Airflow Serenity w/ Alex Meaney

HVAC School - For Techs, By Techs

In this episode from the HVACR Training Symposium, Alex Meary presents 'Airflow Serenity,' focusing on the technical and interpersonal aspec

Key takeaways

• The concept of 'complementary failure' occurs when oversized equipment and undersized ductwork create a seemingly comfortable but inefficient system.
• Technicians should prioritize managing friction within the entire airflow path rather than just focusing on duct dimensions.

Main topics

• Airflow friction management
• HVAC diagnostic tools

Notable quotes

It's not the size of the duct, it's the friction that is created in the path.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a practical guide for HVAC professionals to move

Transcript preview

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It's your host, Brian Orr. Speaker 4 (3:29) Serenity now, serenity now. This is the HVAC School Podcast. I'm Brian, and sometimes I quote Seinfeld. And today I do it apropos of the title of this podcast, which is Airflow Serenity with my friend Alex Meany. It's a great presentation, I guess I should say. I was going to say a great podcast, but of course I'm... Leaving that up to you to decide that. But it was a great presentation from the symposium. And Alex talks about just the realities of airflow, how we are going to try to manage friction. We can't always solve every problem and there's different ways to skin a so-called cat. But I'm not going to get into it because Alex is about to. Airflow Serenity from the 2026 HVACR Symposium in beautiful Ocoee, Florida. Here's Alex. Speaker 2 (4:17) Hey, guys. Speaker 2 (4:20) There we go. Yeah, I'm real bad, by the way, at putting up the first slide and saying who I am and all that fun stuff. My name is Alex Meany. I am the owner-operator of Meany HVAC. I'm mostly for a day job, anyway. I get paid to teach people how to use write-off software to design HVAC systems. But when I'm on the road like this, I like to give back to the industry by bringing it down to fundamentals. And today we're going to talk about Airflow Serenity. I like funny names for basic presentations. And I want to be granted the serenity to know what ducts I can change, the skills to change the duct I can. We're not going to focus too much on that. And the wisdom to know those changes that will make the most difference. And that's what we're really going to talk the most about. So quick disclaimer here. It doesn't really matter who you're praying to if you're saying prayers, just in case that comes up. We're not going to talk about that here. So how do you know you have airflow problems? When you've got duct work, you've probably got airflow problems. Our first problem is going to be identifying what issues we have. And I want to talk about the obvious because we often forget to talk about the obvious. You got to talk to the customer. I got to stay away from those. That's what's happening there. When a homeowner tells you that they are uncomfortable in a particular place in their house, that's an airflow problem. Pretty easy. Good thing you came to this conference. You didn't know that, right? When they have persistent issues with the system, whether they're Room comfort issues or just this is the sixth time we've had to have somebody out here. That's probably an airflow problem too, guys. A lot of the issues that we have can be traced back to this. It's the thing as an industry we tend to overlook, even though it's the beating core of the industry. The less obvious is when you're talking to that customer and they tell you they have loved their system. They are perfectly comfortable. They wish they could have another one just like it. Meanwhile, they have a 1,500 square foot house and a five ton system. Oh, I wrote four. Or that same 1,500 square foot house and 120,000 BTU furnace. So you don't have to go with me on this for a second, but there's a concept that I like to refer to as complementary failure. If your job was to be a tree and stand tall, falling over is a failure, standing tall is a success. Well, what if me as a tree and my neighbor tree, we both fall over, but we hold ourselves up? We hold each other up. That is what complimentary failure looks like. That is oversized equipment and undersized ductwork. When you have oversized equipment and undersized ductwork, what you often get is comfort. You get an overcharged system that probably doesn't last as long as it should, but that can truly, from the perspective of the homeowner, homeowner is not an HVAC guy, right? From the perspective of a homeowner, that can be a comfortable, quote unquote, working system. you got to look sometimes a little deeper than talking to that homeowner about whether they're comfortable in their bedroom or whatever. So when it comes to room comfort, trust the homeowner. We often as contractors have, and I say we, sorry, you do like Toastmasters or whatever, you learn to do presentations. It's always we, right? It's not me versus you. I'm not a contractor. I'm a computer nerd who teaches people the physics stuff. But when we talk to homeowners or when you talk to homeowners, There can be a little bit of an adversarial nature there. Oh, this homeowner is crazy. They don't know what they're talking about. They're out to get us. They're trying to scam us. It's funny. Both sides of that arrangement think they're trying to scam each other in a lot of situations. I want you to trust those homeowners too. Sometimes when your own eyes, your own experience, your own sensors in the moment disagree with them. I swear before you got here, we had an issue. Try to trust them in that moment. If the room that they're complaining about is currently has the door wide open and The temperature is fine in there, but they swear to you it's uncomfortable. There's a really good chance that what you have is a room imbalance problem. You have inadequate return, and the reason that room is uncomfortable is before they use that room the way they use it is they're going to shut the door, and