In these dark days, the test men's souls it's good to know that this podcast is made possible by generous support from testo and carrier. Mr. president, in 2015 on Twitter you stated, and I quote, flowing nitrogen is for chumps. Do you care to comment on that? I never said I don't flow nitrogen, nobody flows more nitrogen than I did.

I flow the most nitrogen of anyone so much nitrogen. Believe me. I did not say that by this time I'm sure you've seen the meme not that I'm a big fan of memes personally, but I'm sure you've seen this one. It has the picture of the interesting-looking gentleman and the caption says I tried to braise with nitrogen.

I couldn't get it to ignite today on the podcast. We have a man who actually can get nitrogen to ignite. He's that good. I give you the masterful Jim Bergman, so, like I scan as they say in podcast world, we can just jump into it.

Everybody. This is Jim Bergman and you've heard from Jim before on the podcast. What would be high praise for you like if somebody said Jim Bergman is blank? What would work for you, Brian or please, oh and we're asked what would you like to have on your headstone? Well, I think, probably more than anything I just like teaching. So if anything could go along with, my name would probably be teacher instructor.

I've been in an industry a long time and been around a lot of products from you know. Early on, I started out with a test, oh and then obviously moved on to true tech tools and through imperial - and you know Here - I am today with red fish and my goal has really never changed. It's been two guests: the service, the industry and to teach the industry, and I enjoy doing research and enjoyed looking up new topics and learning new things and then sharing that with the industry and not everybody has time to actually do those types of activities. You notice it on in research things I know when I was in the field for like probably the first 15 years.

I would make up my own reasons why things happen, because I just sort of figured. I knew enough that way. This is why it's got to happen this way, and it wasn't till later in my career, when I really started teaching that I actually learned a lot more about what I was doing and understood things. I think more fundamentally, because I just hadn't really learned the fundamentals and then you know sort of growing as a person that way, and then I guess, if anything I could do for the industry, I think or anything it could be known by its Jim's.

A good teacher he's a good instructor. You know that's kind of thing I just enjoy. I think, seeing other people connect all the dots finally in their career, because for me that was like a super exciting time. You know when I finally figured something out and actually concrete, ly new.

You know I was able to approve the science. I appreciate what you guys are doing on the podcast it's great for tests, though it's great for carrier, it's great for anybody that supports what you guys are doing, because this information that we're putting out here we do it to make better technicians. That's my passion. This kind of ties in with something that I've been working through just recently I've been kind of digging into the NEC a little bit more, which I've been.

Actually, I was an electricians. Apprentice was the first thing I ever did in the trades, and I've been kind of digging into just some of the deeper topics about ampacity and derating of circuits. For the you know, to write them for the proper ampacity or for the ambassador amperage that they can carry and what's been interesting is like this stuff that I didn't or that I thought I knew all this time or maybe you thought I knew, but I never Really thought that deeply about all of a sudden, all these pieces are coming together and that's such a rewarding experience and then to be able to share that with other people that kind of takes it full circle. I see a lot of that same kind of I guess a for lack of a better word, maybe curiosity and what you do where there's like a joy in understanding things deeply and being able to bring others to that same understanding.

You know a lot of times. It's pretty funny because we isolate certain people in our communities, so I always joke around bill stone because he's an engineer you know and a lot of people as soon as you mention you're, an engineer, the service technicians in particular. They like bashing engineering guys because they all they never had a day out in the field in their lives. It's like you know it's interesting.

