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HVAC-ology
Welcome to "HVAC-ology," your podcast for all things related to commercial HVAC systems! Whether you're an experienced technician, an HVAC engineer, a curious business owner, or simply someone interested in understanding the parts and pieces of HVAC systems, this podcast is perfect for you.
In each episode, our expert hosts and enthusiasts delve into the complex world of commercial heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). We cover everything from the latest equipment technology advancements to practical tips.
Music credits: "Bring Me Back" by Deleveled (instrumental for intro and with lyrics for outtro).
HVAC-ology
RE-RELEASE: Exploring HVAC Advancements with ABB Drives and the "Freq Squad" from Hoffman
The episode explores the transformative power of Variable Frequency Drives (VFDs) in the HVAC industry, highlighting their ability to enhance energy efficiency and optimize system performance. Expert guests Natalie Greene and Perry Conte share their career journeys while elucidating VFD technology's evolution, functions, and real-world applications.
• Natalie's unique career transition into HVAC
• Perry's lifelong passion for drives and technology
• Differences between traditional motor starters and VFDs
• Benefits of adjustable speeds for energy savings
• Evolution of VFD technology and market presence
• ABB's commitment to customer service via dedicated teams
• Success stories showcasing substantial energy savings
• Future prospects for VFD adoption in engineering designs
• Emphasis on practical tips for HVAC professionals.
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Welcome to the HVACology experience, where we talk about all things HVAC industry, topics that are so hot they are cool.
Speaker 2:Welcome to HVACology episode number three. I am very excited today because we're going to be taking a subject matter of probably what every commercial industrial building has and be able to dive deeper into that, to where a lot of folks get to have some knowledge. But I am your host, ryan Hudson, and with me today is Mrs Kelly Kapowski Patterson. Hello, kelly Kapowski Patterson, how are you today?
Speaker 3:It's a new name every time Ryan, I can be, whatever though.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to hear about your relationship with Zach Morris back in the day. Zach and I go way back. Did you watch Saved by the Bell?
Speaker 3:I'd love to save by the bell, but I was older, that though, like I, was an old person watching, it was kind of creepy for me to be watching Saved by the Bell.
Speaker 2:So you're a closet Saved by the Bell person? Is what you're saying?
Speaker 3:Right, who's that geeky guy? He was so fun Slater. Striker Sl was so fun, slater striker slater I don't I remember no ac slaughter was the jock.
Speaker 2:And then you had. Uh, see you're the closet, the geek guy developing, yeah, screech screech.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, that's the same the geek guy I watched that religiously did you have a crush on zach?
Speaker 2:that explains a lot the other one the other one, yeah, ac slater. Or is it slaughter or slater?
Speaker 4:yes later it was yeah, that was blonde, right, yeah, no, yeah you're trying to play it off now, natalie.
Speaker 2:Well, interesting thing. So I've been reading this book by Elon about Elon Musk, his biography, and I cannot think down. And an interesting thing about this was is when they were trying to build the SpaceX, they're trying to cool the inside of the of the first shuttle that they were gonna launch. They actually the price that they quoted was three million dollars to put in a cooling system. The price that they quoted was three million dollars to put in the cooling system. And so elon tells his engineers to go and find a, uh, I think some I don't know what the tonnage was, but basically something off the shelf. And they took a, uh, a packaged unit, uh, you know, standard electric package unit, and modified it to where it could cool the, the entire shuttle, and uh, ended up, uh, costing him six grand to buy it. So so it went from $3 million to $6,000. That's cost savings at its finest. So, kelly, with us today we have Natalie Green. Hello, natalie.
Speaker 2:Hi Hello and Mr Perry Conte.
Speaker 5:How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:Doing well, thank you. So today we're going to be talking specifically about ABB drives variable frequency drives for those of you that don't know what VFD stands for, which is a common acronym that we use in our industry. So, natalie, could you tell us how in the world did you get from high school to where you're at today? 5,000 foot view.