that's what creates the problem. So it's often good to at least dig one level deeper when the homeowner is telling you, I swear this is something that happens. I swear this is a problem. Try trusting them. Try working with that and seeing if you can't figure out what that issue is. There are... Crazy homeowners, though. There are homeowners who want to be comfortable. The biggest place where you disconnect is they want to sit in a beam of sunlight and be comfortable. That's a surprisingly common thing. We want you to come out and we want you to put a mini split in our sunroom or do something like that. And son of a gun, it's 70 degrees in here, but I swear it's hot. Yeah, it is. You're sitting in a beam of sunlight. That's how the sun works. The problem we have, and this goes back to the trees falling on each other here. is system airflow. When the homeowner has no complaints, that does not mean they have good system airflow. I know that's kind of obvious to some of us, but a lot of contractors judge the quality of their work by whether or not their homeowners are happy. Speaker 3 (9:13) That's a pretty Speaker 2 (9:14) good way to judge yourselves. I don't hate it. But you have to understand and always remember that homeowner doesn't know how their HVAC system works. The number of homeowners up my way, I'm from Massachusetts area, who call it the boiler when it's a furnace. is pretty high. So when it comes to system airflow, don't trust your customers, investigate that yourself. But one last note on the very obvious, which is asking your homeowner if there are any parts of their house that are uncomfortable. Sometimes you might want to consider stopping them when they give you the answer, yes. Are there any spots in your house that are hot or cold? Yes. Don't tell me where. For those of you who are already I know this audience, there are plenty of you who are already pretty deep into the diagnostics of the HVAC industry. If you're going to do a diagnostic as part of a sales call, as part of a service call, whatever, building trust with a homeowner, it's really hard. It's literally the hardest part of doing HVAC sales or selling any part or service to customers is having that trust. If you can tell that homeowner, we'd like to tell you where we think your problems are. That can be an excellent tool. for building trust. I know a few HVAC contractors out there who will spend, this isn't for everybody, they will spend two hours on a sales call doing diagnostics. They price themselves in such a way that when they win a job, they're paying for that lost time for the jobs they lose. But when they can say to the homeowner, we think this bedroom's hot, we think this bedroom's cold, and we think this is uncomfortable in the morning. And the homeowner goes, oh my God, you're exactly right. I'm not saying you could tell them whatever number you wanted, but you can come in with a higher dollar and win that sale. You've proven to them, because the biggest problem you guys face is you go in there and you tell them one thing, somebody else goes in there, tells them something completely different. They don't have the skills, tools, or knowledge to tell them apart. If you give them those tools, they will appreciate that. And they'll show that appreciation often by paying you money to do the work. Crazy idea. So if you are going to do deep diagnostics as part of your process, number one, if you don't do that now, don't start tomorrow. That's insane. You need to be able to do this quickly so you can see a return on that time investment. You've got to get paid, but this is an argument I have, and people on the other side of this argument in this room, I want you to know I respect you deeply. I happen to think there is a lane where you don't have to get paid for the diagnostic process. What you have to do is price your jobs commensurate to the amount of time you're losing to the ones who don't and aren't interested. FYI, one of the things that makes this work, and I should have put it as a bullet point in this slide, my bad, is vetting your customers, vetting your leads. And my favorite way to do that is tell the homeowner it's going to take a long time. Have somebody with sales skills, soft skills. Don't just be calling them and be like, it's going to take three hours. No? Okay, bye. You need to be having a conversation with them. But if you can't convince somebody that it's worth $0 of their money and two hours of their time to make sure you do the job well, you're not convincing that person to buy from you. Because the person in this room is, nobody in this room is the cheap guy. Value buyers are who you're looking for. And if you can't convince somebody to invest a little bit of their time and no dollars to make sure you do good work, they're not interested in good work. They're not interested in value. They're commodity shoppers. And that call is the opportunity you have to turn them around. And if you can't turn them around there, you're probably not going to turn them around when you ask them for $18,000 for a replacement. Oh, yeah, and the experience and accuracy, again, this is not something you want to be charging for or investing a lot of time in if you haven't had a little bit of experience with this. So I'm changing gears here over to system airflow because I think... that system airflow is the key to diagnosing airflow problems and fixing airflow problems, even when they're not what we associate with system problems. Even when the problem is up in the bonus room, you can be thinking of this systematically, and we often don't. So first, how about you figure out how much CFM you actually need? Brian's always making the joke, airflow is good. We got good airflow. What's good airflow? How much airflow do you have? Oh, well, we bought the true flow grid. We know it's 872 CFM. Is that good or not? So I'm the load calc guy for a lot of you. And the load calc guy says do a load calc. So you want to know how much airflow you actually need? Your first step should probably be a load calculation. And