah, it’s more common than not and the key to that is is doing what eric said. It’s listening. It’s paying attention It’s being present and fully engaged with the person that’s right in front of you actively listening And I teach you a listening skill when you come to the elevated consumer buying experience training You need to take the notes You You can’t ask a question and they go on this little narrative and then you basically ask another question that they’ve already answered in the narrative because you weren’t paying attention, right?

That just shows customers that you didn’t value what it is that they say. So we basically take those to show customers that we’re value, valuing what they say, capture that information. It allows us to, and again, they’re just cryptic notes. They don’t have to be full. You know, you’re not writing out one piece notes here, uh, to write a novel.

Cryptic notes that you can refer back to that will also, and I always like to put a little star or question mark next to something that basically I want to, maybe want to follow up on a little bit more detail as I walk around the house. Cause again, some of this questioning takes place when we’re sitting down at the beginning, maybe at the kitchen table or in a living room, right?

And then that’s going to lead us to go on the tour of the house. Right. And then it was looking, you know, looking at the equipment. So again, we teach that process in the sales training class. I have an attic. Yep. I always crawl up in the attic. The harder it is. That’s gonna be next. We’re gonna talk about that next.

The harder it is to get to that area, the more important it is to get to. I love that. I love that. Okay. Now, do you happen to wear the, uh, the jumpsuit? Do you put on a jumpsuit when you go to like the attic or the crawl space on them? I have but I tend not to okay. I carry it with me. I also carry booties with me Part of this game is the show as you know, yes, right And so we obviously put on the shoe covers what we call the floor savers, right?

We’re protecting our floor, but i’m going to go into an attic or a crawl space I’m going to go get the full tyvek suit right because again, we’re going behind the scenes. We’re going we’re going all Uh, uh Geraldo Rivera investigative reporter here and i’m going in some dark dank nasty areas and again I’m worried about my health, right?

I don’t know what’s here, and I don’t know what I’m going to encounter. Ever encounter any critters? Yes, I have. Okay, live critters. I have taken a flashlight and shown it, and you see six, eight lights looking at you. It’s like, hmm, not going there, right? Yeah, you have to call pest control before we go, before I go in there, right?

Yeah, it’s uh, I’ve seen snakes up in attics. I’ve seen squirrels. Snakes, mice, rats. Oh, yeah, you know dead cats. I’ve seen dead cats. We saw a dead possum yesterday in that one picture Yeah, yeah, i’ve seen i’ve seen all kinds of nasty stuff. And so yes, uh, you know, i’m concerned about my health I think i’m putting on a gun.

Yeah. Yeah, so put on, you know, the tieback jumpsuit, right? And then you put on a respirator maybe even goggles, right and some latex gloves and you go, you know, uh, You know full commando into the thing And and you’re you’re basically, you know Crawling the crawl space and crawling the attic and whatever or going in the you know Basements are not as bad in most cases But it’s crawl spaces and attics that i’m going to do that for because again I want them to know that your house breathes uncontrollably and what’s ever there Unless it’s sealed is going to be in the air that you breathe.

So moving on here. You’re also going to get a survey I’ve compiled all this into a Uh, a booklet here that you can use. Some of you are doing things digitally, but here’s a multi page, 16 page booklet that you can kind of, you know, go ahead and, you know, choose to break apart and customize, take, answer your questions, make some drawings, gather some detail, measurements, all kinds of good stuff here.

So you’ll get all that in the packet of information that we’re going to send out to you here. I’m going to not go through that today. It’s pretty self explanatory, but anything that you get that you have questions on here, uh, you can obviously always reach out and contact us and we’ll be happy to help you out.

So we go from the living space and we then go ahead behind the scenes, right? We go to the building envelope and the system application. They’re usually in most cases one in the same, right? I mean, obviously as we’re walking around the house, we’re looking at the windows, the doors, We’re figuring out what we believe the installation factor to be in the wall.

I gave you some guidelines in the material as to kind of how to guess it based on when the house was built and what the, kind of the, the codes were. There’s no absolutes nationwide on these codes or even all the way up into Canada. Um, but they’re guidelines. I mean, they accepted certainly energy and design principles in certain decades.

