Okay, so i guess i'm live finally um you'll notice that i have no background uh, that's because my regular computer, that i use for this uh decided to stop working so uh, so yeah go ahead and open up the call in line now so yeah. I had to bring in a whole different computer, which explains why this took so long all right now, my my password manager is not working today. This evening's just been fun. You know as if having 10 children who keep slamming the doors over and over again, while i'm trying to do a live.

Podcast isn't enough, you know, got ta, add something else in there. Oh boy, wow, there's 45 of you here, hey jessica's here ken's here i i thought you'd all forgotten about me: hey even billy noth is here wow. That is awesome, so yeah, it's very! It's very green in this room today, you're just gon na have to deal with that because i just can't uh. I just can't get my other computer to work.

I've never seen a computer just crap the bed like that before i got ready to go and my cpu just went 100 just sat there, so who knows i'm probably being hacked by russians as we speak, but anyway for any of you who want to call in The call in line is 352-280-3575 and i would love you to call in because i want to make sure that it's actually working at this point, because at this point i don't believe anything's working, you know my whole life just to big shambles. You know none of it. None of it's been worth anything just because this one little issue has come up. That's how it goes right, um now, if none of you do call that's fine i'll, just talk about uh, random things, uh random stories and things that i happen to come up with, but it won't be very interesting.

It'll be much more interesting if you actually uh call so wait first off. Let me make sure that you can actually hear me because i'm not seeing i'm not seeing an odd. Tell me if you can hear me or not. Somebody tell me: okay, you can all right great, so the number is again i could have had it on the screen, but none of that's working.

Three five, two: two: eight zero. Three: five: seven, five, three five, two, two: eight zero, three, five, seven, five, i'm putting it into the chat right now and i should be able to you know what let me see if i can actually get this up the way it's supposed to be working. Oh some little known facts, yeah uh, so yes, neil, is asking for little known facts. Um a little known fact about me is: is that i'm cursed um now little known fact about me is that i am mostly polish and uh a little bit of scottish.

Oh there we go that worked; okay, that's good! Actually, no that didn't work hold on and uh. I thought that i was a little bit of american indian as everyone. I guess believes that they are. But then i did one of those 23andme uh things and uh and yeah that didn't it proved that i didn't have any so uh.

It proves that my ancestors were liars um and i have that in common with um some some certain politicians, i won't name any names but uh, claiming that i have indian ancestry, so um dave says just not. If you can hear me. No, i can't so. Are you saying dave? Are you saying that you're currently in is somebody saying that they're currently hearing me on the phone, because that would be a bad sign? That would mean that you hear me you're on the line and i'm not seeing you in my interface.

So this is partly uh. I thought i had this all figured out because i actually did a live test. A live fire test on this the other day, but now so dave says not if you can hear me, but obviously you can hear me, i just don't think i can hear you and i'm not seeing anything uh, let's get a recount on the dna panel for The indian ancestry, yes, i would, i would concur um all right. I've just restarted the uh restarted my call-in thing.

So here's how this works. If you call in at the number listed, then it will give you a prompt to say your name and to say the reason you're calling and then once once that is done, then it will put you in the queue um and i should be able to talk To you, that's how it's supposed to work. So if you call the number five 352-280-3575, you know what i'm gon na do a test. This is gon na be really good quality.

I'm gon na do a test on myself right now. Let's see, oh my brother's telling me that i'm late for my youtube live for by like 30 minutes. So that's that's good at least he's taking care of me. That's that's! For once um 407 says: can we talk go over charging procedures for commercial refrigeration? We could do that.

That would be a good video at some point. Certainly not good for a ask me anything, so i guess in the meantime, you can go ahead and ask questions in the chat. If there's any questions that you want to ask, can you find out why the redfish meter needs an app to test capacitors instead of just being able to give a reading on its own? It requires a lot of additional math um. Oh, you mean just to test capacitors.

I think you can you can just you can test capacitors uh. You can't test them under load without the app so the under load test um has to be done with the app, but you can test them with a bench test, just like a normal uh. Just like a normal thing. Uh - let's see here, i'm gon na try calling my own line just to see if it actually works, and then this will act as a demonstration of how this works.

So, let's see here, 852 280. 3575. Let's see here put it on speaker, so you can hear it to the podcast. Please tell us your name after the beep uh brian.

This is actually software that i've made thanks. We are now connecting you to the podcast. Oh yeah, it's working. That was obnoxious all right, so it works great.

So just apparently nobody wants to talk to me. Fine, no problem um. If you want to know where the uh, if you want to know the net phone number, just look back in the chat, so i'm going to do this like a like a true uh right wing, talk radio host and i'm just going to talk about random stuff Until i trigger one of you enough to make you call so we're going to start with, let's see here, i'm going to look in my essential stack of stuff um billy says i need a sexier voice. That's fair! That's fair! I get that yeah! We do need.

We do need a sexier voice. Um. Can you lick a capacitor to test it for charge? Well, you know what let me give you i'll give you this. This is a controversy.