I think engineers probably sit down sometimes if they saw some of the things that we had done in the field. The way that we've repaired equipment, they would say my gosh - these guys - have never learned a thing a day in their lives, because we're re-engineering things all that I'm in the field, because we think this should be done a certain way and in some cases we're not Necessarily privy to the design requirements to good sound engineering principles, we're just good at making stuff work, and sometimes we do that at the sacrifice of either safety or longevity or comfort or efficiency, because we bypass things we change wiring. We do all kinds of different activities in the day to day service, but we don't always do it with sound design principles under our belt and that comes from everything to setting up air flow on an air conditioning system. While the weight up changing a piece of wire out in a control panel, you know we don't think about things like temperature readings of the wire torque requirements of the lugs late and sensible split, I mean you think about a heat loss calculation and you know we Have tons of guys in our field that if I'd say the majority of technicians have never ever done one, the majority of business owners, I'd almost bet, the majority of business owners have done a minimum, a block calculation but maybe not done a formal heat loss themselves.

But when you sit back and look at this stuff, we actually you know if you do what you're supposed to do your engineering, a system, and so if somebody has selected equipment based upon a sensible load and a latent load that was calculated by somebody that did A heat loss calculation, hopefully right yet the technician goes out in the field and they set the blower speed, and do they even take that in consideration? There's like a huge disconnect between the way things are engineered and the way things that they're maintained in the field. I think that's where we have a huge opportunity, as technicians and as an industry, to really change that, because the better we understand these principles, the whether we understand engineering, the better. We understand what we actually do for a living, the better we're going to make it for everybody, including ourselves, as we go yeah absolutely, and so today, we've selected a topic so first off, I guess I want to state that I'm roping Jim into coming on the Podcast more regularly, so we're going to see if we can make that happen for all of your benefit and also because Jim has helped keep me from saying stupid things or after I said stupid things I was able to edit it before many of you heard it. So I think it's be nice to do that in real time.

So when I say stupid things, he can just catch me, so I'm looking forward to having Jim contribute more often, but today. The first thing that I want to talk about is something that both Jim and I have been writing about and shooting videos about, and obviously Jim as the primary owner of redfish meters, British instruments or redfish meters. What's the redfish instruments instruments, okay, redfish instruments? Obviously, he's working on developing products and being able to explain his products, but I wanted to talk kind of a the general subject would be taking voltage measurements, especially and then how that relates to a lot of the decisions that technicians are making in the field. As it relates to the installation of say, start capacitors or how they're thinking about wire size, I just wanted to explore this conversation little bit see what we can drum up.

So I guess to start with, if you wouldn't mind just sort of reviewing what you reviewed in the video that you did recently talking about measuring voltage drop, I think the biggest mistake I know the biggest mistake I made when I was getting into measurement. I don't care what kind of measurement we're talking, whether it's electrical pressure temperature, whatever it is, was not understanding what the measurement should be before it was made, and you should never make a measurement without anticipating what the outcome of that measurement should be. In other words, phone and measure voltage at a wall socket, I should know it should be about 120 volts before I make the measurement right, but we make measurements all the time in our industry. You know it's laughing up talking to some technicians, one day in classroom like hey guys, uh before you hook up your refrigerant gauges to the machine.

What are the pressures going to be? I don't mean about what they're going to be. What are they going to be exactly and people are looking at me like I'm, crazy or like well, you can't tell what the pressure is going to be till you hook up the gauges. This is well, then, how do you know if they're too, high or too low right? Because if you can't tell me what the pressure should be before you attach the gauges, what difference does that make what they are and it's the same thing with electrical measurements? If we're going to make an electrical measurement, what difference does it make what the electrical measurement is? Unless we know what the allowable reading should be - and then you compound that with when is right time to make that electrical measurement - and this is probably where more technicians fall down than anything - is they don't always check equipment operation under a load and one of the Things you've got to think about with electrical is there's two characteristics that are really important. One is electrical pressure which is your voltage and then electrical flow, which is your current and you can have very high pressure or normal pressure, but not have good flow.

And what I'm talking about in this case is: let's say that you have a conductor that somebody, you know couldn't quite get underneath the contactor, so they trim back a few leads on their right to make it squeeze underneath the terminal. We've all seen guys do that right or they use a pair of wire cutters, it's not rated for that type of wire and a NIC the hole outside of the jacket right well effectively. What you've done at that point is, if you were to measure pressure electrical pressure. What you would find out is, it would read, you know if it's supposed to be 240 volts and read 240 volt until you put it under a load and then everything changes, because electrical just like water flow is dynamic.

