Everyone has their own view on balanced. To some it’s whole wheat pizza and granola bars.

To others, balanced is a diet full of greens, protein, and sweet potatoes.

One thing we can all agree on is that balanced room comfort are rooms that heat and cool at the same rate.

How many times do I hear that there is a rule of thumb to follow.

You wouldn’t follow a rule of thumb for your foundation or thickness of the beams in your house

So why do you accept random measures based off the Stone Age era?

Heres a video what we do to every home or building before modifying or installing equipment.

Click Here!

We don’t guess. We calculate

Your comfort specialist,

Moe H

“Close the door you’re letting all the hot air in”.

It’s true.

But it’s probably doing you a favor since most AC systems I see are over-sized and cycle on and off rapidly.

Short cycles don’t allow you to dehumidify well, so leaving the door open may help you in the long run.

What you don’t realize about the doors and windows is that it’s less of a concern to keep them shut to keep your electric bill low and more about keeping the outside environment outside.

I use a Fenix HL18r headlamp to take the garbage out at night. Why?

Because I want to see what I’m doing in pitch black as well as give the neighbors a reason to call me a redneck lol.

When you use a bright light at night you see all the flying floaties in the air.

And in summer time that’s pollen.

Clouds of it blowing in the wind!

In recent years the pollen feels like razors on my eyes.

So keep the door shut. 

Keep the windows shut.

It is bad enough that your house is negative pressurized from all the bathroom fans, range hood, leaky ductwork, dryer, boiler, and water heater.

They’re all sucking air out of your house and you don’t have any quality fresh filters dehumidified make up air coming in. 

Every time that door stays open you’re bringing that nasty pollen indoors. It gets stuck on your couch, your bed, your clothes. 

And now your stuck wearing an N95 in your own home.

1. They are generally both used in the summertime. 

2. They don’t operate near their rated output.

Item one is self-explanatory. 

Item two isn’t, so here’s the scoop.

We will start with pool heaters. The explanation is rather simple. Gas pool heaters require a specific amount of cubic feet of gas, also known as the BTU. Many times we find 400k BTU pool heaters running at around ⅔ capacity. Why? The meter and/or the gas line to the pool are undersized. If you were wondering, you can’t just enlarge the diameter of the last few feet of piping near the pool heater to help with the volume.

Why else don’t pool heaters operate near their capacity? It could be due to the pool pump not flowing enough water or because of the unit short cycles. Think about a unicycle. You wouldn’t do a triathlon on one. Pun intended. 

Now, let’s talk about air conditioners. Ever wonder why so many people need 4 and 5 ton air conditioners? How about master bedrooms running on 2 ton central air conditioners?! I’ll explain the BTU of an AC, also known as tons. A high BTU is like a high horsepower car. It can make up distance quickly. In the air conditioning world, that means you can go from 74 degrees Fahrenheit to 68 degrees Fahrenheit quickly. 

Although, you don’t get the BTU you paid for when the duct work is:

• Leaky
• Undersized
• Imbalanced 

Or if the refrigerant wasn’t commissioned properly. It needs to be:

• Vacuumed
• Charged by:
  • Weight
  • superheat/subcool

So you end up paying more money for a larger unit that works half-assed. Also, if you don’t know the true meaning of comfort, you end up keeping your house at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Properly tuned systems with low humidity feel freezing at 73 degrees!

So there you have it. Two items that are used in the summertime and run below capacity due to errors by the installer.

The sound of birds chirping is replaced by a bug zapper zapping.

First off, if you’re wondering where to effectively place a bug zapper, about 30-40 feet from your house and 25 feet off the ground is optimal. It should be nice and dark in that area, so the insects will fly there. You will have a better chance of catching them there compared to somewhere they’re attracted to the light bouncing off of your house or front porch. 

What does the zapper have to do with a work-related newsletter? 

Things fail over time.

You drive your four-year-old Porsche, and you say, “Wow, this suspension is nice”. 

In reality, it’s now equivalent to a Toyota suspension in comparison to what it was when it was new. Over time, things degrade. 

YOU JUST DON’T REALIZE. 

Day-to-day in the summertime, you don’t realize your AC isn’t good unless it’s completely broken. It’s not until you remember the day you picked up your brand new Porsche or the first season you had your AC

that you realize how bad the system is now.

Reasons your AC degrades:

• Dirty coil 
• Loss of refrigerant 
• Out of spec. components (i.e. capacitor) 
• Duct work that developed holes.

Like the Porsche, you can maintain your system. You can buy new shocks, tires, fluids etc.

There’s a lot less moving parts in your AC system than in a car, but they do go bad and should be looked at…

By a qualified technician.

I always say that I would rather see you do your oil change less often but done correctly at a dealership instead of doing it often at the local Jiffy lube.

