Quiet automatic

It begins here.

But nothing was quiet.

Or automatic. We didn't know.

She was out of breath, huffing and gasping, a cold sweat ran down her forehead. She shivered and looked up at me in the dark. I couldn't do anything. And I woke up.

The phone rang about 5 am. It was my partner. We had a body. No doer he said. Yet. No "cause of" yet either. But a body. Work. The others would make the call anyway.

He picked me up. Drove me to the scene. It was quiet. A gull landed on the piling behind it. Silent. I thought it was odd. The quiet. When a body spends any significant amount of time in the water it changes. It gets changed. Not in a good way. So "no doer" and "no cause of" was not unusual. The smell was not unusual either. Hard to get used to but you did get. Eventually. Helped if you had an empty stomach.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

So I tried to squeeze my work van into a too small space at a convenience store in the Northeast. Hit someone's pickup truck. Not major. Scratched the paint on both vehicles. My door hinge caught the edge of the bumper on the truck when I tried to back up. Curled the edge up. I went inside and found the owner of the pickup. We exchanged information. Later she called me on my cell phone to tell me she wants my company to pay her $500 deductible because I hit her. I gave her the phone number for work and told her to call them in the morning.

Then when I went to pick up the equipment for the side job I have lined up it was damaged. So I only took one out of the three main components. At least I caught it before I took delivery. Then I got home and realized I forgot to buy catfood. And My Persian needs a bath. And a haircut. And I don't mean he's going to the groomer. I have to put him in the tub and wash his poopy butt myself. And shave him with the trimmer. After I go buy catfood.  This day sucked.

Why?

I told you that I love you and what did you say? "That's because you don't know me." I thought,"Why? ....I never asked why,..."

Would you ask why your lungs breathe? Why your blood flows? Why your eyes can see?

I've asked how. (hard, really hard)  I've asked how much. ("a lot,...I mean, a LOT, a lot")

I've asked when. (always and forever)

But I never asked why. The heart wants what it wants. I think Shakespeare said that.

Copper hands.

I have this house at work that's always been a problem to heat. It's made of cinderblock and the facade is fieldstone. It has a flat roof that's barely insulated and it's on a concrete slab with no basement. So basically it's a stone box with no lid. Oh, and it's on a hill. So a stone box in the wind with no lid.

I suspect that it was originally heated with radiant (hot water coils embedded in the concrete slab) heat. There's a boiler (150K BTUs) and the whole thing is surrounded by 3/4" baseboard. The vendor went there last year and said the baseboard needed to bge replaced and gave a price of around $3500. I went there and looked at it and saw that all the water from the baseboard loops had to go through a 3/4" tee before it got back to the boiler. Basic engineering tables say that 3/4" pipe can only carry 40,000 btu per hour. So the boiler makes 150,000 BTU/hr but only 40,000 was going into the house. I said I could repipe the boiler and put it on outdoor temp reset for less than $3500. So I would double the output to 80'000 BTU and make it more efficient. I didn't think replacing all the baseboard would even work because you still wouldn't be able to get more than 40,000 btu into and out of 3/4" pipe.

The other thing about the house is that it's called "Ladies First". It houses two female clients and has an all-female staff. Last year it had 3 clients-still all female. Not saying all women are perpetually cold or anything, but these particular women like it hot. Like 80 degrees in the winter. So it's a bit of a challenge. I think that's ridiculous so the first thing I did was put in a thermostat in that only goes to 75 F.If you need to be hotter than that it's not about the heat anymore. It's about you.

So last year I did all that, re-piped and put an an outdoor temp sensor and doubled the BTUs, but they still needed me to put plastic up on the bay window in the living room. This year they're complaining again and so I tweeked the settings on the reset control to make the water temp higher. Once it gets really cold out the water will be hotter but in the in-between fall weather it has trouble keeping up. So it only gets to 72 or 73 and they complain they're cold. I want to say, "Put a sweater on, for pete's sake!" but instead I decided I could get another 40,000 BTUs out of it by splitting one of the zones into two 3/4" (still) loops. 

So yesterday I worked all day draining the system down and taking the pipes apart and putting in a new tee and zone valve and isolating valves so I could fill it back up and get the heat back on by the end of the day. When I work on copper piping I'm cutting it and cleaning it with sandpaper and flux and fitting it together all day. There's acid in the flux and it get's on your hands and there's copper dust everywhere and between the two things by the end of the day you have copper embedded in your skin. Like a mineral layer on and in the first layer of skin on your hands. Copper hands. You wash your hands and the soap won't lather up and it doesn't do any good. Takes a day or two to wear off.

and foreign bodies,...

