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.
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