The controversy is. Is that a lot of old-timers talk about the joke of charging a capacitor and then tossing it to somebody and if they catch it, then they get shocked or whatever, and so that's the reason why a lot of people say well yeah that capacitor will hit you. If you don't discharge it, but have you ever noticed that capacitors um? Actually, when you shut the system off, they really don't hold a charge? It's not like you walk up to a system and we do the practice of taking the needle nose or the screwdriver or the 10k ohm resistor. And you know, of course we all do that right, um and but but if you do it enough, you'll notice that they're actually not charged even when you shut the unit off and that's because the windings in the motor that it's connected to actually act to discharge.

The capacitor, so when the thing goes off so long as there's a connection between any windings between the two legs, it's going to uh it's going to discharge itself, so uh, there's your there's! Your uh, controversial tip of the of the day. Is that the idea that discharging capacitors is super important for your safety and i'm not telling you not to do it, but that's a little bit uh a little bit of a misnomer. Let's see here, i need to scroll down seems to be a lot better. If i had a computer that actually worked all right here, we go uh jessica says fair enough, she's making fun of me because i say fair enough all the time all right, so i got lincoln here what's up lincoln.

Is that actually your name as if that is your real name? Oh i'm hearing myself through backfeed, but i'm not actually talking to you hello - is that because i'm on the line here, yeah you're on the line, you're actually talking to me on the phone yeah, hey i wanted to find out. Like did you start kaylos yourself, uh, yeah, um, so story goes, uh started the business gosh uh 16 years ago, something like that 16 years ago, when i was uh in my early 20s with my father and with my uncle so their general contractors. I got the ac license and so we decided to kind of go off on our own. That's pretty awesome! I i have a gc license and just got a mechanical license, oh cool, but i started as an hvac engineer a long time ago, okay and where's that at where are you located uh? We just moved to wisconsin.

So i i started my career in los angeles, where we only did ac and now we got lots of cooling. I mean uh heating to do here, yeah, so how's that transition been um. You know it's: it's actually kind of cool, because uh i'm doing a lot of uh, or at least i'm going to be doing a lot of hydronic heating and uh. It's not really that much different than doing uh, chillers and hydronic cooling.

Oh yeah. I guess yeah good point: um, have you done much of it yet so you so you've. Just are you working for a contractor? You started your own company. No i'm! I just started my own company.

Okay, okay got it. So it's is it just. Are you just a one-man show right now or do you have people working with you just just one guy right now and uh, i'm kind of hoping to go with uh high performance, uh building and do the the hvac and the construction? Okay, okay, so yeah? This is a good time to catch you, then. I'm glad i'm talking to you so you're wanting to do high performance, ac and general contracting, so you're wanting to build like residential high performance homes, that sort of thing and then do the hvac yourself is that the is that the concept that's exactly right.

Yes, okay, interesting, we, my wife and i are actually building a house and i've designed all the all the building envelope and all the hvac for it. So that'll be my first project: okay, all right cool. Who do you follow on the uh on kind of the building performance side of things? Is there anybody you, you watch or read: um yeah, there's uh. I can't think of his name now, but there's a guy who's.

Uh building a house like in atlanta, uh, okay, corbett, corbett, lunsford corey, yeah yeah. I bet i actually started watching his videos about a year ago, okay, um and then i did just a ton of reading um. I so, as i said, i said in my career as an hvac engineer and and then i've been doing software engineering for the last almost 20 years now, and so i had to kind of come up to speed with what's changed in the last 20 years and There has been a lot of changes, i think much for the better yeah. So one of the questions - i guess i i have for you not knowing a lot about the wisconsin market is um.

How are you dealing with, or how are you thinking about outdoor air and ventilation? Well, so we're we're going to build a what uh have you heard of what a pretty good house, which is close to a passive house right right, yeah bill bill? Stone is just i don't know if you know bill spone from um, true tech tools, but i'm going to have him on the podcast next week and that's essentially what he just built was a pretty good house or close to passive, oh yeah yeah. So we're gon na build a pretty good house. It should be very airtight um, so we're gon na have a an erv for 24 7 ventilation and we're going to do um, hydronic underfloor heating in the whole house and then for ac. We're going to do mini splits, so you can and then that way you can zone both the heating and the cooling in almost every room.

Cool sounds really good. So do you have any other any other questions for me on the business side, because that sounds like that's. That's what you originally called to ask about and then i uh yeah and then i started interrupting. I was just no it's fine.

I i would. I could talk about that all day. I was just curious like how did you go from uh? You know just starting out to having the the big business that you do um yeah, so the answer to that is slowly, but then it gets. Then it gets fast.

You know like initially when you're doing it you're just doing customer acquisition you're doing a lot of um. You know getting to know people in the community, basically finding whatever people need to do in order to keep food on the table um. You know the biggest thing in business. Is you really want to have the first six months at least uh paid? For so that you don't need to support yourself in that first six months or you need to have some really good projects that you know are going to be profitable because it's really hard to be profitable early on.