Speaker 4:Well, let's see, I'm going to have to dig a little far back, but not that far, I guess. When I graduated high school, I actually had no idea what I wanted to do. I started in hospitality, switched to criminal justice and then ended up in healthcare actually. So I used to work at the bedside as a CNA. I did that for two years and I was like, okay, there has to be a better way to serve people, but not in this sense, if that makes sense, like it was great and all. Don't't get me wrong, but you have to have a passion for that and I applaud people that do. But I was not one of them and I actually had a friend at the time who worked here and I saw she posted something on her Instagram story. I was like, well, what does she do there? Like that's HVAC, you know what. What does she have going on?
Speaker 4:So I went through and I stalked and I went on um the website and I found a job application posting, whatever, and applied and I ended up in our order and billing department and I stayed there for a year and then something came up with ABB drives and, to be transparent, I could tell you maybe a product code about a drive, but that's it, because I would put them in on the blue sheets and and enter them for billing and then that would be the end of it. And I was like, okay, well, I'll just apply and we'll see how it goes. I knew that I wanted to grow within Hoffman, but I didn't really have any idea what that meant. So I fill out the application, I go to Adam, who was our branch manager at the time Well, he still is, but we've switched back and forth.
Speaker 4:And he was like okay, well, why do you think this would be a good fit for you? And I was like, well, it seems really specialized. And I like that because I'd rather take one thing and run with it than have a hundred things that I need to be a champion of. And I interviewed with Perry and that was, that was comical, it was fun. And then he was like you know what, if you can do with me, I could do with you. This would be a great time. And I ended up in ABB drives and I've been there with Perry for the last four years. Wow and um, it'll probably take me 50 more to absorb the amount of information that he holds in his brain, but I have learned a ton in the last four years.
Speaker 2:So hopefully Perry's got 50 more years in him.
Speaker 3:Easily.
Speaker 5:I turned 65 last Saturday.
Speaker 2:All right, congratulations. So, perry, how in the world do you get from high school to where you're at today?
Speaker 5:Well, I guess, going back a little bit further than that, I got, uh, I got zapped with 115 volts and I was about six years old, because I started taking things apart, uh, when I was a child. So I got electrocuted and father found me in the basement connected to the wire, but uh anyway. So that explains a lot for everybody here.
Speaker 2:But but yeah, that's where.
Speaker 5:I ended up starting to take things apart and I you know, actually right out of high school I went to become an electronic technician. So I graduated in 77 and 78. I went into electronic school to become an electronic technician. At the same time I had a part time job at a place called Parametrics in Orange, connecticut. I went into electronic school to become an electronic technician. At the same time I had a part-time job at a place called Parametrics in Orange, connecticut. They were started in about 1975 making drives no-transcript us market share for hvac drives and at that time then assay emerged with brown bavaria in 1988 and became abb as we know it. So I've been doing drives my whole career and ABB drives pretty much for my whole career, starting in 1978. That's a long time ago. So I've done nothing but drives and I've had three jobs in my whole life and they've all been with drives.
Speaker 5:So I like working with the hvac side of things, because the people that I had to deal with from a consultant engineering standpoint were more interesting to me than the industrial side of the marketplace.
Speaker 2:So Very neat. So tell me guys, so in our industry you can have, you know, across the line starters. You can have solid state starters, you can have a wide Delta starter. You know what is what's the difference? If we could just kind of walk through those real briefly, about what, what the job of each of those does, and then how the VFD replaces those.
Speaker 5:Okay, well, across the line starter, you have two choices You're either on or off and you're on at full speed, 100% speed. So if it's a fan, you're blowing 100% airflow into a space. If it's like a wide delta starter, you will start at one speed and change to another speed to help the inrush, reduce the inrush of current that it takes to start these devices and all of those devices across the line starter, soft start and a wide delta starter. It only allows you to operate at one speed, one fixed speed, and that's the nameplate of the motor. One fixed speed and that's the nameplate of the motor.