If you think about it, if you had a garden hose and you kinked it off, and it's got a nice kink in it or it's got some kind of a restriction and it's just sort of sitting there on your garage floor with that restriction in it. When you first pull on the nozzle, it's going to blast it full pressure just for a split second, then the flow is going to drop way off and that's the same thing when we're making electrical reading. If we have an undersized conductor - and we measure it at its statics position, it's going to read full voltage for a few seconds. But then, as soon as the current starts to flow, the electrical pressure is going to drop or voltage is going to drop and we're going to end up with this system that doesn't have enough electrical pressure to get the motor to start to turn right and that's A big challenge we have because we're not always thinking about what's going on and we're not thinking about now nobody likes to do the math in the field - and this is you know, getting into another product - we're going to come out with your software product, we're working On called measure, quick, that's going to help do some of these calculations for you automatically, but when you're making electrical goo, you have to know it's: okay, so minus 10 %, all 10 % of 240 we'll do the math in your head.

You know it's got to be. You know down a bottom at what 40s 15 14 up to 14 and to 64. You know we're making electrical pressure, readings or electrical readings. If you don't have enough electrical pressure once this thing starts, then you're going to get a motor that salt and what's interesting, is there's only really two things that happen in an electrical circuit.

When we hear we're talking about a motor two physical things that happen, one is it either generates motion or it generates heat, and if that motor doesn't have enough electrical pressure to get started rolling and it sits there and just hums, it just generates a magnetic field And it generates heat and that heat, then it eventually trips an internal overload on the system and what's really interesting, you know if you were to go and measure your electrical pressure, your voltage, you know before the system started, you see that full pressure. You start up. The thing you're going to get a voltage drop typically that voltage drop will be. You know, somewhere around 20 percent you'll see it drop off there under full load.

Amps then they'll be just for a split second, then, when up and running we shouldn't see it drop more than about three percent on a properly sized circuit, the electrical characteristics when we see these voltage drops and things if we're not taking that into consideration, what we're Doing is it's a service to our customer right, because these are the things that affect equipment, performance and longevity and performance from an issue when we have a undersized conductor, if you were to get out your test, Oh thermal imager will give a plug to test out Because they support these podcasts, you would see that the wire is generating Heat in your basement right because you have this undersized conductor. The friction in the wire gets really too high from this excessive amount to flow and you're going to get this wire. That's going to in the thermal imaging world call orange. Well, it's doing two things number one you're putting a little heater in your basement, which is you know, we're trying to cool the house, not heat the house, but we have this little heater going.

It's not a high wattage eater, but it's a little heater down there, but it's also dropping the voltage available to the unit when we drop the voltage available to the unit. Guess what happens? Also, the compressor turned slower when the compressor turns slower guess what happens to the to the output of the unit. The output goes down right, there's no free lunch here. You can't undersized conductors and figure you're going to save a few bucks and in the long run it's going to cost your consumer a lot of money, because that energy, instead of converting it to motion and the compressor, is going to convert the heat and the wire.

It's just in the long term losses of that are pretty huge when you get into power distribution, it's a really big deal. They pay really really close attention to it, but again as technicians. Sometimes we don't consider you know we go. Oh, I got a piece of 12-gauge wire on the truck and it's good for you know probably about 20 amps, and I know this thing's rated at a 30 amp circuit.

But you know I've tested the amps on these things and it only draws about 18. Amps is this wire I'll be fine? You know it won't overload the wire well in reality that wire has to be sized for length for temperature rating, for you know. Is it in a conduit or is it you know romex, you know across your basement. There's a lot of considerations that have to go into that and you know, what's a full load current.