So we weathered the storm because we started the business in 2005 and then the crash came very shortly after when we were still very a very small business but but yeah just developing a really good niche customer base to start with. So that way, you've got your bread and butter for us that was the short-term vacation rental industry uh in the orlando market, um. That was when we were pretty much doing exclusively residential with just a you know very few, like commercial customers um, once we kind of got a little bit stable, then we always knew we wanted to do more commercial work. So we branched out got a couple customers in the commercial space, that's an expertise of ours on the on the construction side and just developed out those customers, and it's just it really is one customer at a time that was our first tagline uh was one customer At a time, and just finding a way to serve their needs being customer first uh, that was actually something i just listened to.

A podcast um harvard harvard business review, has a pretty good podcast that just talks about basic business stuff and they had a good one. Recently, on jeff bezos, um, the founder of amazon, and that was kind of the way that he built built amazon too, rather than saying uh rather than starting out and saying. Okay, this is exactly what kind of business we're going to be. You start as one thing and in their case it was an online bookseller, but then you find the things that your customers need and you provide those needs when i first started just similar to kind of thinking about what you were saying when i first started the First tool that i bought was an air flow hood um.

It was like a three thousand dollar um uh. What is that? Uh? Eleanor hood, yeah and um - and i thought i was going to be doing air balancing all the time, because that was a felt pain that a lot of customers said. You know we want our want our house to be better balanced, but i found out very quickly that people weren't actually interested in paying for that in residential. So it was a.

It was a quick lesson uh for me to not only confirm what customers say: they want, but also kind of vet, what they're willing to pay for in a particular market or in a particular customer type, because we didn't start out having a really premium. Um customer base we've worked towards that as we've gone, and now we do have a much more premium customer base. But i figured out pretty quick that i had to just get good at doing: good old rank and file service and uh, and that's what we did and so in terms of the growth side, though, which is part of what you were asking um. The people side is huge.

I i was very lucky in that we have a lot of really uh, hard-working family members who were happy to come work. For me i was young, they were young and it just kind of worked out that way to build that original core team, but then uh. I always knew that. I wanted to build the company through training, which is the seed of what hvac school became prior to starting my own business.

I was actually a training manager for a large company that was my job so um. So i really just took people who i thought were the right type of people and then just train them in the skills uh to do to do the job, and most of that was just on the job training early on in the business. It wasn't, you know they would just hop in the truck with me. We'd drive around and do service calls and then kind of built, the business that way from a people standpoint.

Oh, that's a that's a really great idea. Yeah! I have to say your your videos are. I think i have a pretty unique perspective because i spent many years as a design engineer, but i never aside from going out to a big job site just to look over. You know what they were building.

I never actually charged a system or or had my hands, you know doing any brazing or anything in the field like that. Oh got it and so uh in terms of your in terms of your challenges, what do you think you're going to be most challenged with? Well, i mean my what i would love to do is have a company where we built, you know, super high performance houses for people and - and we did the you know both the energy design of the building itself and all the systems um. But i have doubts which you actually just kind of touched on. I have doubts if there's really a market for that you know i i don't.

I don't know if people are willing to pay, i mean you know. I drive i drive around here in in madison. Wisconsin and man, the number of buildings that you see being built with uh very traditional materials is, is the vast majority of buildings, yeah, yeah and and there's a reason for that, and it's it's the same reason why so many products are outsourced to china for manufacturing. Um we can all say that we want better, but the reality is is that when you have so many players um down the chain and then you have at least to some degree a cost conscious, consumer, hey! That's three c's cost conscious consumer um.

That causes you to squeeze every part of that and then the and then the beginning. You know the design process, the products that are chosen end up getting you know, kind of a race to the bottom and i think that's happened. A lot in construction um. One thing that i would suggest um that you do if you haven't already uh watched, matt, risinger uh and the bill show okay you're familiar with matt yeah, and i think you know so.

Austin texas is a good example of a market that clearly does have an appetite for premium, uh, construction and honestly. I think the way that that's developed is mostly through fomo fear of missing out. So when you have some people with money and one of them gets a house built, that's with really high quality materials and is getting really good, comfort results and and then they tell their friends hey. This is what i'm getting done.

Then people start to fear missing out, but when the status quo is to build with poor quality materials without a lot of design and without excellent construction, then poor outcomes become the norm and everybody just sort of accepts it. And that's, i think what you are going to want to shift and i think you can do that. Madison is a fairly high end market too. I mean there are definitely people with with a reasonable amount of wealth and there's some high-end segments, obviously pretty hard hit by covid in terms of um.

You know the downtown area, and all that we were just. I was just recently in wisconsin and my wife's family was talking about madison and what a coast town it is right now. So i'm sure there are some challenges right now, but but that's what i would suggest i mean you only need one customer to get started and then you want to riff on that um riff on what you learn from that and hopefully do it in such a Way that you don't lose money because early on uh, the the tendency we all have is the knee jerk towards cheap prices and that's something i would strongly strongly recommend against. You know really understanding a gross margin early on in the business so that way, you're not uh you're, not you know getting off on the wrong foot, because there's nothing more disheartening to do a bunch of work and realize that you actually got to pay money to Do it rather than make money and i've done that many many many times, yeah yeah? Well, thank you that it's uh after watching so many of your videos, it's nice to chat with you, yeah yeah.

