Real No BS Talk About What It is Really Like Running A Small Blue Collar Business

Hey guys, how is everybody doing? I'm actually trying to get this to go live on Instagram again, and I think it is. I see that my buddy Victor's in the house. Today's live might be an abbreviated version. There's been a lot going on with me. I just, more than anything, I want to communicate with you that maybe the next couple of days, y'all forgive me, I see that the live is going live. Next couple days, I may not be producing. The videos every day, like y'all are used to, it's just some things going on with my family, and I'm going to be in South Carolina. That is where all my family is from. I'll be in the Lexington area, and I got a lot of family up there. Both sides of my family come from around the Columbia area in South Carolina, and they go back a long, long time on both sides, so I got a A lot of family around there, and I'm going to be up there. Because it's north of us, about a five-hour drive, I'll be up there in the coming days. I'm actually leaving tomorrow. Hey, Marvin. We have a comment from Elite Climate Solutions. Hello from southeastern Detroit. How is southeastern Detroit? I've never been there. I have probably been over Michigan, and that is in Michigan, but I've never... I've never set foot on the ground in Michigan that I know of. Wisconsin, Ohio, but not Michigan. I got some friends up there, though. If y'all know Jake in A Blue Collar. And I'll be honest, I don't know how some of the people that live in Michigan deal with the winters up there. It just sounds like it. I'm just so used to mild winters down here. Hello from Las Vegas. That is TheGoodGuy867. I want to tell y'all about a video that is going to be coming. I went to a mobile home, and this is a mobile home where there's a return near the floor and the wall, and there's an air handler sitting on top of the filter in the closet, and the ductwork goes up into the ceiling and connects to what I thought was like a 14-inch pipe and then distributes through the ceiling. And, um... So, they were complaining they had poor airflow, and... I had to cut open the wall to get to the ductwork that was on top of the air handler. If y'all worked on mobile homes, you know what I'm talking about. We got people chiming in from Mobile, Alabama. I think y'all were in the news for some flooding lately. I hope everybody's okay with you, Chad. And we have another one from Dallas, Texas. I'll just call him Mac. And this mobile home, when I cut open the wall. I found that the flex duct that was connecting the air handler to the ductwork in the ceiling had come loose, and I later found out why. This is HVAC Tech 49 from Columbus, and he's specific Columbus, Ohio. It's good because there is a Columbus, Georgia about 75 miles from where I am right now. Okay, what y'all hear in the background is my buddy Riley. He likes to tear up boxes, and he knows when I'm in here, and I want him to be quiet, and he starts making a mess. I had to take his squeakers away from him. I'm trying to wait and see if he'll calm down. But I want to get back to this mobile home. This mobile home had a 16-inch duct on top of the air handler, so it had 16-inch flex. And then somebody tried to connect that 16-inch flex to the 14 that was in the ceiling. That's what happened. So I went, I took measurements. I thought I read 14. I took measurement on top of the air handler, read 16. I went and got a 16 to 14 reducer and some 14 inch flex. So I would have 16 and 14. I could configure it either way. And I battled with that thing for hours, hours. It was terrible, absolutely terrible. Come to find out, the 16 to 14 reducer that I found, and I want to know if y'all have had this experience. I picked it up at Baker Distributing, and the measurements across the 16 to 14 are not 16 and they are not 14. It's like 16 and a half and 14 and a half, rather. And, um... I was trying to fit a 16-inch flex piece of duct over A fitting that was 16 and a half and I battled and battled and I just never thought I would have to measure and verify that the fitting I picked up from one of my suppliers was actually what it said it was. It was terrible, terrible. We have Lost Penny 2894 from Brooklyn, New York, an electrical and mechanical engineer. Been doing air conditioning refrigeration since 14 since I don't know if you're a man or a woman, since I was 14 years old and a couple of companies before I, okay, I actually went into mechanical engineering thinking that was going to be what I was going to do because that's what my dad did, that's what my uncle did, I thought that was the right thing to do. Um, but, uh... You know, I just love getting out and getting my hands dirty and working. I prefer to be physically busy and active. The actual work of an engineer to me was boring. And I didn't make it through my last year of school. Didn't make it. It says we are not going live on Facebook. This is just on YouTube and Instagram. So maybe what I'm doing on Instagram will make it to Facebook. This book, We got people from Chicago. This is Chatter Cat, a frequent commenter on the videos. My