Speaker 5:What drives allows us to do? Vfds? It allows us to take a standard ac motor like a totally enclosed, fan cooled motor, and we can drop the speed of it. Uh, saving energy. That's the whole reason we put drives in an hvac um, because in an hvac system it's usually designed for the worst case scenario, meaning the hottest day of the year or the coldest day of the year and when we're spinning along at full speed trying to cool something. We may not need that. So what the building automation and the drive allows does is it drops the speed of the fans in the building, saving energy and making people aware that there still is airflow and making them feel happy and warm and fuzzy when it's the wintertime.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I came from kind of the heavy metal side and one of the things that I always operated under as an engineer when I worked for a consulting engineering firm was IPLV, which is intermittent part load value. And so what you find out is a system usually is going to operate at 100% 1% of the time and then the rest of the time is going to kind of flow between that 40, 25 to 75 range is where that percentage really is a lot. And so to Perry's point you know you're never really seeing systems operating or needing to operate at 100%. It's a lot of wasted energy, yes. So, perry, with that soft start, with that ramping of capability, does that help with saving the motor at all?
Speaker 5:Well, yes, it actually helps the motor from a torsional standpoint and the fan or pump from a torsional standpoint, because it's not slammed on at full speed 100 instantaneously. We slowly ramp it up over a period of seconds to minutes. It's an adjustable value, so there's no mechanical stress and we never go above the nameplate current rating during the start process. If you start a motor across the line, usually it pulls six to eight times the nameplate current value until the wow a family get up to speed. So there's lots of less stress uh, we don't stretch belts, you don't hear them squealing and less mechanical wear and tear on the system, in addition to the energy savings.
Speaker 2:You know, kind of when someone was explaining to me a VFT many moons ago. You know, if you think about a car, you know you can either not be on the gas pedal or hitting the gas pedal down all the way, whereas a vfd, more so, allows you to hit the kind of the speeds that you want to go whenever you're you're driving that drive, taking that drive yeah, you can stop at any speed from zero to nameplate rpm of a motor.
Speaker 5:So if we have an 1800 rpm motor, we can actually go up in quarter. Uh, 1500 rpm motor, we can actually go up in quarter. Uh, let's see five rpm increments from zero to uh nameplate rpm and control it even. Actually actually better resolution than that. But we have all those points that we can stop at. Uh, so it meets, you know, infinite levels of demand by the b building automation system, because we constantly modulate up and down to meet demand. And I'm a, I'm italian, so I talk with my hands sometimes.
Speaker 2:So gotcha so, uh, tell me about how it seems like today. When you're talking with engineers, it's almost like one of the things they want to do is go ahead and throw a vfd on the unit regardless, because, if anything, it can act as a soft start for it and ramp to wherever it needs to be and you can set it at the appropriate place. So it helps a lot with dialing in from a um uh, to make sure that it's hitting specifications for whatever that building is external static pressure and whatnot so yeah, air balancing, thank you.
Speaker 2:So, uh, um. So how in the world is it that we got, from you know, the invention of that first vfd to where now it seems like it's so affordable? Because, you know, I've been in this business for a little over 20 years now. When we first started there was a big, there was still an economic hurdle to get over to get to that VFD, and now it seems like that barrier is almost gone. Walk me through the evolution of the drive.
Speaker 5:Yeah, well, drives back in the late 70s, early 80s. They were fairly large and and fairly expensive. And so the technology, the changing technology of the power semiconductors or the transistors in the drive have actually enabled us to shrink things down and still generate the same amount of power in a much smaller package. So in 1978, a five a five horsepower drive weighed 125 pounds and now they're about three and a half pounds. So that's a huge reduction in size and that's just been strictly technology the whole. And I hit the electronic school time in 1978. I was still doing transistors and vacuum tubes, you know, and I went from that to microprocessors and then microprocessors got put into drives and they just exploded. And that started in the early 80s and that's when I really started putting them on fans, the fans and pumps, to save huge amounts of energy, to save huge amounts of energy.
Speaker 3:Harry, how many people would it take to install a drive that weighed 125 pounds? Would it take two of you, or could one of you do it?