What's the operating current, all these things come into play even on some things. We also got to look at the insulation rating of the wire is rated at 600. Volts or thousand volts, because the breakdown of the insulation on higher voltages, you know, there's a lot of ratings on wire chemical readings. If we don't think through this whole process, we don't size these conductors properly.

We don't make sure that, as part of regular service were checking these things, all we're doing is overlooking opportunity an opportunity in the form of revenue opportunity, because these are real problems that need to be corrected and if we correct them it's going to in the long Run make the equipment last longer make it run better and make it more efficient. These are things we should be doing, but, sadly, not enough technicians. Do them a challenge. Any business owners.

Listening to this podcast ask your technicians. Why they're measuring voltage, because they're going to tell you well pretty much to see if it's there? Well, you know it's there, the motors running. Why are you measuring it? What is the point of you measuring it? What should the acceptable range be? Most guys will look at you like you're, crazy. Our industry has done a really poor job of teaching people the things that they need to know and then we've gotten so rushed in what we do that we're literally filling out check sheets without ever understanding.

If what we're writing down is even acceptable, reading yeah there's some practical things here like this: isn't just high voltage or motor loads, but coming up through the trade I used to hear senior Tech's talk about goosed voltage, yeah I'd say well. I have 27 volts here and they'd, be like oh, that's, just a ghost voltage and what they're observing or why they say that is that you're taking a measurement where you see in this particular case 27 volts. Let's say I saw 27 volts between Y and common at the contactor and a condenser with it off and then as soon as it pulls in or as soon as I actually connect it to the contactor so with it disconnected from the load I'm reading 27. As soon as I connected to the load now that that voltage disappears, it's a better way of describing that and they would call that a ghost voltage.

But what that really is, is it's just a very, very poor connection, somewhere it's carrying the voltage through when there's no load applied, but as soon as it goes under load. That disappears, because it's like that kinked hose where you get that quick blast. But after that it can't carry any current yep Forrest, Gump would say magic, volts, yeah, it's magic volts. We also see induced current, which is another induced voltage right.

You get into commercial stuff, and I don't know how many times I've seen guys run the line and a low voltage together. There's a lot of reasons. You don't do that a lot of times just because the insulation rating and the wire is not ready to be in conduit with the other rival tidge wires. That's a big reason all on its own safety.

You know we don't want a 40 volt thermostat sitting down there. That's why we have low voltage for primarily for safety and also cost, but the other big problem is when you run conductors parallel and a conduit or parallel to each other for a long range. It becomes like a giant transformer right and you get this voltage, that's induced on the wire and it causes all kinds of problems with electronics. If you've ever worked on got trained equipment, they'll tell you got to use a shielded ground, cable and you want to ground that shield on one end of the connection so that it dissipates that and do voltage back to ground on the equipment.

So we don't have issues, and these aren't rated either to run inside of a conduit. But the thing is just even running next to any high conductors any high voltage conductors. They can pick up these induced voltages and it causes all kinds of different problems and that's a good reason on its own. Sometimes they have like you know we do data logging on the redfish meter and a lot of times with power problems you get there and everything seems like it's normal and you can't figure out what the heck's going on there's something else going on in the house.

That's causing an issue or something's, getting a point where you get enough load like a home with all electric appliances. You need to go out there and you check the air conditioner and everything seems fine, but they're having problems with, let's say lights flickering or the air conditioners, not starting intermittently. Well, the problem really occurs when the dryer is on and the electric stoves on and the electric ovens on and the air conditioner starts up because they got all this excessive heat and load in the house. Now we have these huge loads that are all trying to run at once on a hundred amp panel, and you know we started to see voltage drop in the panel and then the unit can't start and it caused some issues and it overheats right.

