This article is written by one of the smartest guys I know online, Neil Comparetto. Thanks, Neil! Recently, I posted a question in the HVAC School Group on Facebook that went like this: “When designing a residential duct system, what friction rate do you use?” As of writing this, only one answer was correct according […]

Belly band crankcase heater When I first started in the trade as an apprentice, we worked on many Trane heat pumps that used crankcase heaters. These crankcase heaters slid into the compressor sump on the big orange Tyler reciprocating compressors. They looked like the one in the picture below. It was very common for these […]

I hear many techs complain about the finicky and ineffective nature of electronic leak detection—so much so that some claim that it is a waste of time altogether. We recently located a leak inside the fins of a ductless evaporator coil—pinpointed to an exact spot—using an electronic leak detector. For demonstration purposes, we took that […]