Speaker 5:Just curious. Well, I used to carry it back then into the burning room. I'd have to pick it up after it was tested and hang it in the burning room. Nor the room was a 40 degree C test location at full load. That was how he tested all the drives. They still do that today. They run them up to full speed, full loads and and bake them for 15 minutes. So, wow, two people can do it a lot easier. But but you could do it in one yeah, when I was 18, I could Not anymore.
Speaker 2:So kind of. The next question I have for you is how I haven't been with Hoffman and Hoffman for a little over almost five years now, but it seems like when I was at a, when I was previously at another manufacturer and then when I was also at an engineering firm ABB the name itself was almost like the word Kleenex. Like you knew, when it was ABB you were talking about a variable frequency drive. How in the world did it I don't want to say household name, but maybe, maybe something like that so how in the world did it become that kind of that household name within our industry?
Speaker 5:Well, like I said, abb purchased a company that had been around in the US for a while, a drive manufacturer, but they focused in the early 80s on selling HVAC drives and actually breaking out the part of the business where there was an industrial side and an HVAC side. So we focused on the HVAC side and it enabled us to get to all the consultant engineers, get the products specified. We basically sell them, start them up, service them. So it's like cradle to grave responsibility with them and ABB doing that nationwide. It was worldwide. They're a $39 billion multinational company. They employ about 35,000 people in the United States alone. But the way that the cradle to grave of the uh drive regionally whoever sells it is responsible for it gives you great service, great response time and uptime, which is really important. So that's how it's gotten that name.
Speaker 5:And and they also they've been around. They were kind of like the ge of europe. If you're familiar with the GE here in the United States, they do everything from trains that tilt to power systems. They'll build power plants, the windmills ABB does windmills, electric cars, the whole gambit. So they're very high tech. They put at least 20% of their profits back into R&D every year Wow. So they definitely stay leading edge. Leading edge or bleeding edge technology sometimes we call it, but hopefully it's just leading edge.
Speaker 4:And to kind of piggyback off of that on the non-equipment side, the way that ABB's rep program is set up is each office who sells ABB is required to have a dedicated at least one or more than one individual. So we've got our AC drive specialists and then myself, who acts as a liaison between our customers or our salespeople and the factory, is a liaison between our customers or our salespeople and the factory. So your service and response time is going to be astronomically faster when you're going straight to your rep instead of having to wait and go to the factory or whoever it may be, or you know the rep from the manufacturer. So they've got it structured so that they have probably five times as many boots on the ground, whereas if and I don't know, just speaking of possibility if you're going with another manufacturer the connection between the two there's probably some discrepancies as far as going to service or tech support or whatever it may be with us or with all of their channel partner programs.
Speaker 4:You've got dedicated individuals in each rep's office to service and support abv drives, and so I think that really kind of puts them out there and helps them lead the way, aside from just their technological advances.
Speaker 2:Almost. I think maybe another way to put it for people listening is almost like a white glove approach is what it kind of sounds like yeah, yeah, yes, it is.
Speaker 5:And you know, here at Hoffman Hoffman, I know that the customer always comes first. So that's also what's been driven into everybody here in this work environment to make sure that the customer is taken care of, no matter what. That was Rusty Hoffman's main thrust when they hired me back 13 years ago, and that's, you know, that's what we do. That's a company, that's how we support the drives or anything we do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would agree that very much, rusty. You put that ethos within our organization, you know. To add to what you guys are saying, you know the mechanical side, which is the side that I'm on the service arm of Hoffman Hoffman. We actually have technicians that are dedicated just to variable frequency drives, and that's actually a pretty unusual thing to see because you think that the jack of all trades can be the guy that also messes with the VFT, but there's actually a lot of intricacies involved with it to make sure that it's running properly and maintained, and we actually a lot of people don't know this, but we actually have maintenance recommendations and service agreements just on variable frequency drives because of the need to keep up with them as well an abb's drive itself is has a three-year on-site parts and labor warranty right out of the box for everybody.
