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.