The Static Pressure Test for HVAC Techs to Improve Diagnostics and Airflow with John Anderson Part 1

0:00CMPX Show is upon us. It's March 25th, 26th and 27th in Toronto at the Metro Toronto Convention Center. I mean, the trade changes so quickly. We're going to see all the modernizations, in equipment and tools and methods. We have the social hub, activations, all three days of tool demos and compressor tear downs, and there's going to be a full-on 18 van, which is going to be pretty cool guys. So if you use code, know what all. That's K-N-O-W-I-T-A-L-L. When you go to the CMPX website and register, you get a free pass for all three days. Come check us out. The Combat P-Trap Concert Drain System by Cooler Products achieves constant drain flow maintenance through the unique Concert Drain Line Tablet dispensing method. This mechanical system designed by a technician and for the trades uses known technology of P-Trap's and tablets, and is ideal and cost-effective for preventing Drain Line clogs. So check out the Combat P-Trap Concert Drain System by Cooler Products. What's up everybody? Welcome back. So last time we had

1:02John Anderson on the podcast, we talked about manifold gauges versus probes, and one of the videos we put out on that got a lot of engagement, a lot of back and forth controversial stuff, right? Because we're talking about not using a manifold. But anyway, we got him back. We're going to talk about spring maintenance, and we get into topics of airflow and static pressure, checking electrical, using your senses, the refrigeration side, when and where, and how to check it. So this is a good conversation. This is part one guys with John Anderson. This is the HVAC Know-it-All podcast, and I'm your host Gary McCready. Welcome to the HVAC Know-it-All podcast. Recorded from a basement somewhere into Toronto, Canada. Your host and HVAC tech, Gary McCready will take you on a deep dive into the industry, discussing all things HVAC. From storytelling to technical discussion. Enjoy the show. Welcome back, John. And I got to say the last podcast we did,

2:06I posted a clip on social media about not using gauges, and I think the caption. I sent my podcast out to a production company that basically produces the, does the edits, they put it out on the channels, and they come up with the, it was like a little caption at first, and it's something like hoses are ruining the industry, or killing the units, or it was something along those lines. And a lot of the comments, tons of engagement, that clip got tons and tons of used, thousands of use. And I mean, there's text hating on us for mentioning that manifold gauges are not the greatest or best way to go. Text agreeing, I think text probably on the fence, and just reading all the, the stuff we were talking about. But this conversation is not that. It's spring maintenance because we are upon spring. Some places, uh, warm state of probably already started to do their maintenance on the air conditioning side of things where I am. I mean, it's right now it's snow storm outside. This is our march. We can have a day that's, let's say, 40 degrees outside. The next day, it's snow storms. We had exactly that here, man. It was 87 degrees on Wednesday,

3:11on Thursday. It was snowing for four hours. Yeah, it's not so shoulder season. Yeah, man. I have a lot of experience in the commercial side. You have a lot of experience on the residential side. I think talking about both sides of the equation is really important because we're going to have both sides of the equation listening. So I'll let you start it off. Like when it comes to maintenance in the spring, what are some of the things that we should be focusing on when it comes to air conditioning? Nowadays, a lot of heat pump installs are in place and we got to service those too. So where are we going to start? How are we going to tackle this? First off, whenever I was asked to come up with what the standard would be for seal services, whenever I created that for maintenance, you know, I started looking. I didn't want it to be John's way of doing things, right? It didn't need to be that. I needed to have some sort of backing on it. And anytime that we do a load calculation, we're going to look for a acumenule J, right? If we're looking at duck work or acumenule D, where is we move throughout? There's all these manuals for how to do stuff during the replacement process. And I wondered if there was something similar to that in the maintenance process.

4:14And I found one actually. It's called the Akka Standard 4QM. It's a free download. If you down, if you go to Google and Google that, you can download the PDF. And it actually has an entire book that goes through all the different pieces of equipment that you'd have for maintenance. Just like we've talked about in the last podcast we did, our main job there is to look for dirt. You know, we're trying to look for dirt, look on filters, look for dirt on coils, look for any sort of dirt in a condensate line. The main point whenever I'm looking at something is I want to make sure that everything is clean and everything is running to the best with the ability. Before I start jumping in to try and take any kind of readings, that's my first step. How's that work on the commercial world? Start with visual inspections. I mean, in the commercial world, where I come from, the maintenance packages were sold that you're going to be doing filters probably every quarter. That's usually where it begins. We open up the filter panel, take all the filters out, slide them all in. While we're doing the filters, we'll take off the blower panel, we'll inspect, we'll pull the belts off, we'll inspect the belt for cracks, tears, anything like