Speaker 5:that's something else that, uh, some of the competitors don't do some of the brand D and brand S and brand Y they don't have that on-site parts and label warranty, which means if it's a hospital operating room you can't have that down. That's huge amounts of money you're wasting if you're not filling that space. So with the service group and the parts, we have local drives in stock and the people that, like I said, we service them, install them and get them back and running again. So that's really what made the market share grow, and ABB is about 48% market share in the HVAC industry. So that's where that Kleenex name type of thing has come from.
Speaker 2:Gotcha Very cool. So, Natalie, if I could put you on the spot, so tell me about this name Freak Squad that you guys have. And then also if you could tell me a little bit about, maybe, a situation where you just helped satisfy a client, Like there was just a situation and y'all kind of figured out a solution to that.
Speaker 4:So the freak squad came about. What do you think two years, a year and a half ago, maybe two years?
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:What is it 2024? So, like, right, post, the heat of the support, all four companies internally and externally, and so we came up with the idea to create a group, and essentially what the idea started from was a group of superheroes, champions, you know, people you can call on when you're in a crisis, like, don't worry, we're here to save the day. Because, believe it or not, a majority of the calls and emails that we get are kind of situations like that, like help me, I'm down and out or I need to retrofit and replace this drive, and I have no idea what this is. This thing is from 1996. And so that's where the Freak Squad came about. It's myself and then our drive specialists, and we serve all four companies within the Hoffman family. And then our goal is to kind of put the word out more externally so that people can just email straight into the Freak Squad and get an answer as quickly as we possibly can and not have to call five different phone numbers and hear from somebody who has no idea who they are.
Speaker 4:Um, I could give you plenty of scenarios where we've helped some people who are down and out, but, uh, during covid lead times, which I'm sure across the board were astronomical for everyone else.
Speaker 4:But we kind of felt like we were on fire and running from the opposite direction of water with ABB drives and there were multiple scenarios where hospitals or data centers or you name it are like I need this drive yesterday, I have this, whatever it may be out.
Speaker 4:And we have a network of other channel partners who also rep ABB and we were able to communicate with them during the time that the lead times were pushing into weeks and weeks and weeks and try to source drives from them and vice versa. And so we kind of probably saved ourselves and helped our company displace competitor opportunity many a times by relying on other reps within the United States to source drives for people that were down and out and I don't I don't have. We probably would have had to go back and kind of play recon and replace them with ABB anyways, but being able to continue to lead in the industry during a time where nobody well, I don't want to say nobody, but access to certain things like ABB drives were scarce definitely was rewarding and helped us secure relationships going forward for sure.
Speaker 5:Very cool was rewarding and helped us secure relationships going forward for sure.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 5:Another thing we did too. You know application experience. That's what I've got a lot of because I've been around for a lot of years and some things that gets missed a lot of times in retrofits in a building is the minimum speed settings that we put on on drives for pumps and fans and so forth. And I was working with a project uh uh company in Raleigh that had hundreds of drives over many of years that were had been installed. And you know, you ask somebody what the minimum speed is and they'd say 20 Hertz or 25 hertz or 30 speed. Anyway, I went back to this customer and said contact all of your air handling manufacturers and find out what the fan surge points are for those air handlers. And they didn't, went back and we were able to drop the minimum speed from 20 hertz down to like six hertz. Basically what that did was save that customer $50,000 a month in energy savings.
Speaker 5:Wow. So there's a huge amount of savings and that's just little application details, subtleties that we understand, the right enclosure for the right environment. You know a drive is a pretty sophisticated piece of equipment. If you wouldn't hang your flat screen TV on a wall where you're thinking about putting the drive, don't put the drive there. You know we'd have to put a special enclosure around that to protect it. So we got a lot of that experience and that's how we help people. So the Freak squad is there for any questions anybody's drive.
Speaker 2:Obviously we want to leave with abb as a solution, but we'll answer questions about anything so my last question for you guys so what is the biggest uh vfd you've ever seen and what is the smallest?