It's been nice talking, yeah thanks so much for calling in yeah. My pleasure thanks all right, you see how easy that was, he just picked up the phone and he called in i've got to get you get you all trained um. Somebody asked me uh, let's see here, let's go back to some of the questions. Um one of them was, if there's a business book, that i recommend definitely recommend jim collins books, um good to great and built to last.

Those have been the most influential books on me. Obviously, books like um uh, also my mind's going blank here, um the e-myth uh, the e-myth revisited is a great book just to kind of think about building processes and businesses. But honestly i don't. I don't know if any of those books are the most important thing um to start with.

You know like i, i i would almost just suggest, having a mastery of your customers, understanding your pricing and then providing really good service is a good place to start, and then the next step is getting people, which is what good to great, really talks about. How to how to develop an organization that produces really great people and puts them in the right positions, so those are some of my suggestions, steve. Yes, sir good evening, how are you i'm fabulous? How are you i'm excellent, it's good to hear from you. So, what's going on in your world, it has been a while it has been a while.

You uh, you send me a text message every now and again and i appreciate it - i'm not very good at uh, i'm not very good at responding, but i do appreciate it you're, a very busy man i understand. Well, i almost called you yesterday. I know you are, i think, you're an electrical whiz, okay and i've got one driving me nuts, all right good. I like this.

I, like the sounds of this okay um. I know you don't do a whole lot of natural gas down there uh phase and polarity. I think i've seen you do a video on at a time or two yep yep. We've done, we've done some on that yep, okay, good.

We got a furnace and it is giving us random errors on the circuit board and we've changed circuit board. We've done everything to this thing, so they send me out there from it's 120 volt from l1 to l2, i'm getting 117 volts. When i go from l1 to ground, i get 122 volts when i go from l1 to 24 volts or r, whatever you want to call it, i'm getting 72 volts. Okay, i should be getting 92 if i've got a 117 speed in it, which was a little low.

What are you getting between ground and neutral? Did you measure between ground and neutral 2.2? Now, what i do is i track the wires back. This house is an older house, it's been worked and worked and worked on and they have got a plethora of wires hooked into a giant gang box that feeds - i don't know what it feeds so, but that furnace should be on a dedicated circuit according to code. So, with that polarity being 72, where in the world am i losing 20 some odd volts, i should be getting like 92 if i've got 117 and 1 and 24 volts, whatever that math comes out to be yeah and - and i didn't write down all the numbers, But it sounds almost certainly like you've got some sort of additional impedance resistance in. I guess it would be in your neutral right because you're reading your full applied voltage between your line and ground right, you're, reading the full applied voltage between line and ground, but not the full applied voltage between line and neutral right.

That is true. Okay, yeah and um. In that case, it sounds like you, you've just got some impedance in neutral, so neutral is probably just poorly connected uh, significantly poorly connected somewhere um, because you've got your full path and, and just out of curiosity, so did you check back at the panel um? What you had between your uh leg and uh and neutral, and you had the full amount there? No, i did not they're a kova 19 customer and this was down in the base. They didn't want me they're, renovating the housing right yeah.

That would be the the next test would be to chase it back and see where it changes. So if you've got that lower voltage um between because and that's all i'd focus on right now, because obviously you, whenever you're getting a different um voltage present between line and neutral and line and ground, that's either an issue with ground or neutral. But in this case, since your neutral number is the lower number, then your issue is with your neutral number. I mean with your neutral, so that's what i would focus on is: why is your neutral uh? Why is your neutral? Have some additional impedance in it um and it's likely i mean yeah, it's it's pretty much got to be right up to it.

What's that they've got other circuits wired up to that furnace circuit going to. I have no idea where other outlets in the house or something some handyman's been in there, and it must be six wires going into that one gang box yeah i mean it seems unlikely that you've actually got some sort of weird series circuit. It just seems more likely that, because of that um it in it definitely increases the odds that you've got um a poor connection, because when people wire, you know circuits into outlets, for example, you're actually making the circuit through the neutral through the side terminals on the Outlet um, so it just sounds to me like somewhere in that circuit. It doesn't sound to me like.

I would guarantee i'd be willing to guarantee that somewhere in that circuit, you've got a poor connection, especially since they're in the process of remodeling um anywhere, and any any added resistance into the neutral circuit will result in what you're seeing and will definitely result in problems. Um, you can't have any imbalance in between neutral and ground on a furnace without it having some ramifications either direction poor grounding or poor, neutral um. So that's that's strictly where i would focus. I would start all the way back in the beginning, and just you know, start at the panel and go uh neutral to uh.

Go neutral to ground, go neutral to hot and see what you've got and then just trace it down until all of a sudden. That goes away and i would probably use a tone generator on it. I probably d um, i probably de-energize, once i kind of found what i could find. I probably de-energize it disconnect the conductors and then use a tone generator on it and go around with a with a wire tracer and just try to figure out everywhere that that circuit goes in the house and open every possible box and outlet or anything else.