You know I've even seen an undersized feed wire from the transformer to the pole and I've seen issues where the lugs coming into the drop the lugs aren't tight. You know they ran a copper and aluminum conductor and they didn't put the paste on the aluminum conductors to stop them from corroding. You get a corroded ruined connection and it's causing a voltage drop in there and it's getting hot there's all kinds of things that when you're troubleshooting and diagnosing these problems, you really got it fair to look at everything and you got to think outside of you know It was not have ever seen blinders on a horse, but we get sort of the same thing. We get.

What I call furnace fixation where we forget that that appliance is actually connected to an electrical distribution system, a gas distribution system and air distribution system, and we get so fixated on the appliance. We think everything can be solved at the furnace right or everything can be solved at the air conditioner. And we forget that when we're testing that electrical system, there is a distribution system and we got to test it from the condenser to the disconnect back to the circuit panel. All the way back, you know as far as we're comfortable going right and then obviously you get an electrician out on the job.

I would work into the panel and put a breaker in a panel, but beyond doing that, I got an electrician out when I did my work, but I was at least able to troubleshoot the problems until the electrician. Okay, here's what I'm seeing you know when you find bad meter sockets, you find all kinds of crazy things, and these are legitimate, billable hours, we're solving real problems when we solve these things, if you're going to make measurements, do them with purpose and understand what they Should be and don't leave that revenue sitting there on the table, I mean guys are going to change parts and never get the problem solved when they could actually be solving the problem and billing the customer for a legitimate solution, and that problem goes away forever. At that point, this is sort of a side know, but I thought this was an interesting sort of case study and this sort of thing, the building - that's right behind us so and actually this is the building that I'm sitting in right now. So it's kind of funny that I said that we bought the building behind our current office and there was an issue where there was some weird voltage drop and some just really strange things happening.

So we pull apart the exterior panel, and the first thing I notice is that it has kind of a distribution box coming from the actual utility that then goes into the main meter base. They were right next to each other. They had some PVC grommets in them, but they were mounted right to each other. Just getting these really strange readings, you know higher voltages that I would expect and lower significantly in some cases, depending on whether I read the ground in neutral, and what I found out is is that the entire structure, the entire building the neutral and ground, were connected Inside the main panel, but then there was no connection from the neutral inside the main panel to the actual neutral from the utility, so the utility was grounded and the panel was grounded, but there was no bonding in between the two neutrals.

There was no connection in between the two, and so when I opened up the panel. The first thing I noticed was the screws that connected the two panels together had arcing at all of them. There was like little arc flashes at every screw, because the only thing that was carrying the neutral for that entire panel were these screws in between these two panels with those rated screws. Are they rated for that yeah rated purpose yeah? The point is: is that it's? The first thing that I knew it'sjust, that's abnormal: why on earth would there be arcing around every screw that connects them and then that kind of led me in that direction, initially figure out what was going on, but there's things like that that we assume that.

Well, it's been this way for years. It's got to be right and you'd be shocked. How many times things have been. You know working okay in this case, these these little screws were carrying at all this time, but now they're starting to build up enough carbon and gunk on them that they're not making a good contact anymore.

Now we've got an AC and honestly because I'll tell you I've done this way more than once. How many times have you looked at a problem like that and you turned around and you go dang what in the world's going on there and you literally button the panel back up and you go home and you're thinking about it for days on time? Thinking about it at night, what could be causing that I've never seen screws get Ark before wonder if they put those screws and what's kind of an arc, screwdriver you're thinking all these reasons. You know you just don't know and your brains going on and on on. Why could this be happening and we end up making your own reason or just simply forget about the problem, but you see something and you don't even know what question to ask you don't even know how that could happen in there and that's why I enjoy doing Things like this podcast I enjoy doing things like the Facebook posts that we do the videos that we do, because it allows us to not only share our experience but also share a solution with somebody, because I will guarantee you that every time we do a video Every time we do a podcast there's somebody that has an aha moment or has a little epiphany and going wow.