Speaker 5:you've ever seen and what is the smallest? Smallest has been fractional horsepower and the world's largest drive is at nasa langley, virginia, and it's 125 000 horsepower. Wow, it's the size of 40 by 40 by 40 room. You actually walk through this thing and buy the seven conductors and it's on a wind tunnel project at nasa langley, so that's the largest drive I've ever been around. I think it sold for 6.8 million dollars, but, wow, very cool wow I can't say the same.
Speaker 4:I have not been around a drive that massive, although if you met jimmy johnson, our other drive specialist, he's very tall. The largest drive I've ever seen was taller than him and probably I can't even say how wide it looked like. I don't even know what to compare it to. It was huge and I was intimidated because I was not prepared. I've looked at the drawings. I'd seen the thing. I saw pictures of it, but in real life, when he's standing next to it and he looks short, I was like okay, this is overwhelming.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he's like.
Speaker 5:He's like six, six, five maybe, I don't know, something he's really tall yeah wow, that's when he has his lift on, you know, but they're not here to defend himself we we've done quite a lot of large high horsepower drives and we do a lot of chiller plant work.
Speaker 5:Now for data centers to keep things cool, and there's lots of three and four and 500 horsepower pump motors primary chill water pump motors and we've been doing more and more of that. We've done lots with data centers, so we get involved in all this high horsepower stuff, motors, and we've been doing more and more of that. We've done lots with data centers, so we get involved in all this high horsepower stuff and, uh, you know, 500 horsepower drive is is pretty good size for, uh, commercial hvac.
Speaker 4:Uh, oh yeah, so a lot of horses a lot of horses running a lot of horses or slow, depending on what you need them to do Exactly.
Speaker 2:Well, very good. Well, thank you, Natalie and Perry, for your time.
Speaker 3:Kelly, what was your big takeaway, if I can put you on the spot from what Perry and Natalie told us today? Honestly, my big takeaway was the fact that drives used to be start and stop right and now we can adjust speeds according to what the system needs, right? And from what I'm understanding, the system tells the drive what speed it needs the drive to go at. Is that right?
Speaker 5:Yeah, the building automation system.
Speaker 3:You explained it even to me, perry. It's pretty impressive, pretty impressive.
Speaker 2:I think my big takeaway was is one the saving of the motor because of the soft start application that you naturally get with the VFD, and I think the other one is is that the savings that you can have when you start paying attention to motors and being able to run them at the lower frequency. So a lot of good takeaways from this. Thank you guys so much for your time and.
Speaker 2:Kelly Thanks for asking yeah, absolutely yeah, kelly, you have to make sure you remind me that we have to say at the beginning of all of these that you have to, if you enjoy it, to like and subscribe.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh. Yes, we need to do that at the beginning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those are things that a lot of other podcasts have down pat. We do not.
Speaker 3:We're not yet, but this is just number three. Just number three. We're still newbies, ryan, it's fine.
Speaker 2:Okay, just number three. We're still newbies, ryan, it's fine, okay, so after today we're going to be so, uh, perry, natalie, you guys don't know this, but uh, 90 of podcasts don't make it past episode three, so you guys are helping us to get into the minority what if we're the opposite?
Speaker 4:what if we're detrimental to you? Getting past the 90%?
Speaker 2:Oh no, oh no, this was a good one Works both ways, my cup is half full, right Half full we're optimists.
Speaker 3:We're optimists.
Speaker 2:Good stuff. Well, thank you all again, and once again, this is HVACology.
Speaker 1:Yay, take care. Thanks guys. Bye. 20 years of staring at that freckle on your left shoulder. Who would have thought all I needed Was to think of you to bring back the words inside of me? I drove an hour to see you. Things just seemed to matter more to me anyway. Got lost in reality. No answers to cancel. We never got to talk. Lost so many friends as I got older. Wish you had the strength to hold you a little bit longer. Always meant to write these words down, thought all the best of you faded in the sea. But you always bring me back into blue eyes. Twenty years of staring at that freckle on my left shoulder. Who would have thought all I needed was to think of you to bring back the words inside of me? We'll be right back, shoulder. Who would have thought all I needed was to think of you to bring back the songs inside of me? You were always inside of me. You were always a part of me.
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