That might be connected to it. Okay, let me throw this out to you, because i'm not electrician. I've had problems in the past on certain furnaces that don't like having a gfi circuit on it yeah for some reason, and this furnace also has one on there. Well, if that isn't causing an issue as well, maybe the issue is yeah, i mean.

Is it possible um? I guess because the gfi does have a circuit board in it, and so is it possible that it could be actually adding some impedance to the circuit as well? Uh could be um. I would definitely try swapping it out. Can't hurt um see if that see. If the the issue goes away, but again just to define what the issue is, the fact that you have an imbalance between neutral and ground and the measurements you're getting between your line and ground line and neutral are different.

You want to keep chasing it until that problem goes away. You shouldn't see any variation on those, because if you, if you do, that means that there's something wrong in one of those circuits and in this case it's neutral, so i wouldn't suspect the the you said. It's a gfi, it's a gfi breaker. Is that what it is or is it a well they've got a combo switch for the furnace okay at all? Okay could be.

I mean that's just a matter of going back before that and just seeing if the problem goes away back before that you just have to kind of walk your way through and see where you start measuring. You know normal, which would be zero neutral to ground and the same uh from leg to ground and leg to neutral, but yeah it could be, could be. It is possible all right. I knew i should have called you yesterday.

Hey you've got me. You've got my cell phone number so feel free all right. Well, thank you for taking my call and uh we'll get back out there and uh i'll, give the landlord a buzz and tell them to yeah. I mean it's kind of i mean yeah, it's a job for an electrician.

I mean it's, not it's not a job for a regular. You know for for an ac contractor, it's something i would dive into, because we've got an electrical license, but uh but yeah. That's once you yeah, that's really your job kind of ends there. As soon as you have an imbalance.

That's that's really an electrician's job. At that point, yep, yep, yep, all right, steve appreciate you brother, all right, bye-bye, all right! So now i've got it says here that your name is is sunny. Is that right, yeah man? What's up buddy, hey, not much? What's going on with you, hey, not too bad man, hey uh um. What part of florida are you guys in uh central florida, orlando market? Oh nice, hey, i'm down here in southwest florida! I work with a local contractor, we're uh, train dealers, okay and i've been with the company 20 years, and i've been getting a lot of this bacteria white uh from what i researched at zuglia slime, you're, familiar with that in your area, yep bacteria's, bacterial zuglia, yep And basically this is, i just want to see if maybe we're on the same page.

So i tell my customers, you know, picture the air in your house with a pie. Your filter is only going to catch 35 percent on. What's in the air, see that's your particulates, then you got your vocs, your valid organic compounds and your molding. Your germ spores well filters alone, aren't necessarily there to clean the air in the house.

It's just there to keep the equipment clean, the coil coils free of obstructions, the blowers free of obstructions. So what we're finding is that filters uh the bacteria for that zooglia slime. The microns are so small that you would need a nerve, 13 or higher to actually catch the bacteria. That's trying to help reduce that slime.

Have you heard anything of that nature? Yeah i mean anything that you that you can capture will help, but yes, you're right. Bacteria is trying to i'm trying to remember the size. It's do you remember the size of of uh, of typical bacteria as far as a micron standpoint, because i'm not i'm not recalling it, i've got his powerpoint. Well, basically, i think it was uh the micron size.

I mean uh from what i'm told in researching like if you look on your standard, say your silly home depot filters. They don't really go by a merv rating, but filters that do um. I think once it starts showing that it can actually start catching. You know bacteria if you're you're, all the way up to the merc level 13, so many technicians are hesitant on telling people to use that filter because they believe it's obstructed to the machine, especially if you just only filtrating right at the machine itself.

Instead of you know multiple surface grill area right so i mean that's one of our biggest problems down here. If we do a fantastic job, installing our train equipment and the machines are running flawless, but we got people almost on quarterly services. Continually complaining about this pseudlia slime we've tried everything from throwing pocket change, zinc, new calgon, algaecide tablets, everything you could think of uh and now we're getting to the point where we're gon na start using drain solve on just about every call that we run, because this Slime is running amok and causing just call backs beyond belief, especially now with the aluminum coils yeah. I didn't know if you were experienced or knew any good products out there.

I've been trying the new viper get familiar with that yep. I've seen burt use it actually. In the videos yeah yep, the the pan and drain spray, we use that we use evap plus on the coils um, but yeah. The best thing that we've done in terms of um, reducing it is using actual you know, pure copper.

So not a not zinc, not change, but actual pieces of copper, pounded flat, laid in the drain pan. That's that's what we've seen reduce it the most um, but but there's no one uh smoking and in fact we have uh eric melly who's here in the chat. Is one of our lead, techs and he's down in south florida, and we've done it on all of our uh recent installs that have the aluminum coils and it has made a difference, but it hasn't solved it completely. I've tried everything from well.