I've seen it before and I never knew what caused that, and I can't believe I missed it and now what job was that on? Oh, my gosh, it was so long ago. You know they're trying to remember, and I mean just think about that it. These are things that, as technicians, you've got to stop. You've got to take a breath for a minute and either going to pick up the phone and call somebody if you don't know or you've got to just keep working at it till you figure it out, because these are not only untapped revenue streams but in a Case of what you had there, you had a fire hazard.

You had some pretty serious issues at a panel carrying all the neutral current through the through the ground rod through a safety circuit. You know it should never happen and by the way, there should be no current through your ground wire right or through your gas lines or through your copper plumbing right. So you know clamp your an clamp around a gas line once in a while clamp, your amp clamp around your waterline once so I'll accept the plastic ones. They don't conduct too much current.

I don't know if you guys do water softeners as part of what you guys do, but I've been out with companies have done water softeners. I've watched a technician cut apart the water lines and we saw a huge flash and electric arc like whoa, that caused that you know we're not even thinking how here we're carrying back current through the water line to ground and the well line taking like a ground Steak, you know and that's why now, if you look at grounding in the NEC, that's a and you got to bond all these things. Together, you got to bond the ductwork. You got to bond the gas line.

You got to bond the water lines. All this stuff has to be bounded to the same potential, because these are issues that have been happening for years and we just simply see them, but we don't think about what could be causing that. And we don't also think about its that dangerous. And these are questions we got to ask ourselves: there's nothing wrong with not knowing the only thing you're doing wrong.

If you don't know is, if you don't ask somebody that may know or don't take it to the next level or don't do the exploratory surgery or don't figure out what's going on, none of us know everything every single week, I'm digging into books and learning new Things I always tell people like when I teach them kids at high school. It's not that I know everything it's I know where to find it. I know where to look. I know what questions to ask it's a skill set for me, one of the Eureka's this week, and it's interesting that I never thought about this before.

But when I was digging through the NEC and reading some different right. Actually, I think it was the K you learn this in a Mike Holt video and then went back to the NEC and looked at it. But the idea that wire length conductor length I used to think of that is the same sort of D rating condition as having too small of a wire when it comes to voltage drop that would think of them. In the same way, I would think well having too small of a conductor that leads to voltage drop, having too long of a conductor that leads to voltage drop, and so it's the same sort of consideration but they're actually very different.

When you have a conductor, that's long enough that it's causing an issue with voltage drop, that is a problem for the equipment, but that does not result in greater heat in the kind after and at first, I thought that I know that doesn't seem right. How is that possible? But it's just Ohm's law, and I know I just said it's just Ohm's law and you told me that if anybody ever says that you're going to kill them but we're adding resistance to the circuit. So when you're, adding resistance to the circuit, you're, actually reducing the amperage of the circuit, whereas the size of the conductor has to do with the ampacity the amp capacity of the conductor, which results in heat which, even when I first said it. Because I recorded it on one of the episodes of the podcast, and I just like that's not right, you know that can't be right and I just kept going back to it and then finally, I was like yeah, that's actually how it works, which I I don't Know if you find that interesting, but to me that was that was kind of a new thing and that's exactly the kind of things like I said we're talking about engineering, we almost have a responsibility as technicians to make the system run the way that it was Engineered to run not necessarily the way that we think it should run, but the way it's engineered to run right and we got to realize every day we're engineering, those solutions.

And if we're going to be engineering solutions, then we need to be effectively educated, like engineers or again know where to find the stuff and Mike Holt's a tremendous resource. I've read his stuff. Also he's got a great website if you haven't been there, yet I'm sure you have Brian but he's just a wealth of information, especially when it comes to code and grounding, and things like that. You won't find too many people that are more knowledgeable than he is and all that stuff's out there I got to do is pick up the computer and read along a little bit that sounds kind of heavy well, do I have to pick up my computer? Can I just like sit down? Well, that's why I got the MacBook Air.

