Lineage Logistics recently funded renovations to the refrigeration system at a New Jersey facility, including replacement of an evaporative condenser.

James Bowman, a 20-year industry veteran, has joined NAVAC North America as regional sales manager of HVAC tools. Bowman will oversee the company’s central sales region.

Wendy Abbagliato of Chester, New York, was promoted to office manager at Nebrasky Plumbing, Heating & Cooling, an award-winning Hudson Valley business. Abbagliato will be responsible for planning, directing, and overseeing the office operations for the company.

AI tools, such as Bluon’s MasterMechanic, could make a big dent in another aspect of the labor issue: the wisdom lost as older, highly skilled workers leave the industry.

Software company Bluon is betting that artificial intelligence, or AI, can help solve the labor shortage — and pass along decades of knowledge from retiring HVAC techs to the next generation.

This article lists four ways contractors can stock their trucks to guarantee they keep rollin’ in the dough (pun intended).

This service reduces fleet downtime due to roadside emergencies or inconveniences like dead batteries, empty fuel tanks, flat tires, etc.

This product provides central management on one platform for both employees and owners.

GPS Insight, a provider of fleet software for organizations, announced the acquisition of ServiceBridge.

Here are managerial strategies that contractors can incorporate to improve driver safety and management during the winter season.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic struck nearly three years ago, automobile manufacturers have had trouble getting many of the parts — computer chips especially — required to assemble the vans and trucks that field-service businesses use daily.

Software can increase productivity, better manage labor, encourage retention, and keep things consistent and organized. But it’s up to HVACR contractors to choose the right software and take the proper stops to implement it.

Having the right fleet management solution can increase employee accountability, efficiency, safety, and grow an HVAC company.

Used in new construction and retrofit applications, the product is small, light, and customizable.

At a booth thick with traffic at the AHR Expo’s, commercial product manager Schlegel talked about Johnson Controls’ new YORK Sun Choice rooftop unit.

Daniel Truxillo, the general manager of the Dayton, Ohio, branch of Thomas & Galbraith Heating, Cooling & Plumbing, has a long history of success in the home-services industry and got his start as an HVACR technician nearly two decades ago.

Refrigerant manufacturers highlighted their low-GWP refrigerants for both air conditioning and refrigeration applications at the 2023 AHR Expo.

A new survey released by Daikin studied the opinions and habits of more than 1,200 people from 12 cities across the globe when it comes to their a/c systems.

By splitting the absorption process into two steps, lithium bromide solution concentrations are lower in the system, enabling lower hot water temperatures within the generator, lower hot water flow rates, and the elimination of crystallization risk within the chiller.

Heat-only, direct-fired, and indirect-fired makeup air units have been added to the company’s product line. 

In comments to EPA’s proposed rule regarding HFC management, many HVACR stakeholders expressed concern over issues including tracking cylinders, training technicians, and reclaiming refrigerant.

Contractors need to implement a refrigerant management strategy that accommodates both legacy and A2L systems, as well as emphasizes recovery and reclamation.

Technicians need to understand the basic electrical fundamentals and how they relate to each other in order to better troubleshoot electrical failures.

Geothermal heat pumps tap into a renewable source of energy to provide comfort for a home, and HVAC contractors can tap into this market for increased sales.

Amy Harlan, who has an extensive background in electronics and device connectivity, is the new business development manager for device connection technology at the global electronics technology firm.

Saving one compressor will cover the cost of a voltage monitor and then some.

Panasonic Corp. of North America is honing in on its focus to make it easier for both residential and commercial building owners to control the temperature and comfort level within the space. The company hit its targets with the introduction of two new products — the ECONAVI air conditioner and the Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) Smart Connectivity Controller.

Here are two examples of the difference that high-performance building features and high-efficiency HVAC technology can make.

Johnson Controls announced that it closed an agreement to purchase the EasyIO Building and Energy Management System (BEMS) product line.

Aircuity has been named a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority Qualified Vendor for the RTEM program.

BrainBox AI intends to integrate ABB’s MSR business and its installed base of 12,000-plus retail locations in its current operations.

The Coastal Coat Casing Package is now offered as a premium option for the Modine Atherion packaged ventilation system. 

New Champion LX Series packaged units heat and cool residential and light commercial buildings. 