5:18that, belts. If they're aligned properly, they're tension-right, they can last quite some time. So that's something that we take into account. I also, I'm a big pulley slash sheave guy, like inspect them. If there's wear on them, you take both of them, like the motor and blower pulleys, give them a side to side wiggle. Make sure there's no play in the bearings. You spin them, make sure there's no, like a grinding sound in the blower or motor bearings. If there are grease ports, like zerk fittings and maybe some of that is due to the fact that they're dry and they need some grease. So you go pump some grease in and sometimes that sound kind of minimizes, sometimes it alleviates, sometimes it doesn't. Then it's like, hey, on the work order, bearings are grinding a touch, sound a little noisy. Maybe best to replace them before it causes a chaotic accident. I'm going to tell you a story that relates to that. Was that a restaurant in the summer? They're having some issues and I got to go and, but the blower motor, it sounded terrible. And I said to the guy, your blower motor is going to fail at some point.

6:19I said, it sounds terrible. The bearings are bad. It's sealed bearings because it was a sealed motor. There's no way to add grease to them. And he's like, no, no, no, don't worry, it's running now. He's like, he, and he even said it. He's like, I know this is going to come bite me on the ass one day, but right now and on. So I ended up changing the motor in a blizzard, because that's when it died. It died in a blizzard. We never did die in a blizzard, right? Yeah, there was a blizzard and it had an overload, like a starter contact or an overload. So and that happened in a snowstorm because the power went out. So I went up to the roof, reset it. And the thing was just, it sounded chaotic and it was having trouble even trying to spin. And I'm like, remember that motor we talked about in the summertime because he came on the roof with me, and I'm glad he was there. And he's like, oh, he's like, we got to replace that. And I said, yeah, we should have done it when it was hot out here. Now I got to change this in a blizzard. And I did. It was agonizing. It was chaotic, but it's almost like the word preventative maintenance means you're supposed to prevent something from happening bad, right? That's our job. Weird.

7:24You hit something that I wanted to touch on a little bit more about the visual inspection. Whenever I'm teaching technicians to do the maintenance, I tell them to use four senses. All right. We know we got five of them, but I'm not really going to get into taste for that much. But I'll tell them to, you know, first visually check out the system as it as it's running. We've already turned on the thermostat. We're going to visualize it because I don't know if this happens in the commercial world, but there's so many times in the residential world that people have a broken system. They know it isn't working. And then they'll think that us coming to do the maintenance is going to fix it all up for, right? So I want this to verify that, hey, that unit's running before I start touching and doing any kind of measurements or anything, right? So I'll have them turn on the equipment at thermostat, not jumping anything out. I wanted to work from the thermostat. Go down to the equipment and just use your senses. I want you to look at the system, verify that, everything looks like it's installed somewhat correctly, right? We can't control everything that

8:26happened before we get there. Look at it. See if you see any signs of water damage. If any sort of issues electrical like sparking or anything crazy, you've got one on, all right? So I'm just looking at all that kind of stuff. I'm listening. You talked about your listening for the sound of that blower motor, right? I'm listening as that's going on. I can sometimes hear from the refrigeration cycle going through the refrigerator lines. You can kind of hear some sort of noises everyone's about. Hear from vibrations or anything like that. Smell, right? We're going to be down in the at these equipment, this equipment, and you know, it may be connected to a gas or an oil furnace or something, right? If we're there and we're doing an air conditioner maintenance and there's a gas leak, our job is safety experts is to verify that, you know, hey, there's not a huge gas leak down here, right? We got to be aware of all that. Then the, you know, what do we do? We did vision, we did we did hearing, we did smells. I don't want you to taste anything though. Let's talk about blowing out a condosate line or something like that, right? Oh, feel it. It's all the sweet part.

9:28As far as taste goes, I've tasted quite a few things. I've tasted, I've gotten a big splash of glycol in my face several times, but it's actually kind of sweet. It doesn't actually taste that good. Well, hey, guy, I used to blow out my, my bleeder line all the time. I probably thought it was really discussing, but after a while, I didn't hurt them. Feel, feel is very important that I want them to do. You know, I don't want them downstairs at an air handler or furnace, running that, you know, checking out that system, doing all this stuff down there for however long it's going to be, and then they go outside and now that outdoor unit's not running, right? And, you know, you go to the customer and say, hey, your outdoor unit's not running. We've been here for half hour by what, what's the deal? So what I tell them with feel is during that observation, go ahead and grab ahold of that line set. When you grab out of that line set, you could feel the refrigerator coming through. You could feel the vibration of the compressor. That way, you at least know the compressor's running. I don't know if the, if the outdoor fans running, but at least I know that compressor started. So that's, that's my initial portion. Before we start doing anything, that part of that visual inspection, it's really visual. I'm listening. I'm smelling,