The houses were built, so use those as guidelines, but don’t, don’t allow. You know what we’ve shared with you to shortchange you doing a full thorough detailed process, right? Yeah if If I’m on an outside wall, I’ll take a tiny screwdriver and take off a switch cover, and then I’ll take my flashlight and take a, uh, a pencil or something to reach back there and see if I can find something.

Yeah, look for where maybe a hole, I mean, you can ask the customer, hey, you haven’t had a set of the blue, uh, set of blueprints when, from when the house was built, and then what have you done to enhance the house as far as insulation, windows, Doors, skylights, uh, additions, maybe finish the basement, finish an attic or something like that.

Finish the garage, turn that into a man cave, uh, and find out what it is that they’ve done to enhance the space. You’ll see that is listed in the, in the questions, you know, as well. And, uh, but a lot of times I can go peek behind a cabinet or ask them if they’ve ever happened to have a wall open and notice that how much installation’s in the wall.

The reason I do this is, is because no one else is asking these questions. Do you happen to know what direction your house faces? I have Google Maps. I know what direction the house faces. I can pull out my, my, my, my life management smart device here, right? Which is your, your cell phone and figure out with a little compass.

But that doesn’t matter. It’s about engaging the customer. And say, and they say, why do you need to know that? Well, the direction of your house faces obviously determines what direction the sun comes up in the sunsets and the exposure to the windows. And we need to factor that into the load calculation.

All right. Right. Because if you’ve got a lot of south glass, you can add another two, three tons to it. You can take a house, and I know you know this as well, you can literally take a house, right, that, uh, is facing east and west, uh, right, meaning, faces east, it’s getting the morning sun, sun comes up over the house, goes on to the back of the house, gets the west sun in the afternoon, right?

I can take that same exact house, and builders do this, right? They build a Winchester model all over the community and the development, and they rotate this thing, right? They do the mirror image of the house as well. And by just rotating the house 90 degrees so that we don’t have, uh, we have a north south exposure now, what do you think the tonnage changes by?

It can change a bunch. It depends on that. A quarter, about a quarter to a half a ton at least, right? I’ve seen even two tons. Really? Okay. Yeah. I usually find about, by rotating a house about a half a ton is pretty much, you know. Another ton. Pretty much at least, yeah, half a ton to a ton. Yep. And so, again, you can’t just go by square footage of the house and, and some random rule of thumb, although I gave that, I’m giving you that information to you in the packet as a guideline.

It’s a check figure for you. Uh, again, if you’re ever having a conversation with a customer at a home show or, you know, uh, on the weekend, or you’re impressing some friends, some of your friends at the bar and you want to kind of tell them what size seating and air conditioning they have based on the square footage of the house.

Again, you can use them as guidelines, rules of thumb. But math facts science and data prove what it is that you’re finding and recommending, right? So what else do you look for when you go? Let’s say up into the attic into the crawl space into the basement. You’re behind the scenes, right? You’re looking at the application.

I look for attic fan. I look for can lights I look for knee walls. Knee walls. Talk about that real quick. Knee walls. Where are they? For some of the people that don’t know what a knee wall is. So if you’ve got a short wall somewhere, it’s eight foot. And then next to it, it’s 10 foot. Like in a Cape Cod style house, right?

You know, so you got a four foot wall and then we get the slanted ceiling, right? Where the, the roof deck is right on the joists, right? Right. There’s no attic space above it. So. Your second floor or third floor is smaller than the floor underneath it. So it’s what I do is I take a piece of foam or.

Something that has an air barrier so the pipes don’t freeze. Okay. And that I can cut down the infiltration sometimes 40 50 percent right but an outside wall Let’s say for example, you know, that is an outside wall It’s an outside wall, but a regular outside wall on like the first or second floor Let’s say it’s 70 inside at the house inside the house, right on a summer day and 95 outside So that wall is basically treated as a 95 degree wall.