It was straining my arms and now it's much easier yeah. Maybe your Eureka today is that you don't actually have to pick up your computer to search things on the internet. I mean that. Could be something that you come away with yeah? Well, it always like to pace a lot while I well, I think so.

I haven't the computer. I can carry around it's not a bad thing, so yeah, that's good, so new technology is definitely serving you in this case yep. I digress. Sorry before before we in this episode, I wanted to ask you about hardstark: it's because you made a comment about that.

When you were talking about measuring voltage, drop and I think conclusion number one would be: if you're not measuring voltage drop under load, then you have no business ever installing a hard start kit, or I shouldn't say ever installing one, because there are use cases where the Manufacturer says that you should install one but as an aftermarket repair in order to get a compressor starting, you need to be checking voltage drop under load before you're, installing the hard start kit first off. Would you agree with that as an assertion? First of all, I guess a couple of quick notes. You know I install my fair share of those in my time, but first thing I'd say is if at all possible, put on the manufacturer approved hard start kit, in other words, one that has a start relay and a capacitor, that's matched for the capacitive system and The compressor, the aftermarket ones they use their misters in there to take the start cap out of the circuit instead of a start relay and the thermistor takes time to reset. So if it doesn't start right, the first time and the mr.

doesn't reset it goes through. A cycle of restarting until the thermistor, resets and start cap, and then it starts again so ideally, you always want to make sure that you're using a manufacturer proves hard start kit. That being said, it's not always a case, a lot of times we're using the aftermarket stuff and there's really for the most part, there's not a lot wrong with that. They do work but again they're, going to cause some longevity issues or can cause longevity issues with the equipment because they're again not engineered for that.

They just happened to make the symptoms of the problem go away now. It is absolutely critical that you're making sure that you have ample voltage when the system is going to start at lock, rotor amps it shouldn't drop more than 10 % and during operation shouldn't drop more than 3 % of the static voltage. If you're seeing those voltage drops, then in excess of that, you got to start going back and looking for loose connections. Otherwise, you're just masking the symptoms of another problem and eventually, whatever has failed or whatever is failing, will completely fail and you'll end up with a burned up, disconnect a burned up views a burned up circuit breaker, whatever you want to have there interesting enough, and your Comment just a minute ago, jogged my memory with voltage drop in a wire.

There is a acceptable voltage drop in a feed circuit, so in other words, if you were to measure voltage at your panel and measure voltage at your disconnect they're going to be slightly different because there is voltage drop in the wire. Just do the resistance of the wire right, then, there's also voltage drop when the equipment starts and we have current slow in there. So this is the same thing again. If you ever looked at a vacuum, pump right our recovery machine guys go out all the time you get a hundred foot cord or 200 foot cord they plug in their vacuum pump and the thing search that chug-chug-chug trying to start on the roof vacuum pump.

Won't start up, that's because it doesn't have enough voltage under a load to actually let the pump start up and run properly. That's what's causing that and if you were to take your cord off and measure your voltage, you go. Oh, I got 120 volts at the court. I don't know what's wrong here.

Well, if you got a vine splitter and you measure it again well, it was actually trying to start. You see that voltage is dropping down, probably to 90 volts, and you need a 10 gauge cord instead of that 12 or 16 gauge cord that you have, but before you throw on that hard start kit do some pulmonary checks, because what we're trying to eliminate here Is the truck roll? Is the callback right at the end of the day? And technicians often don't realize this, but it costs your company a ton of money. In fact, one company down in Texas - I interviewed not too long ago - was a about $ 250, for a call back is what it cost them, because not only that this in the truck back out again but they're doing that for free and there's a lost revenue That they have because they could be making money on another job and then there's a cost of the overhead that supports those technicians. Technicians often get fixated on themselves and don't think about everything that goes to supporting them at the office.

