I once had an old commercial blower assembly on a 20-ton package unit, and the bearings and pulleys were seriously shot. I was 19 or 20, and as much as I tried, I just couldn't get the rusted hunk of metal apart. I tried penetrating oil, pullers, pry bars… I knew better than to beat […]

Note: My brother Nathan wrote this a few years back, and I only did some minor editing. A pool heat pump is essentially a water-cooled air conditioner in reverse. It usually has a large air evaporator on the outside that looks like a condenser coil and a heat exchanger (usually tube-in-tube) on the inside. A […]

When I teach electrical basics, we do this exercise where we sit down and connect a 10-watt bulb to a power supply and through a switch. It's a SUPER SIMPLE circuit—the kind you might have learned about in a high school science class. But then I grab another 10-watt bulb and tell them to connect […]