If you think back say the 20 years ago, when you had aluminum copper and steel coils, and i don't recall ever having to be out on drain lines quite as frequent as i do now right, i mean i've. I've cut pieces of boot clip put galvanized steel, flattened out, copper put that in there i went as far as taking uh those corrosion grenades which are zinc anodes and i stuck those in a pan dude. I would throw a 20 bill in the pan if it would work at this point right right, yeah and in the case of the bacterial question, um, it's not a galvanic reaction thing. It's a particular ions that come off of copper and some people will say silver and we've used like high silver brazing rod as well to try to do it and uh and those those ions have some antibacterial properties, which is why we see the problem now with Aluminum that we didn't see uh when there was more copper in the coils um, but yeah somebody needs to come out with.

I mean i've suggested to some people. You know maybe start coating drain pans in copper, uh something uh to to try to solve this issue. Um, maybe maybe they can come out with a spray or something that contains because it needs to be a fairly long, lasting um and it's not an algaecide right. I mean people, people keep saying algaecide, but this isn't algae.

This is bacteria yeah. Well, from from my research, when i'm looking it up, i think it's zougalia z-o-o-g-l-i-a zouglia slime. If i'm not mistaken, yes, it's usually a white. Real thick almost looks like a something you can batter and fry it's pretty bad stuff down here.

I don't know how bad it is up there, uh, where you are but down here in southwest florida between, say, uh, charlotte, county and uh marco island area. It's it's awful down here, yeah yeah and i think you're right i mean there's. Definitely a uh there's. Definitely a benefit to using better filtration, and one of the effects of when you get up above that sort of merv 13 is generally considered to be kind of a close to a magic number in terms of where you really start to get these nanoparticles.

That start to get captured, uh and then obviously 15 and better, and then you get into the hepa range um, even better. But yeah i mean it's true. What people say that you, when you put a a denser filter, a filter with denser media, that it can restrict airflow, but you just have to design for it, whether you're, using four or five inch media. That's oversized or like you mentioned, whether you're doing it at multiple filter back rails, which is also a good strategy.

That's neil's favorite strategy, yeah. That sounds good um, but i mean you know when you're out doing a fantastic maintenance, you're spending. You know adequate time um taking care of these customers, but then you get the ones that are so frustrated because uh, it's gotten to the point where some people that were on six month service now has to go on a quarterly service. You got ta be out there every three months, because they're not going to properly clean their grain lines.

They try to do the vinegar trick, the bleach water trick and you don't want them, putting anything, that's harmful into the drain line, especially if you can get back to those new thin aluminum, coils um, we're just down for anything that works. So i'm just asking you guys out there that may have known something that i don't know. That's working to just put it out there we're down to try anything out here. It's getting ridiculous, yeah yeah and we're in the same we're in the same boat.

It's not as bad um and i think it does seem to be. Does the tam do the tam air handlers? I imagine that's what you're installing right the train tam air handlers? Well, it's it's! Not just the cam so so say like in new construction homes. You've got these big builders down here that purchase their own equipment. It's the brines, the pains anything, basically all the new ones, with aluminum coils um i mean linux still has some of the old, copper, aluminum, copper and steel coils.

But a lot of manufacturers now are all straight aluminum, your roots, your carriers, your trains. Just about anything, that's aluminum! It seems to be worse if it's a solid aluminum coil from my experience, right um, is what i'm seeing yeah. That's what we're seeing too horizontal. It's just i tell people, hey, look it's it's almost like herpes, there's no cure, but there's treatment options.

I can give you better. Filtration. I've been using uh, fresh air uv, apco x, er3, just something to help. You know treat the other 65 percent of.

What's in the air that the filters can't you know catch and treat or kind of hesitate on indoor cleaning, anything that would produce any type of hydrogen peroxides or you know ozone like your old air cleaners, yeah, something like the app code that just uses a uvc Light with a uh, you know a carbon cell, that's more of a capture and kill. I find is not not something. That's going to be invasive to the homeowner they're not going to be complaining about any odd smells you're, not really going to smell a uvc light and carbon, which is essentially charcoal. I think that's pretty safe, putting in anyone's home you're, not producing any by-products.

You know what i mean: yeah yeah, i mean that's about my same my same thinking, um and i think they probably could come out with uv that really focused on the drain pan. But then you still have the potential of it building up in the line, if any of it makes it through um. I think one of the big solutions: okay, yeah, go ahead. Sorry now go ahead, no uh! You know, like those uvc um, the uvc light strips made for mini splits, they're, just a light strip yeah i was thinking of lining the inside of a pan with one of those they're they're meant to go inside of like a blower of a mini spool yeah.

I've almost been tempted to put those down into a pan that i would imagine they probably essentially close to being waterproof they're, just a led light strip yeah. What i'm talking about yeah yeah yeah? No, that that's not a bad idea. I don't the spectrum that those use is a different spectrum of uvc and it's more like a purplish light. So i don't know how effective it would be on that, but yeah it would be worth trying on a house that is known to have.