What about the knee wall? You Is that gonna be 95 degrees? If you do a super attic or a say, let’s say most people don’t. What, what is that wall gonna be treated like? It’s an outside wall. But what’s the temperature on the other side of that wall? You, it’s, if it’s on the other side of an knee wall, if, if it’s up in the attic in the summertime, it could be 150 degrees.

So don’t you have to treat that differently in the software? Absolutely. You got a new wall differently. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So again, purpose in the wintertime, it could be negative 20 degrees. Yeah. And, and I’ve seen addicts to be colder than the house because of nocturnal, nocturnal ghouling. Yep. So, so keeping that in mind, you’re looking behind the scenes and gathering that information.

And again, these are the types of things in detail that are explained in the document that I provided to you. We’re also going to leave. When we look at the equipment, we’re gonna look at the configuration. We talked a little bit about this yesterday. So the configuration is basically looking at upflow, downflow, horizontal.

Right. Where the ductwork is. I try to bring the ductwork in the building. Okay, talk about that a little bit. Okay, so You’ve got often than not it’s outside the living space outside the conditioned space, right? And you can get ice damming. Okay, if you’ve got too much piping or too much That’s a term that I don’t think a lot of our viewers know talk about what is ice damming ice damming is where In the the day when the sun comes it will thaw The snow or the ice snow on the roof on the roof.

Okay, and then the building will heat it up again. Yep You When the sun goes down it freezes up again, right because there’s air coming out right there can be Yeah, and so there’s basically what it’s doing is it’s not only it’s freezing over the gutters number one But number two is then doing what at the edge of that roof Yeah, frequently you don’t have a lot of insulation.

Yeah, right at the peak where you have a roof hits And so right there, what might what would be the evidence that I have? Someone would say that’s evidence of ice damming. What would they see outside? You actually can see Shingles that come up and in the inside you actually see water spots. Yeah So you’re basically seeing damage because of the ice damming.

Yeah And so what would be the solution for that? I know a lot of our hvac contractors don’t do that stuff But you encapsulate the ductwork you encapsulate the ductwork, right? Yeah, and that’s why The that duct sealant the the 181 is so so seal the ductwork make sure it’s insulated Yep, right and then some try somehow through insulation or something try and isolate it from The unconditioned space now, even though it’s still, you mentioned this yesterday, right?

Even though it’s still in the attic, you basically are burying it in insulation. You know, an R30 over the duct work is not uncommon. Yeah. That’s right. And so in essence, it’s like, again, you’re just doing insulation, but you’ve, you’ve changed and differentiated yourself and you’re standing out and you’re helping a homeowner see that, again, uh, Ice damming, the damage that is done, inexpensive to fix, right?

Oh, I’ve seen the one house I was working on, in a 10 year period of time, it had seven roofs. Right, so not inexpensive. And, you know, the roofer kept on saying, you know, I can’t find the leak, Eric, I can’t find the leak. And then they said, well, It’s not the roof dude. Yeah, it only reveals itself when the when there’s a this condition, right?

Right, right because the ice is basically expanding and lifting the roof and separating shingles and in this particular house at 134 can lights Wow, yeah, that’s significant the heat from the can lights Because she hardly ever turned them off and she didn’t like the looks of LEDs. So she used incandescent bulbs which give a lot of heat.

Yeah, and so you have 20 25 CFM for every can light. And in this one area overlooking. Because houses at the top are basically the air is leaking into the attic, right? So you’ve heated the living space. That heated air is now coming up through the can lights up into the attic and created an essence.

Somewhat of a conditioned attic a little bit, right? It’s not, it’s not super warm, but it’s, it’s still according to the house. The house feels it. You might not, but the house feels it. And so she had a duck work, uh, when they insulated the attic, supposedly they knocked off the duck work. They didn’t fasten the duck work to the starting color.

I think we all need a coach. I mean, I guess I look at tiger woods, needs a coach for golf, and we surely need a coach for us around our business. Help us run our business. When I talk to my coach, Bob, about different things, he’s constantly giving me directions on where I need to go, do some studying, and get, you know, it’s nice that it has all that stuff in the EGIA contract university, so.