The Model P8SE light commercial air conditioner is a three-phase electric/electric packaged cooling solution. It delivers 14-SEER cooling in capacities ranging 3-5 ton in even tonnages, making it fit for strip malls, restaurants, and retail stores. 

This series of residential package equipment features energy-saving performance as well as cost-effective installation and maintenance.

The units feature an exact-fit replacement design that matches the units to footprints of other manufacturers’ units and eliminates the need for a curb adapter.

Learn how HVAC companies can increase retention by giving their employees a stake in the company’s success through phantom stock plans.

In the seventh installment of this series, we ask if there are any special storage requirements for A2L refrigerants.

While a controls upgrade may be costly, the reality is, the longer you wait, the more expensive a replacement can be.

HiberSense Inc. appointed Chris Lawson as channel sales manager for the U.S. market.

His jacket was emblazoned with the logo of a manufacturer of high-performing heat pumps, but when I mentioned that we were thinking of getting one, the tech shot down the idea.

As heat pump technology advances and begins its march into colder climates, industry experts are expecting rooftop units to continue to gain popularity in both new construction and retrofits.

Posted by Vladimir Soldatov on Sep 17

Posted by CISA on Mar 21

In this Episode, Alexander and Markus talk about scripting languages. Topics include the definition of what a scripting language is, typical usage scenarios, performance issues, programming styles and IDE support. In later Episodes we will talk about more specific topics, such as dynamic typing, reflection, functional programming as well as specific languages such as Ruby.

In this episode Michael and our guest Prashant Jain talk about patterns for resource management. Efficient management of resources is critical in the execution of any kind of software. Ranging from embedded software in a mobile device to software in a large enterprise server, it is important that the resources, such as memory, threads, file handles, or network connections, are managed efficiently to allow the systems to function properly and effectively. Michael and Prashant discuss various patterns, such as Lazy Acquisition, Caching, Leasing and Evictor and explain when, why, and how to apply them for effective resource management.

In this Episode we talk about dynamic languages for statically-typed minds, or in other words: which are the interesting features people should learn when they go from a langauge such as Java or C# to a language like Python or Ruby. We used Ruby as the concrete example language.

We started the discussion about important features with the concept of dynamically changing an object's type and the idea of message passing. We then looked at the concepts of blocks and closures. Next in line is a discussion about functions that create functions as well as currying. This lead into a quick discussion about continuations. Open classes, aliasing and the relationship to AOP was next on our agenda.

We then looked considered a somewhat more engineering-oriented view and looked at the importance of testing and what are the best steps of getting from static programming to dynamic programming. Finally, we discussed a bit about the current (as of October 2006) state of dynamic languages on mainstream platforms.

In this Episode we talked about the new POSA 4 book which has recently been published. We talk to two of the authors, Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann (the third author, Doug Schmidt was not available - and he had also been on the podcast a couple of times :-)). The book contains a pattern language for distributed systems. It contains 114 patterns that had been published before by many different other authors. The patterns have been rewritten to form a consistent language. We basically talked through the different sections of the book, which gives a really good overview over the challenges and the solutions of building distributed systems. These sections include From Mud to Structure, Distribution Infrastructure, Event Demultiplexing and Dispatching, Interface Partitioning, Component Patitioning, Application Contrl, Concurrency, Synchronization, Object Interaction, Adaptazion and Extension, Modal Behaviour, Resource Management and finally, Database Access. The book references several other previous works (as listed below). Interestingly, many of these referenced works and authors have also been discussed previously on the podcast. Here are the back references:

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans
• Messaging Patterns, Gregor Hohpe
• POSA 2 Patterns, Doug Schmidt
• Concurrency: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and the interview with Goetz and Holmes
• Remoting Patterns Part 1 and Part 2
• POSA3, Resource Management

This episode features a discussion with Dan Grossman about an essay paper he wrote for this year's OOPSLA conference. The paper is about an analogy between garbage collection and transactional memory. In addition to seeing the beauty of the analogy, the discussion also serves as a good introduction to transactional memory (which was mentioned in the Goetz/Holmes episode) and - to some extent - to garbage collection.

In this episode Michael interviews one of our regular listeners: Petri Ahonen. Petri introduces Software Configuration Management by defining key terms and describing relevant concepts.