Uh has a known issue with it and just see, and that's kind of we're all just throwing stuff at the wall just seeing if it sticks right now, yeah i i i can tell you they make a new calgon pan tab. That's made for like a five ton unit, i mean it's a locker, it's a big one. It's about the size of a thermostat and i've used that on a gentleman's house that every six months i would go to it. He had two units side by side.

He lives down there on fort myers beach um his upstairs unit, no slime. The the downstairs unit looked like jellyfish living in the pan, and i started using these giant new con new calgon fan tablets. I don't specifically have the model number handy, but it's it's quite large, it's as big as an iphone um, it's quite thick as well, and that seemed to get it. I mean if you clean everything up really nice with the back side.

Maybe spray the pan down with some viper put a big new cow gun, pan tablet in there six months later it was. It was almost um like it. You know like i had just cleaned it when i came back, but as soon as uh, the customer opted not to get the tablet. Six months later, the swap was back.

So it's um your traditional little pill, pan tabs just aren't cutting it anymore. We're gon na have to definitely step it up with uh, just trying to figure out if uh different sides of the world is any different. If it's just a southwest florida thing um, i think it's worse. It's worse and the further south you get, the more tropical you get just because there's more stuff in the air and your run times are longer there's just a lot of factors that are kind of stacked against you in south florida um.

You know more there's more moisture, there's more stuff in the air. Just kind of all that together would be my guess, but yeah we're seeing it uh, and i know a lot of people are working on it. I've talked to a lot of different chemical manufacturers. I know a lot of people have tested it, but it's still just been one of those things that is is tricky um.

That's why one of the colony you fsrs, don't even want to talk about it yeah! No, i i i hear you it's definitely one of those uh significant issues, all right brother thanks for calling in. I appreciate you great man. Thank you. Man, great night, night youtube.

Alright, we got an open line. Everybody anybody else wants to call in feel free. The number is in the in the chat three five, two two eight zero: three, five, seven five we're gon na. I think i'll go until 8, 30 um, just because i started so late.

So some of you have commented that uh that why am i? Why do i have a green screen behind me? It's because normally i use a different computer and that computer's not working - and i don't have the software on this one to uh - do it, which is the reason why i was so late in the first place, and now my computer over here is complaining at me. So, anyway, i've had a lot of challenges today, but it's okay, i'm not complaining. It doesn't help anyway. Um, let's see here so yeah.

There's a lot of you know. I don't throw shade on brands um and it seems like any time you get micro channel. It seems to get a little worse uh, but who knows you know? I don't know all the factors that lead to it, but it does seem to be a bacteria, not a fungus. That seems to be the broadly held belief and when the testing has been done but who's to say, i mean there definitely are fungus.

Fungi that look that same sort of way, that kind of gummy look and um. You know one nice thing with copper is that copper is anti-fungal, antiviral and antibacterial, but you have different different substances that are more difficult to kill than others, and bacteria definitely can be one of the more difficult things to to deal with and kill or deactivate. You know if you're talking about viruses, you don't really kill them. You deactivate them um, let's see here what else we got uh joe shearer says that he doesn't think the leds would work in the drain pan i i don't know if they would or not um.

I don't think that they would be bothered with a little bit of moisture. I probably wouldn't stick them right down to the bottom of the drain, pan um but uh. But who knows? Let's see here we got ta get another caller all right tim! What's going on? Hey not a whole lot, brian, how you doing you know if i were any better there'd have to be three of me. Yeah i hear you, i hear you um.

I was calling in because i wanted to see what your thoughts were. Uh, i believe, y'all already installed at least one of the new 25 seer heat pumps, or maybe the 24 seer straight ac by carrier bryant yeah, the um they they're, calling them green speed extreme, at least on the carrier side. I'm not sure what they're calling it on on the brian evolution extreme on the bryant side, yeah or infinity. Maybe it's not green screen, maybe it's just infinity extreme um, but yeah uh we've installed several of them.

Um, i've only personally been involved uh with one of the first ones that we did, which is the one i did the video of um and it went okay, i mean there were some. There were some challenges with some of the software on the controller. It was throwing an error that was just a an artifact. It wasn't anything real and i don't remember what it was.

It was like a. It was like a heat over temperature error of some sort and we contacted tech support and they said yeah, it's just a bug. Um we had to upload. I mean update the the software and firmware, which is a little bit of a thing because you had to have a you know a card with you in order to do it quickly, so there's a few little things that were a little tricky but uh, but we Didn't we haven't had any real problems with it.

What have you had a chance to work with it? Uh i have not. I had my first chance to potentially sell one the other day, um, and i was really anxious because there's been a lot of hype about it. I was wondering in your market uh y'all deal with a much heavier latent load than we do. I was very curious how it performed uh, especially in part, load conditions if it was able to maintain comfortable conditions inside in terms of the latent load yeah.

It did and in terms of both what we measured using measure, quick and in terms of customer feedback. But i will confess we haven't used it to my knowledge in a super challenging environment like we haven't, used it in a house that was previously had a significant problem um, so the homes we were doing it in are, you know pretty much standard standard, regular homes That don't have a huge issue um. While we do have a lot of latent load. You know we size for it, and so you don't generally run into houses that you know have huge issues, but every once in a while, you bump into a problem house, and we haven't, haven't had that issue but yeah and in the measurements that i took on It um yeah, even when it was turned down, uh it it was performing really well and again, you know a big part of that is you have to match your blower turn down to your compressor turn down.

