When I found out that I had inherited the old family farm out in the country, I was so excited.

My first thought was that I could upscale my pot growing operations, which had been limited to my two car garage. My boyfriend and business partner Max and I packed up our gear, our plants, and all our belongings and moved out to the country. Setting up the plants was the easy part, it was much more difficult to get the farmhouse into livable condition. The electrical grid needed a major overhaul, and there was no ductwork which meant that central AC wasn’t even a possibility. Thankfully the place still had the original water boiler and furnace in the basement, as old as the house itself. They were dirty and dusty but seemed solid after all these years, so I wasn’t worried about heating come the cold winter. When the place was built there was no such thing as air conditioning, but I am a modern person and I won’t live without it! Since the place was not equipped for an HVAC system I decided to think smaller, and focus on my immediate needs. Trying to cool off the entire house was foolish, at least at this point, so I got a portable air conditioner that was strong enough to cool down one room. I could easily move it from room to room with me throughout the house ,or anywhere that had electricity. With this covered, I could focus exclusively on the humidity and heating lamps for the pot plants, and get the crops growing in real soil!

 

HVAC service

An old high school buddy of mine has a bold new business venture, and he wants me in on it with him.

I am still not quite sure, it sounds promising, but will require a lot of work on my end.

I wouldn’t need to invest money, but I would need to put in hundreds of hours of work from me and my team to make it happen. Maybe I should talk to the techs about it directly, and see if they want to risk the extra work for the possible financial reward. My buddy has a bunch of old shipping containers that he wants outfitted with climate control systems so he can rent them as apartments. He can handle the interior renovations, and he has a plumber and electrician on the payroll, but without climate control these containers simply won’t be livable. His pitch was for me and my HVAC techs to outfit all sixty of these containers with their own systems. We can definitely do that, but it will take a lot of time, and this is “spec” HVAC work which means we work for free, then get paid later when the units sell. This is a big risk, and risk is not something that plays into my long term plans for the HVAC company. I think that I will commit to installing six heating and cooling systems to start with, so that he can start showing them and have open houses. If money starts coming in, then he can pay for more HVAC work on the rest of the units.

 

Heat pump service

Is it weird, working on a college campus where many of my friends go to school? No, to be honest it may be weird for them, but I am fine with it. I am sure a few of my friends think that having a job and working for a living is worse than pursuing higher education. I come from working class people, and although I like to read I didn’t think college was for me. I wanted to stay close to home, start making some money, and figure out what I wanted from life. I got my HVAC certification because I saw it as a way to acquire a valuable skill set I could take with me no matter where I went. Sometimes I am on campus, going to or from an air conditioning or ventilation job, and I will run into someone I know. I never say anything, but I always chuckle to myself, because they are paying so much money to be here, and I get paid by the HVAC contractor to be here. In essence, my friends are sort of paying me, aren’t they? Their tuition money goes to school, who uses some of it to pay the HVAC contractor, who pays me to do the work. By the time they graduate they will be a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and my HVAC job will be putting me ever closer to buying my first house! The only thing that is weird about my college friends, is feeling sad that they weren’t smart enough to get into HVAC work.

 

 

climate control

I was born and raised in the city, but I never really thought about if I liked it or not.

When I turned twenty one and was told I inherited the family farm, which had been held in trust, I had the first real decision of my life.

I decided that I hated the city, and would love a chance to start over in the country. The house was old and a bit run down, but me and my partner Pat were going to fix it up, make it liveable, and then maybe start a pot growing operation. I mean, we were definitely going to grow pot for ourselves, but we needed to get the electric and HVAC systems up and running before he decided if we wanted to upscale the operation as a business. We both have experience with electrical work, but neither one of us are that familiar with HVAC systems. Still, we did the best we could without calling in a professional HVAC tech. We were new to the area, and didn’t want to risk inviting someone who wasn’t cool out to the house, even if they were a certified HVAC expert. We consulted any number of Youtube videos, and ultimately decided that for our personal comfort we would buy a small air conditioning unit. For just a couple of hundred bucks we could get an A/C unit powerful enough to cool down one room. That is all we needed for us, and with all the open air, and natural sun and rain the pot plants wouldn’t need any climate control either. When you grow them inside, in the city, you need humidity and temperature controls.

cooling representative

I have never seen a bus this size in my life.

I got the full history of it while we walked around the outside, taking in the murals and art on the sides.

The tour bus was very old, but had been the biggest and most luxurious of that era. This one had allegedly been used by the Rolling Stones for a few of their American tours in the 70s. Now it wasn’t going anywhere, the wheels had been taken off and it was sitting on a foundation. The owners needed me to look at the old HVAC system they had on board, and see what I could do about replacing it so they could live there as a home. It didn’t take long to see that the entire HVAC system was as dead as disco, and that it needed to be removed. There were several positives to this situation, I told them, namely the old air conditioner was so huge that they would basically have an entire extra room was it was removed. Since they wanted to live in the place as a house, I told them not to get a central AC installed inside, but to mount it on the roof, or set it on the ground next to the bus. HVAC tech has come a long way and they would need a much smaller one than the old one, but it was still smart to keep it outside. They also asked me about setting up a geothermal heat pump in the ground nearby, so they wouldn’t have to be on the city power grid.

 

a/c worker

I am not one to gloat, really I’m not, but sometimes it’s hard.