We’ve gotten a lot of really good advice. We’re starting to implement some things. That, uh, we weren’t doing where we’re unique because we only do Douglas. So we have to kind of tweak the HVAC industry into our world, but we’ve been doing that and with both Daryl’s help and Bob’s, we’ve been able to really rethink a few things and we’re starting to make some big progress.

The experience with next level coaching so far has been really good. It’s been really great to be able to talk about all things business and even the social or the difficulties that we’re enduring, not just, it’s not just KPIs. It’s actually, you know, it’s, it, it feels like it’s human coaching more than business coaching.

Sometimes I would say the biggest thing that I learned is about pricing. When I realized that I don’t see. Sell anything but labor. I control all my pricing through my kits, and that’s where my labor is built in. And so it’s made me more competitive because I’m not, I’m not marking up big, expensive items as much as I was, and yet I’m getting it all back from my labor.

So it works. It works really well. I’m getting paid for what we, and paid for what we service. The biggest thing that we’ve learned from the next. level coaching would be the implementation process. So being encouraged on a regular basis to implement the things that we talked about and to be able to go back and either look at the numbers or to talk to you where you remind us of where we left off and to make sure that we’re actually doing the things we said we were going to do.

Somebody else has already done this and there are people who know how to do it. So go ask him and get the answers. Cause it’s already been invented. You’re not going to reinvent the wheel. You just have to tweak it to your company. And these guys have broad knowledge and, and it just, they, they, they bring it in and they can make it work for you.

Do it. I mean, next. Level coaching. If I could convince everyone to be a part of it, I think that’s a big, a big thing for us to all participate. We need to participate in every avenue that’s available to us.

So we also have to take into consideration, obviously, we’re going to take a look at the equipment capacity that is there, right? We’re going to go read the plates on the indoor and the outdoor units and whatnot, gather the information. We also have to look at the dimensions of things, right? Because we have to, sometimes I was just in a house, uh, you know, Last week or so as well as the week before that.

So it was in Virginia and Dallas and basically to get the thing out first, right? It has to come out of the place. Sometimes you’ve come to find that they actually built the house around the equipment and we found the old, uh, they had customer last week, as I told you, we sold a customer had an oil furnace and an air conditioner.

Guess what she had in the crawl space as well. The previous oil furnace they just uninstalled it and abandoned it, right? And so when we got there, you know, She said yeah, they just abandoned it there and it’s not doing any harm But we decided hey, we’re gonna get it out of there because you know Ultimately we want to go back there and sell her a uh, you know Get up on I shouldn’t say sell her get her to buy a cross based encapsulation But we’re gonna dismantle that thing uninstall and then obviously the new thing has to be able to go through the hole Or you’re gonna have to create access, uh there so as salespeople You gotta have a tape measure Okay, and if you don’t have a tape measure you you will become public enemy number one of your installation department So have a tape measure utilize it.

We’re gonna look at the duct system in the air flows We kind of talked about yesterday right and gather the information all that you got to crawl the entire duct system See where it all is connected. See how it’s installed look for broken ducts disconnected ducts again a lot of stuff you’ll see in the um Survey packet as to what, where to look for for these problems, looking for dampers, looking for the different types of supply registers.

Do they have the right registers on there? They have air conditioning registers versus heating registers, um, leaky duct work, um, you know, dirty ducts, looking inside, you know, and taking pictures. Pop off the return grill and, you know, take some pictures inside there. Use a borescope to take pictures inside the ductwork.

Um, you know, again, like Eric said, bring, make this thing visual to the customer. Because if it’s just you talking about it, that’s opinion. But having the pictures, having some drawings, having some notes, taking some tests is really going to help you, um, take pictures, take pictures, lots of pictures. Yeah.

And then if you have the customer’s cell phone, simply. Tell what the issues are. Yeah, you gotta you gotta show them and give them a little bit of a narrative Just sending a bunch of images to people doesn’t make any sense. They don’t know what the problem is I know when you do your audit you’re basically, you know, you’re taking the picture You’re putting a little arrow to what it is and then making a little note.