You see a lot of brands that start to float up their suction saturation. They start to float up their coil temperature, as the system turns down in order to squeeze a little more efficiency out of it, but that in a high latent market, that's a mistake. Um and another thing that i find in a highlighted market is that a lot of times the design suite uh your you know your your manual as your manual j. They don't really uh fully deal with the realities of highlighting conditions, especially in homes that aren't maybe as tight as they could be um.

So that's you know, that's another. That's another factor, we're generally running our equipment, pretty you know pretty heavy on the latent side. Um low, sensible heat ratios and so for us yeah, and it's it's actually one of the uh one of the stated benefits of this equipment over the prior uh over the prior line is that it does dehumidify better nice. That's that's kind of what i was hoping to hear um, we obviously our market's not as late and burned as yours.

What what is your market? Where are you at um coastal zone? Three north carolina, okay, uh? So it's not as bad as central florida, but uh. We have our days yeah um and it's our part load conditions that are our biggest issue right, so i was kind of curious how they how they performed for you yeah, i mean it's still. You know you still want to size things properly and all that, but yeah it does seem to. It does seem to be better in terms of part load and again, i'm not just we've done a lot of testing on a lot of multi, uh stage, multi-speed equipment and it's very common for them to start to underperform on the latent side when they turn down.

Uh and again i i only was personally involved in one job uh, all the way through doing doing all the testing and the measure quick report and all that. But on that one it did very well um, even once we took maybe once we started turning it down so once it approached that point awesome. Well, i appreciate your time. That's all i had brian all right man.

Thank you. Thanks all right, i got wayne on the line. What's up wayne, hey brian, how are you good good, uh, first off i'd, just like to say uh thanks for all that you guys do i mean it's a phenomenal resource. You guys offer here um, just very appreciative of it.

Well, thank you um. So the main thing that i'm calling about right now is um. I was hoping that maybe you could talk a little bit about efficiency and what i mean by that is actual efficiency or effectiveness of basically the different types of refrigerants: okay and uh. The refrigeration cycle itself, like how you actually you know, get a more efficient cycle, including the refrigerant, and you know like sub cooling and stuff, like that, oh good, yeah, that's a good one! I'm gon na! Let i'm gon na bring eric on too him imagining.

This is eric. Melly is this you eric, maybe yeah, allegedly because you said because reason so i don't know if you heard, did you hear wayne's question? No because i was connecting - and i was watching on my phone, so i uh - i missed the last 30 45 seconds - okay. Well i'll summarize. His question was about efficiency in a refrigeration circuit and specifically um what makes one refrigerant type more efficient than another refrigerant type, and what are some of the factors? Did i summarize that well wayne yeah yeah, absolutely um.

The only the only other thing, like i said was you know, even even the cycle itself as far as like sub cooling - and i don't know even a tx mini versus a piston and stuff like that, got it okay, so um i'll i'll. Take a stab at that and then i'll see if eric wants to take a stab as well as whatever else you want to talk about eric. How about that sound good sure! Okay sounds great all right, so in terms of what makes a refrigerant good at refrigerating is it needs. It needs to be in the range where you can pressurize it and depressurize it in order to change its state from liquid to vapor efficiently.

So that's the reason why we don't use air as a refrigerant. We don't use nitrogen as a refrigerant, although that would be very convenient um it just wouldn't it wouldn't be conducive to that, because in order to get it to condense and boil um, we would have to you know just apply some. It would just. It would just be really difficult and besides the fact that it has water vapor in it, and that would create other issues with it so refrigerant we have to be able to fairly easily manipulate it, preferably without having to produce ridiculously high pressures.

That's one factor, but then the next thing is what we call the latent heat of vaporization, which means how much heat is transferred when the stuff boils uh and generally you could, you know, send a per pound on a per mass basis, and so things like ammonia For example, are incredible at that um propane is really good. Uh r32 is really good. They have really high latent heat of vaporization, meaning you don't have to move as much of it in order to get a lot of heat in and out of it um. So that's a that's another, really big factor and then we think about a lot of practical things like flammability and toxicity and all that sort of thing.

But in an ideal world we could use ammonia and it would be great in terms of how much of it you would have to move in order to do the job of refrigerating and again from a very practical standpoint. And you know like just to kind of really break it down. What is the goal of an air conditioning or refrigeration system? The goal is to hit a fixed target temperature in the evaporator coil and be able to hold that target temperature at design load conditions and in an air conditioner. That's pretty much about a 40 degree.

Evaporator coil, that's ideal. For most things, we want to hit about a 40 degree, evaporator coil. We can float that up and certain in some conditions in order to get more efficiency, but generally that's what we want, because we want to get heat out of the air, and so we want a refrigerant that uh we can manipulate to maintain a pretty much.