10:33and I'm going to feel it, right? And then again, like I said, if I need to take something, I guess I can blow out a condosate line or something. So what you're describing there, the senses, I've talked about that lots of times too, and I've even just put a play on words on it, like the HVAC 6 cents. Just when you get up onto a, like for instance, I've talked about this before, like, there's buildings I've been servicing for so long, I pop the hatch, and as soon as I stick my head up through the hatch, I can tell if there's something wrong with something by the sounds that are going on on the roof. Just walking through the roof, you can hear, listen, you can hear like squealing of belts and grinding of bearings. Wait a minute, that compressor sounds like it's like 30% short of refrigerant. And when you put your gauges on it, yeah, it is because you can hear it. I'm never heard of it say don't push in contact. That's awesome. Yeah, people say don't push in contact. I'm not going to tell people to start pushing in contact as a way, but I've done it

11:36before. I'm not going to say, you may have done that myself of time or two. Yeah, and sometimes you can push them and you can be like, that compressor is completely out of refrigerant because you can just hear it sounds hollow and empty inside of it. And then sometimes you push them and you wait 30 seconds and you can hear it kind of like loading up as like the rush of refrigerant from the system comes back into that compressor and it starts. So after a while, you get good at sort of the the HVAC six cents and using your senses to to come across issues. And that's when hey, my sense is detect something. That's when you pull out your your test tools, a manometer or a set of probes or the the manifold for the guys that still use the manifold, right? That's when you pull out your diagnostic tools and get a little bit deep and heavier into it. But if you can get good with your senses, you're like, you're more than halfway there at figuring out where the problems lie. And then you've got to figure out what the actual problem is afterwards if you agree with that.

12:39100% agree with that. Yeah, I mean, that's that's the part of us that AI can't replace, right? Is the way that we can sense this kind of stuff and we can hear things. We know when things aren't working right, you know, that before we're even putting tools or anything on, I highly recommend doing that. Yeah, you work in boilers and you're going to you're going to know just by going down there, listening and just observing the area for a while, you'll figure out whether things are working or not just because of being used that area. All right, boys and girls, I'm going to give you a link to some discount and also some training. Yeah, listen to this ad first though, running HVAC calls all day. And you know how valuable it is to have the right part and the right support where you need it. That's why pros turn the supplyhouse. We've got a huge selection of HVAC and refrigeration parts and stock from Bransy Trust and they ship fast. The site's easy to use and pack with specs and product info so you can find what you need and get back to work quickly. Here's where it really pays the trade master program. It's free to join and members get exclusive discounts access to pro training videos and free shipping nationwide across the US. Check it out

13:42supplyhouse.com forward slash TM and use promo code hk i a five to get 5% off your first order. That's promo code hk i a five at supplyhouse real people real service. Cool. So I want to get your take on static pressure because it is something that tech should do, especially on the day one, the first day that they're ever at a building or on commissioning or startup of a new piece of equipment. But how are you feeling on static pressure on quarterly PMs once you know what it what it is. Are you still checking this? I'm 100% still checking that. Yes. All all the time. Yes, okay. Because I mean what's going to happen when I mean can anything change between the last time I was there to this time? I know that in the residential world all the customers like to think that during the air conditioning season they're going to close off all the vents downstairs to push more cold air upstairs, right? I'm not going to know they did that or not unless I'm checking things out,

14:45right? And if I don't know you know what's going on, I'm not really doing my job. AVC, air flow for charge and you know static pressure isn't an airflow measurement. It's part of the part of the deal to get me close to that airflow measurement. And when we're talking about things like I'm big on measure quick as you know. So that's part of the essential nine probes that you're going to you're going to put out there in order to to get your full diagnostics that system. I mean you wouldn't go to the doctor without getting them taking your blood pressure, right? So getting your static pressure checked every maintenance is something you do. And I mean that's justifiable because that you could change a filter but you could still have a dirty coil that could affect your your measurement, right? Yeah and I mean but most people are just hesitant to take static pressure readings. Honestly and this is probably going to offend people because they're scared to do it because they don't know where they're supposed to put it. When you know where to put the static pressure probes, it's not that big of a deal. I mean if you're using a program like magic brake you push the button and it literally shows you a picture of here's after the filter before the coil