In my day to day life I’m a humble dude, but here online I will cut loose a little bit.

The same guy who called me a loser in high school for dropping out to learn a trade came in applying for a job. This guy graduated top of his class, went to college, the whole nine yards, but I couldn’t hire him because he didn’t have the right certification. He had a ton of education, but he couldn’t work on HVAC systems and that is all I needed from a worker. He got mad at me about it, but my hands were tied, all of my field techs need to have official HVAC certification and licensure. His problem was that he still thought that trade work like HVAC was beneath academics like him, but it’s hard to argue with that kind of self delusion. He had come into my heating and cooling business to ask for a job, and then scolded me for not doing more with my life. Truly stunning, the balls on this guy! I lowered my voice, speaking real nicely, and explained to him that air conditioning and furnaces were always in demand. I had educated myself with a very specific skill set in HVAC work to make a living and support my lifestyle. Then I said “instead of learning something useful like HVAC, you studied Russian literature, and now you are realizing no one will ever pay you for that. Tough luck.”

Air conditioning workman

There are four of us living in this split level rental house.

We all signed a one year lease, although the other three guys have actually been living here for several years.

We all get along very well, and share many hobbies in common. In fact, we had been gaming buddies for a while before I moved in with them. The downside is that with four of us slamming beers, smoking tons of reefer, and playing video games on the couch, our place smells terrible. I even opened it up for natural ventilation and fresh air, but the stink was too deeply ingrained for it to matter. Like I said, they have lived here for years, so this dingy, gag-inducing air quality is not the result of me at all. I inherited it, and now I don’t know what to do about it. I bought an air purifier, then quickly realized that wouldn’t do enough to fight this smell. Instead I bought a second air purifier, and I set up both of them in my bedroom, so at least I can make that one place a little better. I have been checking out some stuff around the house, and I found that there is thick dust built up on the air vent coverings. This tells me that the air ducts are probably just as dusty, and that isn’t helping the air quality either. Changing the air filters won’t do any good if the air ducts themselves are crusted up with dirt, dander, and hair. Maybe I should just move out.

 

programmable thermostat

When Dotty and I first got hitched it was 1973 and the world was a very different place.

We took all the wedding gift money we had gotten, and bought tickets to the farther tropical island we could afford.

We took almost nothing with us, and didn’t even have reservations for a place to stay — we did it all by the seat of our pants, just making decisions as they presented themselves. We ended up in a small, rickety cabin with no power or air conditioning, and it was the most amazing week of my life. For our forty year anniversary I surprised her with a trip to that exact same cabin, only now it had been upgraded with electricity and climate control! That was all my doing, of course , I had been working with a local contractor of the last six months to have a cooling system installed in the place. I wanted to recreate that magical honeymoon, but we are much older now, and going a full week with no A/C would be miserable for the both of us. She was delighted to see the place, and even more delighted to find that it now had power, running water, and an amazing air conditioner with vents in every room. After spending all that money to renovate the place and install an HVAC system, I went ahead and just bought the place as a vacation home. Now we can come down whenever we want, maybe we can even live here one day, and enjoy the sweet cooling system.

 

hvac service

My kids had to go back to school on Sunday this week plus they were actually not ecstatic about it.

It’s not that they mind going to class or hanging out with the other kids.

They don’t even mind the cafeteria lunch or riding the bus back plus forth. What they do like is the fact that they have bad indoor air pollen levels in the classrooms plus they hate that! I think it’s absolutely because they are spoiled at apartment with our good heating plus cooling system. We have actually good indoor air pollen levels in our apartment plus of course, the air quality in the school building is not going to be as good as what they have at home. Even though the local board of education has voted to replace plus repair the Heating, Ventilation, plus A/C systems in all of the local schools, they are actually taking their own sweet time about getting it done, then you believe how things go with local government. Everything has to transport at a snail’s pace most of the time. It seems like that’s especially tploy when it comes to things in the school system. Meanwhile, my kids are suffering through long hot afternoons in class at the end of the summer. The air conditioning at the school is practically non-existent plus my kids say that the whole locale stinks musty plus old. I think that they should think about installing air purification systems in the schools whenever they finally get around to putting in the new Heating, Ventilation, plus A/C systems. That would be good for everyone!

Whole home heating

I go to a cafe every day for pop plus a muffin, plus most of the time I stand down plus do a little bit of labor on my laptop, too.

The atmosphere in the cafe is actually comfortable plus the fact that they have a little gas log fireplace in the corner typically makes it know nice plus cozy in there, too, of course, I would be better off if I didn’t eat a muffin every single day, although I have just gotten into the habit of going in plus ordering a single.

I could change things up plus go someplace new in the afternoons, however the fact that this locale has good muffins, customer service, plus indoor air pollen levels typically seems to make myself and others want to come back for more. The other thing that I like about this cafe is the way that they typically seem to have the heating plus cooling set at just the right rapidly increasing temperatures… A lot of times, you go into a restaurant or a pop shop plus you find that they have the air conditioning plan set at a frosty cold temperature while in the summer. I hate that. I mean, I like going inside plus cooling off on a hot summer time day just as much as the next person, although I don’t like trying to eat breakfast while laying inside of a meat locker, either. I think that the management of this locale does a actually good task at keeping the heating plus the air conditioning levels set just right. They need to provide lessons to some other locales around here!

furnace/heater