I bought a crappy old house built in the 1920s a few years into my marriage. There were so many things wrong with it. Water intrusion, leaking pipes, roots in the sewer line… on and on. But it was our house, and we loved it. One issue was that the water heater was tiny, and […]

Back in the “good old days,” controls were all analog and mechanical; that simply means they acted in a directly connected and variable manner based on a change in force. Both pneumatic (air pressure) and hydraulic (fluid pressure) systems are examples of mechanical or analog controls. When the pressure increases or decreases on a particular […]

Not if you are hungry, anyways— A true story. I have a good friend who owns an HVAC company. Not much of a Ph.D., but he is known to be honest, doesn’t pull vacuums through manifolds, and claims to almost always use American-made capacitors. We’ll call him Captain Kirk. He called me recently, quite worked […]