Hey you found your way into into the HVAC school podcast, actually more more apt more aptly. I think I found my way into your ear cavities, it's kind of strange. So don't worry! This is just a short episode. Splitting up the two episodes that I had with Trevor Matthews about compressor murder.

So this is just a quickie just to just a few minutes of your time and before I jump into it today, we're actually talking about energy States energy compared to what almost nobody's gon na get that reference. Unless you ever watch the video series Marcel the shell with shoes on, if you haven't watched it, it is kind of funny in a very childish way, but energy compared to what that's the title of this of this episode. But before we get into that, I just want to remind you of a couple of our sponsors carrier, Mitsubishi comfort and then a couple other companies that have partnered with us that I appreciate really good quality companies and, of course, in addition to carrier Mitsubishi. That are that are good quality companies as well, but retro tech, retro tech makes a lot of really great high-end building performance test equipment.

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The rights off for partnering with us as well, but today the episode is about energy and we think about energy. There's there's always this there's always confusion, there's confusion in terms and so an example would be we'll use the term temperature and heat like they're. The same like they're synonymous and they're they're, not I mean they're directly related temperatures is a measurement of the intensity of heat average molecular velocity. So it's a it's a measurement of the intensity of heat, but it isn't the measurement of total heat content.

Actual heat moved, in fact, you could have something: that's a certain temperature and have no energy transfer going on between it and another substance. At all I mean, for example, you could have something that was, you know, 100 degrees and it's completely insulated and it's not transferring any energy to any other any other space, and it's just got a contained energy inside that inside that container. Imagine it's a glass jar and then the same is also true. When we talk about voltage and amperage, we get those concerns confused, sometimes or even call voltage, power, we'll say technicians will say: do you have power, that's at the outlet and what they mean is.

Are you measuring voltage at the outlet, but here's something that I think it's important for us to understand is that in most cases as diagnosticians as most cases out there in the field as technicians we're not measuring, generally speaking, an absolute measurement, we're usually measuring in comparison To something else, a perfect example of this is when we measure voltage we're always measuring it between two different points. You never take a you know, one one of the leg of a voltmeter and just you know, hang it in the air and then test with the other that doesn't work, there's no path. When we, when we were using a voltmeter, we're using it to measure a difference in charges and another way that people will say, that's that's technically correct is you're using a voltmeter to check voltage, drops actually you're right, you're measuring a difference in charges, a drop in Potential energy between two states and that's when we say voltage where we often will define that as being force. The force behind the electrons is voltage, but I think it's it's helpful.

If we can take these different energy states, these different energy circumstances and equate them to each other, so the way I've started describing this is, if you imagine, a wall and on one side of this wall there's a hundred degree air and on the other side of The wall there's 30-degree air. So what do you have in between those two? What's the difference between those two? Well, one is 100. One is 30, so that's 70 degrees, a difference across a wall. If you think of the wall and the r-value of that wall as a resistance and electrical, it's it's the resistance to the movement of energy and you think of the the difference as voltage so between room to room, there's a difference of 70 volts.

So we have this difference between 130. That's 70 difference. Now, if we were just saying the difference across this wall is 70 well, it could be that one side is 170 and the other is a hundred we're measuring the difference and that's what we're measuring when we use a voltmeter we're measuring a difference in energy States. So we're really measuring a difference in potential a difference in intensity between two different points, and so, when we measure 120 volts we're saying there is a hundred and twenty volts of potential difference between these two points.

That's a technical term for voltage potential difference between these two points, and so that would be the same thing. We could say it with a wall and energy transfer. Through a wall we would say, there's energy moving through this wall and it's moving because there's a difference of 70 degrees from one side of the wall to the other and what affects the rate of energy transfer is the resistance of that wall. You see how well that works when we start to think about voltage amperage in ohms.

This is just like Ohm's law right. The resistance, higher resistance allows for less transfer of energy through a conductor. Insulator and the amount of energy that gets transferred across is dependent upon the difference on both sides of that on both sides of that conductor or the difference on both sides of that wall. If the case maybe - and so when we start to think about things in terms of differential energy States, that's something I talk about a lot in my classes with my staff is think about things in terms of differential energy states.

If you imagine a hill and a ball rolling down a hill, you have a difference in height between the ball on top of the hill and the ball at the bottom of the hill, and the difference there in between those two energy states is the force of Gravity, so if you've rolled that ball, it's going to want to go down the hill. Now, if that hill is made of something that has higher resistance, so it's made of really dense gravel that opposes the measures of bowling ball and and one it's a really slick. Surface it goes straight down with concrete low it less resistance, less friction, there's going to be a greater transfer or less loss to the to the surface itself via friction. That's another similar way of thinking about this.

Once we wrap our heads around the difference between differential energy States, the difference between two sets of charges or difference between two sets of temperatures start to think about the resistance between the two and then start to think about the total work being done. The actual end amount of any quantity of energy being transferred. It starts to make a lot of this more clear to us and, and hopefully that's helpful to you - I think we get. We have a lot of confusion in the trade that surrounds things.

For example, a common confusion would be somebody sees a fan and they'll say: okay, well, 120 volt blower draws twice as many amps. That's a 240 volt blower motor. That's a common thing that people will say. Well, that's actually not true.

What happens is in order to hit the same work target? It has to have twice the amperage in order to hit the same work target. But if you were to take a 240 volt motor and you were to put it on 120 volts, it would draw far less amperage, because while we're saying that this motor is designed say if it's a one-horse motor, you know so it's designed to set a specific Amount of work to be done, 1 horsepower worth of work. Well, if you put that thing on 120 volts, it's not going to produce it's nice, I'm going to produce half of a horsepower worth of work at that point, because it's well below its rated voltage and it's definitely going to draw less amperage. And so it's tricky in our minds because we start to think well what's fixed is the amount of work performed and the amount of work performed is not fixed.

Just as if you imagine, if you had that wall and you decrease the differential and temperature across that wall by half well, then your energy transferred is also going to decrease and we would say well how can that be, because we've already calculated that so many BTUs Can transfer across that wall true, but you changed the the difference in energy across that wall, which in turn changes the rate of transfer through it, and once you start again, this is a kind of a complicated thing to get your head around. You may want to listen to this a couple times once you get your head around. This idea of differential energy States not being the same thing as the amount of energy transferred the amount of work actually done, and then you start to realize. Oh ok now this applies to things like what happens when you put a dimmer switch on a light and that you know that there's this whole like paradox there, because we noticed that, oh as you start to dim down the light, you're adding resistance, but now that Resistor itself is getting warm, and so it does that make it more or less efficient and there's all these questions and that's a whole different podcast.

But once you start to understand the relationship between resistance to movement of energy, differential energy States and total amount of energy transferred, it all starts to kind of fall into place, so hopefully that Peaks some thoughts in your head. Maybe you thought of some examples. If you have some examples and you're like hey, I think you're wrong about this. Let's talk about this further well, then, you can feel free to shoot me an email, as always at Bryan P, rya n at HVAC, our school comm.

I get a lot of emails, so I can't tell you how quick I'll be able to respond or even better, yet you can go into the Facebook group on for HVAC school and you can talk about it there. Alright, thanks for listening, we'll talk to you again soon on the HVAC school podcast.