This is the bridge I cross every morning on my way to work. I cross it again every evening on my way home. It's a mad dash over two rivers and across the city to and from a job I really enjoy doing on most days.

Over the years I've driven a lot of miles and that's given me time to think about my work and what it is that I do. I've had a lot of teachers in those years and one of them, I think, whittled it down to it's essence in these words.


"What we do in this field is move Btus. We take them from where they aren't wanted, or needed, and move them to where they are. Or to where they don't matter." We take the Btus in a gallon of heating oil (or a therm of natural gas) and we transfer that potential energy to where it can be used. To heat a building or heat water for domestic use. With a heat pump we take the btus locked up in the latent heat of vaporization (and condensation) of refrigerant and use it to move btus into or out of the space we're trying to condition. The same goes for refrigeration. We're just moving btus around. It's what we do. That is the essence of the heating and cooling or HVAC industry. Or so I thought.

Like a lot of other occupations we are a service-based industry. We provide a service for a profit. Until today I thought that service was that we moved your Btus for you. We don't. Or rather that's not what we do. It's how we do it. When our customers call us they want something else. And we provide it. We give people the illusion of control. And that is all that anyone really wants. Or gets. The illusion of control.

inadequacies...

I re-piped a residential boiler for outdoor reset at work. The way it works is; the control gets input from a sensor that measures outdoor temperature and then uses that to determine the optimal water temperature to use to heat the house. You set the design temperature for your geographic location and the control will give you 180 deg water when it sees that outdoor temp. It came out of the box at 10 deg F so I left it that way because the design temp for Phila, PA is 10 deg F. So on the coldest day of the year (average 10 deg) the boiler will heat the water to 180 deg F. On a 50 degree day it will reset to maybe 105 degrees. Saves fuel without sacrificing comfort. Sounds simple, right?

Except it ain't so simple.

You see, the boiler can't see water temps below 140. Otherwise the flue gasses start to condense and that condensate is acidic and before you know it, no more boiler. So I made it primary/secondary. The boiler and the primary loop run at one temp and the secondary loops at another. In theory. We have yet to see how that works out in practice. I'm counting on the fact that some knucklehead put a 175,000 btu (net) boiler in a house with only 80,000 btus worth of baseboard in two loops. So the boiler should heat up fast enough to keep it out of the condensing zone even though the baseboard water is relatively cool. Putting the water temp sensor on the common return will help.

Already I noticed a problem though. I re-used one of the zone valve bodies from the original piping to try to save money. (They're like $100 each) It's by-passing and over-heating the #2 heat zone. It's a mostly unused sitting room and bathroom for the staff of the home and they like it hot anyway (like 85 degs hot) so no one has noticed or complained yet. They weren't sure if they could complain (justifiably) when I changed the thermostats to ones that max out at 75.  So if it's 78 they're not likely to complain about that. 
If I don't replace that valve body and it continues to bypass it could be,...well, I'm not really sure how it will affect things. I think it will help protect the boiler because more water will have to heat up to the setpoint before the control shuts the burner off. But since it's a shorter zone it could bring the temp of the common return up sooner. Sooner or later I'll have to replace it though. I think.

I haven't actually got the outdoor reset control all the way wired in yet. It doesn't have control of anything yet but the sensors are installed and it has power. I want to spend some time with it watching the temps and tweeking the setpoint once it's controlling water temp. That's when I will know all the weaknesses in the system. The inadequacies in my plan.

I know this much. I doubled the volume of water delivered to the baseboards for half the money the other guys wanted to replace all the baseboard in the house. Double the water volume and you double the btus delivered. Just replacing all the baseboard would not have done much toward increasing the btus delivered. Not unless you separated the two zones. The way it was piped before all the water had to pass through this one 3/4" tee on it's way back to the boiler. So with both zones running they were only getting 40,000 btus to divide between them. 3/4" pipe = 4 gpm = 40,000 btus @ 20 degree Delta T

little star-struck innuendos...

Sometimes it's what you don't see that makes all the difference in a job. You don't see the hard metal pipe under that layer of R8 insulation. You can't see the hard 90s under that flex duct that scoop the air into and out of each run. You can't see the custom transitions that spread the changes over two feet of run. Or the ducts that are sealed on the inside with silicone at the seams and painted with mastic at the seams on the outside.

You don't see the 75 or 80 hours I spent on my hands and knees making it all happen either. But when the temperature in the house doesn't vary more than 2 degrees from room to room or from one end of the envelope to the other you don't need to see those things. The best thing you can say about a properly designed duct system is that you don't notice it. That you never know when the system is running. Comfort doesn't get noticed. Lack of it is what gets noticed.

To paraphrase Dan Holohan, "Years from now men will look upon my work with wonder and never know my name. And that will be good enough for me."