But again, you’re being paid for that Yeah, i’ll get six seven eight hundred dollars to do a full fledged audit. There you go in system house. Nice Yeah, and but you know, you’ll get the job anyway More often than not put it out to bid then then when you go to test that out again And then you talk about all the problems that didn’t get sealed Yeah, I know you wanted to talk about this when we uh, when we built this class here, but so we go into a house You know, it’s how to heat an air conditioning system, right gas furnace propane furnace oil furnace Because this is where this particular issue happens or it’s a boiler, right?

And so we’ve got to verify that we have adequate combustion air and so combustion Right, so combustion air is air that allows the fuel to burn right and just because you inherited a situation And it’s operated all this time doesn’t mean the number one that it’s safe enough to code You have to verify this now.

This typically becomes an issue on combustion air when the equipment is installed in what is considered a Confined space according to the National Fuel Gas Code. Right. And so it’s usually like when things are installed in a closet or a basement got finished after the equipment was already installed or something like that.

Right, right. So talk about number one, combustion air, number two, venting. And then number three, I know a lot of our viewers don’t get into the CAS testing, but I, I, I want combustion air zone. Yeah. So talk about that a little bit. Okay. I teach a class on this and it takes me eight hours to do this. We don’t have that , so combustion air.

Is basically on the older equipment if you’ve got a 40 60 80 40 60 70 percent equipment or 80. Yeah, it it takes a lot more combustion air You have primary and then you have secondary air. So the primary air that it takes to make it work can get huge You can have six seven eight hundred cfm of air for a large system And then if you don’t have it, then the flu is actually in the makeup air You So, so the guideline is, you know, uh, based on my understanding is if I take these appliances, these gas appliances, which again, your oil appliances as well, and I take these, these open combustion appliances that are getting, you know, getting combustion air from the space itself, not like a 90 plus percent of this bringing in the combustion air through the piping, right?

Um, you can take an old 40 percent and well that, with that, those days of study, they’re not going to really say there’s still a lot of them out there. There’s very few 40 percenters. You look outside and I, I pictured when I was in the hotel, I pictured seven of them in my hotel room. It’s gotta be a 50, 60 year old furnace.

Well, they’re out there. Maybe. Okay. So if you look at the flue and it’s all nasty on the outside. If you look on top of the roof, the flue is rusty and it’s just nasty. And then yesterday I saw ice build up on four of the seven atmospheric flues from my hotel room. Wow. Yeah. Okay, so those were those commercial buildings Uh, yes, yeah because obviously where we are right right, but This is residential when I took my walk.

I saw over a dozen houses that had ice off the flu Okay, and that’s a call for action. There you go. So that means the flu gas isn’t getting Uh warm enough. Yeah, and we’re obviously in a super cold climb We’ve had a little bit of snow here And so you’re going to probably see that a little bit more in a place like this and you maybe will In certain other markets, but right right.

But uh again, so for combustion air, the rule of thumb is what 20 btu’s per cubic foot Right of input of the combined appliances So for our you know for argument’s sake or example save here What we’re talking about here is i’ve got a hundred thousand btu input furnace 80 percenter that i’m going to Put in here Put in because i’m gonna play i’m not worried about the thing that’s there i’m taking that out I’m putting in the new 80 percenter.

Let’s say that’s 100 000 BTUs input I got a water heater that i’m either inheriting or replacing. Let’s call it a tank water heater. It’s 40 gallons That’s another 40 000 of input for that water here. That’s 140 000, right? Cheaper hot water heaters could be 32 000 Could be but i’m going to get it’s going to tell you on the plate, right?

So you gather the information with the plate you add the total combined input of those devices And then you divide that by 20 and that’s going to tell you how many cubic feet of air free airflow space that we need uh For combustion air if I don’t have it Then my job is to get it from somewhere and the way I get it is usually put a louvered door on the closet where the utility room That’s, uh, one way I can install duct work or grills, transfer grills to the adjacent space.

I can install duct work to the adjacent space, or I can get it from the outside. Uh, there’s also a device called a fan in the can. Right, right. To journal and makes one that’s turn turnt. TG it’s like, is like Swedish or friend? Uh, Swiss. It’s Nordic. Nordic. It’s Nordic. Something. Nordic. That’s right. You, you’re, you’re, you’re

Um, so that being said, yeah, that’s a way to do that. Talk about venting. Right. So we go, basically we get in the house. Um, you know, and, uh, we, we have the, the thing that we’re inheriting that we’re going to get rid of, right? We talked a little bit about this yesterday, right? And we’re going to basically put in a 90 percenter, but we’re going to orphan the chimney.