He joked about a friend of his that was so old he used to say, “At my age I don’t even buy a ripe banana”.

But this man had his priorities straight. 

And he wanted his boiler leak free.

When the clock hit 8:00am my phone rang.

In an older man’s voice, “Moe, this is Mr….. are you coming today?”

I’m here thinking,”It’s hot outside. I have places to be and he wants me to fix a boiler?”

Enough persistence, and I show up.

He doesn’t have a car, and he eats dinner at about 5pm sharp. He goes to bed on time and wakes up at the crack of dawn.

Nothing wrong with that!

So I tell him to hang out.

If you’re spending a couple hundred bucks, you want to see what you’re getting for that.

He was so old school that I had to call him back downstairs because he didn’t want to be watching over my back.

A few hours later the boiler was repaired. We made all the dripps stop. We also made all the items that weren’t dripping and were supposed to, drip.

The relief valve was clogged.

The water feeder was clogged.

The expansion tank bladder was ruptured. 

There was no air vent so they bled the radiators every season a few times…. Another old myth.

Be like this man.

Don’t wait until mid winter to make your heat calls that you knew about. 

Benchmark your system today during a proper pre-season maintenance. 

To accomplish this, you must proceed with caution. The dehumidification process without the proper controls can increase your utility bill exponentially and go unnoticed. 

I had to learn the process the hard way which means you won’t have to. Last week the temperature outside was in the low 90s and the humidity felt like a steamed sauna. My house had trouble staying cool, and the thermostat rose to 76 degrees Fahrenheit while the humidity dropped to 47%. By checking the thermostat analytics (I’m a geek for info, and you know it), I found that the AC had been on from 10:00 AM until I got home at 11:00 pm.

Of course, the worst scenario came to my mind, “My own system broke”. However, when I took my shoes off I realized my radiant floor was warm. Now I like a warm floor, but not in the dead of summer. Since the heat was set on high on a separate thermostat (I’m not sure who set it), the AC had to work harder and longer. Therefore, it was lowering the humidity and lengthening the cycle to the point where the AC did not turn off all day. That night my house was unbelievably comfortable albeit the high temperature, due to the low humidity!

There you have it, if you would like to lower your humidity for free all you need to do is raise the temperature on your heat thermostat and let your AC fight it for a while.

We are watching concrete being poured today. It’s like watching a baker make a cake or a florist prepare flowers.

The client spent a significant amount of money to tear up the floor, lower it, level it, insulate it, and have us install Uponor radiant heat tubing.

This is a radiant heat system in a 125ft x 54ft barn. We computer generated the layout and installed it using Creatherm S45 insulated panels. 

The job costs X amount of money regardless of who does it. No matter how free or cheap someone does a job for you, the concrete company costs money, the tubing supplier needs to get paid, and the insulation and wire mesh isn’t free.

So the cost of doing the job is really X+Y. What’s the Y? The Y is the incremental difference between the lowest bidder and the one doing it right.

Cats have 9 lives, but you only have one shot at radiant tubing. That’s before the flooring gets poured or installed. 

Plumbing, heating and cooling services are not commodities. You get what you pay for.

Your Main Man, 

Moe

Every home has heating and or cooling, yet not every home is comfortable.

We dial in on the comfort, and we find the perfect balance of heat or cool. We make sure you are never too hot, too cold, too humid, or too dry. We ensure that you have fresh air rather than stale air recirculating in your home or office.

When you’re comfortable in your home, you spend more time there, your mood is better, your productivity increases, and there is no need for the excessive blankets or sweaters. Conversely, you shouldn’t need to strip down to your underwear in order to stay cool.

Allow us to help you find comfort in your own home. 

We look forward to hearing your comments, questions, and suggestions to make this and all future articles geared towards YOU, the reader.

(VIDEO BELOW)

This may sound bland, however I see this every day. The classic conversation is as follows:

Client: Moe, What do you think about XYZ equipment?

Moe: It’s a good product, however where are you planning to install it?

Client: I have a job, building, business, home, etc.

Moe: Well it’s a good product, but it is the wrong product for that application.

Let’s use the case of a combi boiler or indirect hot water heater. Without putting a brand on the pedestal, the product may be perfect for one application and terrible for another. The appliance may work a long lifespan when applied correctly and a short, maintenance-filled, lifespan if it is installed in the incorrect scenario.

The above goes for anything from faucets to mini split heat pumps, or from boilers and radiant to forced air. Every plumbing, heating and cooling appliance, fixture, and part has an application. Misuse of the appliance in a manner that the manufacturer or designer did not intend to have it used, will have the outcome of a miserable failure of the product and will cost lots of money to keep it running.

This my friends, is why brands and types of appliances get bad names. I have a line I always say when someone complains about a piece of equipment or brand.

There is no such thing as bad appliances, only miss-installed and poorly applied. – Moe