15:48here's top and bottom of the air handler. It's really not that big the deal. There's lots of ways and when I've teach a class on static pressure I usually will go through a lot of scenarios where you'll say oh but in my area we always put the filter here and there's no way to get it. There's always a way around it. We're going to be able to get a static pressure reading 99.9999 percent of the time. Now if we could talk to some of the manufacturers of equipment out there and maybe they could give us some pre-made static pressure test ports like they got the 15,000 different knockouts for electrical outlets and things like that on the side. That'd be awesome but until then we're going to have to make our own test ports and it's really not that hard once you know what it is. Once those test ports are in place all you got to do is put the probes back in there the next time you show up. So I'd like to for the audience it's not aware of this we're talking about it but we should spend a couple of minutes just letting them know what it is and how to check and where to put the probes and I would start by saying that static pressure is a

16:52is a measurement of the pressure in the duct. It's not an airflow measurement because some people go oh you don't check air flow you don't check static like well static is not really checking air flow is checking the duct pressure. Now some people say oh you got to check it in the duct and I've seen some people go like four feet down down the supply duct and stick the probe in there well that's not really the the place to do it. It's supposed to be done at the air handler and the reason for that is the reason it's called total external static pressure is because you're checking everything external to the air handler. So imagine the air handler sitting there or the furnace whatever you call it. A furnace is even an air handler it's got a fan in it it handles air and if I've had this fight before well that's not that's a furnace not an air handler well it's got an air handling component to it so it's essentially it can be called an air handler. Anyway so yeah so coming in where where the air enters and where the air leaves that air handler is where you should be checking so everything external return external supply external and everything that's

17:55in the ductwork like a filter a damper maybe like a UV lighter or something that is somehow creating pressure or or stopping you from having an an ideal static pressure then it all needs to be included in in there. So when I set it up I just go right into the side of a furnace usually that there's the knockouts and the rubber knockouts I just try to shove it through there into the return side of the furnace if there's not a hole like I don't want I don't like drilling holes if I don't have to so it's after the filter but before the fan is where your first probe goes and then if you have a furnace that has a coil that's external mounted above it you want to go before the coil but after the furnace and get your other probe in there and you got to use static pressure tips basically what they are like these tips that are on a 90 that the tips don't actually have any holes in them it's the sides of the probes that have the holes in them so if you use static pressure

18:55tips tubes dual port monometer and you put it in the correct places you will get the total external static pressure and it's usually written right on the air handler what the maximum total external static pressure is and if you're within that range then you're good if you're outside that range what's going on is we have high supply do we have high static do we have high high on both then we got to go and dig what's causing this maybe it's too much airflow in the duct maybe the fans set to by maybe the equipment's too big maybe the duct is too small so now it's your chance to go figure out what's wrong and now you found a legit problem that you can sell us a legit solution to rather than just saying hey you need an air purifier or you need a smart stat but why why do I need those things but no I found this prob with air distribution in your duct system and it's related to this let's solve it and maybe the customer will I always explain it when I'm teaching where you know the probe placement of it just think about how that box came from the manufacturer you know if you look at a furnace air handler whatever if I have a furnace then the manufacturer has no clue what

19:59filter you're gonna attach to that they have no clue what return ductwork they have no clue what return grills or anything you're gonna use they don't know what evaporator coil you're gonna use they don't know what ductwork they don't know registers you're gonna use they have no clue about that so you got to measure everything external to that furnace itself just think about how it comes from box we look at an air handler we go to the top and bottom of that right something if you're not using an app and you are just using just a dual port monometer something to keep in mind is that could use a lot of people they're doing static pressure is that you know you're going to see one number that's negative and one number that's positive and because we think of numbers as it's like money right if I have negative two dollars and then I get positive two dollars now I'm broke even right but that's not how the static pressure thing works that's a negative pressure because it's on the return positive pressure on the supply you add those two numbers together without being concerned about the negative positive portion so negative point two and positive point two is point four right so that's kind of the idea and and a lot of people get fixated on that it has to be point five or half-inch of water column on the residential world but with the higher efficiency

21:02variable speed blower motors that we have out there we're seeing it more and more common that there'll be anywhere from point five to point nine or point eight a lot of times is what you'll see on the higher end variable speed units so you do have to look at that and verify that that is correct lower static pressure doesn't always mean that you have better airflow a lot of people will say that if I have a really low static pressure I might be on low speed of my fan because that fan speed as I make you go up and down is going to increase or decrease the static pressure quite a bit too just because it's low doesn't mean it's good so we do have to be able to think about this holistically