Then you have to put a flu liner down or something to make it smaller so it heats up quicker, which would make, makes zero sense because what you spend for the, the flu liner, it might, you might as well invest that into a brand new direct vet or tankless or heat pump water heater, right? Frequently it’s the same cost to put a power vent.

Pbg fluid hot water heater in as to put a vent liner. Yeah, and the thing is you have to realize on tank water heaters Uh, the warranty is typically only six years on a tank water heater And so if they’re beyond that they’re living on borrowed time as it is now again If you’re at 10 years on a tank water heater Okay, you’re you’re like you might as well go to vegas or atlantic city because you’re you’re you’re living on rolling the dice here With that thing leaking at some point It’s not a question of if it’s a question of when that thing will leak and how severe it will be in the damage You know that will happen as a result, right?

Right. So, I look at hot water heaters really, really, really heavy when I’m doing my walkthrough. Ah. And 80 percent of the time, I am recommending a pyrovent or a tankless hot water heater. Water heater, not hot water heater. Alright, so, and I was going to ask you, that’s what this device is. This is, is this for, uh, what I think it is?

For checking? This is a flue gas sanitizer. Okay. Can you do a close up, please?

There’s a lot of them on the market. What do you do with this? I put the rod into the flue, and I test the flue gas. I’m testing for oxygen, I’m testing for carbon monoxide, I’m testing for temperature, and if the temperature isn’t high enough, add the flue gas. Outlet of the flu. I know it’s not going to be high enough at the top of the flu if it’s atmospheric Yeah, and so especially if you put in something if it’s not working on the old 40 percent efficient 70 percent efficient And you go put in less heat into the chimney is definitely not going to work Right and the new hot water heaters the pilot light is literally An eighth of an inch tall.

Yeah. So, uh, does this device also check for carbon monoxide? Yes, it does So do you walk around the the living space I test on outside and I walk it

Okay, but you also walk around the living space to see if any carbon monoxide is up in the living space, too Yeah, right because most homes should have a uh, uh I mean, it’s code in a lot of places that they have a carbon monoxide detector outside of each of the bedrooms, right? Correct. Okay. And again, let’s talk about that real quick.

Um carbon monoxide detectors versus carbon monoxide monitors Right the things you know customer can buy at lowe’s and home depot and costco and online and whatnot Those are carbon monoxide detectors Techters, you know that they can get at retail and like eric said yesterday those things start signaling anywhere between Uh, I think about 60 70 parts per million That’s so they can get the ul listing which is an electrical listing here in the states That makes it safe and certified right and that’s a lobby for the you know, those organizations that have worked with the Washington to ensure that that’s what gets them that ul listing However, you’re not supposed to be sniffing carbon monoxide even at low levels five parts per million fifteen parts per million 35 parts per million for any extended period of time i’ve given you some information on this Uh carbon monoxide testing and facts.

You should know about carbon monoxide Uh, just because you again you have a crack in the heat doesn’t mean you have carbon monoxide coming into the living space but But you need to understand the dangers of carbon monoxide and share that with a homeowner, not to fear that, you know, make them, put them in fear, but to make them aware, anyway, you need to walk around the living space and test for this with a low level carbon monoxide monitor.

And then I basically talk about, uh, again, even though you’re putting in things, uh, you know, good equipment and you’re doing it the right way, that doesn’t mean that they still shouldn’t have some measure, right. Just in case something were to happen, right. An ounce of protection, right. Okay. Yeah, I like use the low level low level.

Who’s do you use co experts or nci? I’d use both But there’s actually six manufacturers. Okay, and they’re using the same sensor and everyone Yeah, so you’re gonna get eric’s contact information if you’re not familiar with low level carbon oxide monitors that you can sell to a customer so that they can Constantly monitor, monitor for this because again, maybe they start off the car in the winter and that carbon monoxide leaks into the house.