But there's not a single person sitting in an office that is not overhead, they don't make the money for the company. The technicians make the money for the company and, if your technician is not making money for the company, the not only burdening the cost of the technician. You're also burdening the cost of the overhead and that's where the costs get huge. So if you spend an extra ten fifteen minutes on that job, tracing out that loose connection in that disconnect or in that panel or putting a right sized feed wire in or doing whatever, you have to do to correct that problems that are just throwing on a Part that masks the symptoms for a couple months, you're doing a huge huge service, not only for your customer but for your company, because every time guys go and ask for that raise at the end of the year.

If the overhead costs of running the business are just too high to do it, it's just not there and everybody bears responsibility and technicians are the front line and we're the guys that really got ta make the effort to make sure that we're spending the extra time On the job to get it done right here here, so the number one lesson here is start checking voltage drop under load. That's something for you to look for and the first step. If you're, seeing abnormal voltage drop, voltage drop outside of three percent. While it's running, then you want to check connections first, all the way back as far as you can check out.

Obviously, certain areas, certain requirements, you know prevent you from going into panels or whatever and that's understandable, but you want to go back and check as many connections as you can and then start looking at wire, size and wire length would be the absolute absolutely. Everything requires maintenance, even panels require maintenance, they do require going through and making sure things are torque correctly, making sure breakers are seated properly and again. You know we don't always do that kind of stuff and we got to make sure as an industry that we really start to do those things yeah. I was looking at the little residential contactors that we keep on our truck and I never noticed this before, but it's got a torque spec right there on the little residential contactor.

So I'm going to be the first to confess I have never torqued a lug on a residential contactor before, but now I'm going to be convicted to start doing that as well. So it's pretty cool once you start digging into this stuff. How much detail there is and how much better you can do your job when you start paying attention to the fine print yep and that's a big difference between a technician and a parts changer out here, and if you make that commitment to never stop learning, then Your earning potential is pretty much unlimited. It really is because you're going to be the guy that solves the problems that everybody else overlooks.

There's a lot to be said for that and it's very gratifying as a technician to be the hero, I mean that's what we all want to be at the end of the day, we're giving you opportunity to do it now so, but that's it for me, Brian Anything else for you, no that's it! I appreciate a gem all right all right. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of the HVAC school podcast. I'm excited to announce that Jim Bergman is going to be coming back on a regular basis as sort of a honorary co-host on HVAC school. So that's something to look forward to.

We actually have a lot of episodes, it's crazy when I initially started this podcast. I intended on just publishing once a week, but there's lots of really cool stuff is happening and a lot of people are willing to come on, which is very, very nice. We have Jamie kitchen from danfoss is coming on to talk psychometrics and airside. We have an episode coming up with the EPA, which should be quite interesting talking about the changes to the 2018 6:08 standards, so stay tuned.

If you haven't gone on a podcast app yet an actual app on your phone subscribed and maybe considered leaving us a review, I would request that you do that. If you enjoy this podcast or even if you hate it, I don't have any one-star reviews yet. So if you do hate this podcast, if you're listening to it, just to think of mean things you can say about me to your friends now's the time to go on to an app and leave me a one-star review, telling me what you really think of me And as always, you can email me brian, be rya n at hvac, our school comm, I'm always happy to get your emails and if you haven't joined the Facebook group, yet you just type in hvac school in facebook and you can join the private facebook space flip Fit i can't talk the private facebook group and join us there. We have a lot of interesting conversations going on there.

I will warn you, though, our Facebook group is not like others. I don't. I don't allow some of the name-calling and and nastiness that goes on. Some of the other groups, so sometimes things get started, and it's not intentional, but I will tell you in our group if you start calling each other names and get nasty you're just going to find yourself disappearing from it, which is already come up a couple times Already and hopefully, I'm not making myself too many enemies, but again, if you are my enemy, take it out on me by leaving me a one-star review and telling me how much you can't stand my podcast, alright, thanks for being here, we'll see you next time on Hvac school.