Maybe they’re, they’re cooking and they’ve got an issue there or they’ve got a dryer issue. Things that you haven’t touched, um, and, uh, you know, causing carbon monoxide issues. And so one out of 11 houses have very high carbon monoxide. Yeah. Even if some of the hotels you go into, I remember now, uh, Jim Davis at National Comfort Institute went to comfort tech in Atlanta.

In 2000, I think it was like 2001 in Atlanta, and he was at the top of, uh, the Omni Hotel, downtown Atlanta, after a storm had just come through and damaged a lot of the plate glass in the hotel, and they were replacing the plate glass. And again, he was teaching a class at the hotel at Comfortech, uh, you know, for this event, and And he, he travels with the monitor, has it in his car, it goes off in the car when he drives through tunnels and stuff like that on his bill, it’s on his bill.

He walks around with this thing. He actually has a personal one. You can even get a personal one that you can kind of walk around with. And your technician should certainly have those as well. Anyway, quick story is he went into the hotel. He’s at the top of the hotel and they’re replacing the plate glass windows at the top of the hotel.

And the signal goes off in his carbon monoxide monitor. And he goes to the front desk and he tells the manager, Hey, you need to stop all construction right now. Here you go. Huge amounts of carbon dioxide pouring into the the building through the elevator shaft, right? And he goes you’re gonna possibly make a lot of people sick or possibly end up killing somebody and he he proved it to them They shut down the whole project until they could find a way to ventilate the thing that true story Uh, so this is a stack effect that the trouble was the boiler was feeding through the elevator shaft this stack effect Yep Is there so again, we want to obviously letter D.

We want to look for this evidence of this stuff as we kind of go along here, but in letter E, we’re going to go ahead and understand the issues I’ve given you some information that you also have to make sure that if you’re going to go ahead and do anything from an electrical standpoint, that the panel can handle what it is that you’re doing.

The wire, the breaker sizes is adequate there. Some cases, depending on if you’re adding air conditioner, you’re doing something in the attic. You may have to install lighting and switches and outlets. Okay. In order to basically, uh, allow this thing to be serviceable, uh, and whatnot. That’s all dependent upon local codes.

So make sure you’re licensed and permitted to do the work that you’re doing or that the subcontractor that you’re bringing in is as well. Uh, again, I want to sprint to the end here. So we, before we take a break here, gas piping, uh, Eric, you talked about this a little bit yesterday about making sure that the gas pipe size is adequate for what you’re doing, but also from a pressure perspective that you’re, you’re, um, You’re setting that up properly.

Now for you, you salespeople, that’s not really, uh, your responsibility per se. Um, if you walk into the building and you smell the captain, the gas smell, the gas, no, there’s an issue and you need to act on it. And if you don’t have a way to test it yourself, get a tech who can. Okay, and you have to also if you’re doing going to do conversions, right oil to gas or gas, you know oil or propane I mean oil to propane or oil to electric or gas or propane to electric, you know What do you got to take into consideration there?

You know again go back to the list above right? Is it the venting? Is it the electrical? You know, what are the safety issues you got to take into consideration when you’re uninstalling things? another thing you have to do in a lot of places right is if you’re going to reuse a chimney and you went from a solid or liquid fuel Mm hmm to a gaseous fuel.

You either have to line the chimney or sweep it. Do you run into that anywhere where you are? Not too much. Okay. I know where I was in pennsylvania and delaware maryland, new jersey We would have to bring in a chimney sweep or line the chimney if we were going from oil to To propane or oil to natural gas, because the creosote would line the chimney and that creosote is flammable.

So these again are all kinds of things that, uh, from a code perspective and just a technical perspective that you need to be aware of as a, as a sales person. So that when you go in there, you’re using your eyes and again, pictures, drawings, video, and things like that, uh, to, you know, gather your information.

Awesome content right there as always. Now, if you like this content, please share it with your friends on Facebook. And if you’re not a member, go ahead and click the button below to get a free 30 day trial of our entire Contractor University platform. We’ll see you next week. Until then, my friends, bye bye for now.

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