intention is to be in Chicago in February for a jar. I don't know how many people are in the conversation here who might be going or interested in that. My intention is to be there They're there to meet people, have a good time. At this point, there's really nobody who... Pays me. To say the things I do or go to their booths or promote them. I do have an agreement with ACIQ. Nobody actually pays me. So, you know, going to AHR for me is just for me. And if I make content, you know, the content's for y'all. I kind of like it that way because I can say I'm free to say exactly what I think about something. For example, I just posted. Posted something on Instagram. Y'all forgive me for the beep. I have somebody texting me and it's kind of hard to change my settings right now. One second, I need to ask this person to stop texting me. I can say what I want to when I go to AHR. I made a post recently about a manifold that someone who was once a sponsor of mine put out. Actually, they're owned by another company that was one of my sponsors. And and it was a Hillmore manifold. And I'm sorry, I just don't know what they were thinking when they designed this thing. Speaking of engineering, whoever thought you. that putting the probe wire connections for your K-type thermocouple on the top was a good idea? I'm sorry, and then the manifold doesn't tell you what superheat and subcooling are. The raw data, but you're going to have to break out a calculator to figure out how much your superheat and subcooling are. I'm sorry, the thing was poorly designed, and they really should have run it by somebody before they put it on the market, and I had to make a post of it. This is the Francisco Hustle. Curtis watching from Portland, Oregon. Just moved from an install helper to maintenance tech with the aspirations to be a service tech. Any advice? Well, you're on the right track. I kind of did the same thing. I started out as a duct helper. I mean, I started at the bottom of the totem pole and worked my way up to an installer. And, you know, both of us were about the same skills, except the other guy had more metal work experience. And I was better at wiring stuff and brazing. So we made a good install team. But I was moved. into the service department and initially that's what I did. I was doing preventive maintenances and depending on the size of the company you're very likely to be sent out on service calls as a preventive maintenance tech to go see if you can figure out what's going on and that's kind of how it starts. So learn everything you can. If you can get into tech school. If you have not been been in the tech school yet and it can help you in your job. To me, that's the. Ideal way to go to tech school if you're going to go. If you're already working, going to tech school, when you learn something in tech school, you can immediately put it into practice. And if you're going to tech school in that situation, let your boss know. Talk to your boss about the things that you're learning. And yes, they will be more likely to move you into a service role. Because they know you're interested. They know you're trying to better your education. They know that you're trying to learn. And that's how things happen with me. Y'all keep this up. Y'all let me know where you are from. This is the Heating Guy, 667 from Jackson, Michigan. Forgive me if you're in the mitt of Michigan. Where are you in the mitt? Are you north? South? I'm not familiar with Jackson, Michigan. Saludos. Thank you for chiming in. Another comment from HVAC Tech 49. By the way, I like that little logo you got there. Did you ever struggle the first couple of years or so? Yeah, you struggled the first couple of years in the service department. Basically, most people that, in my understanding, a lot of people that become really good at what they do struggle in the beginning. They have to figure it out for themselves, spend the time to think about the electrical path of the 24 volts, how things are brought on, and figure it out mentally and understand the refrigeration cycle of heat pumps and everything else. And those people that struggle with it and then figure it out, those are the ones that I have seen are the most successful. Because They have, for lack of a better term, they have figured it out. They have learned it the hard way. You can read about it in a book all day long. You can look at a diagram of the refrigeration cycle and you know what a transformer does. But when you actually sit down and have to rewire like an electric furnace or something like that because it burn up and you figure it out, it might take you a while. And you might struggle with it, and it might be some painful struggling, and you think you need to call somebody. You don't want to, but you might need to. That's when you learn. So the struggle is good. It helps you learn. From the heating guy in Michigan, he is about 60 miles southwest of Detroit metro area. Is that close to Ohio? Am I wrong? Am I? understanding of the map. I don't think you're too far away from like Indiana and Ohio, that part of the country. Maybe I'm wrong. We got another comment from Lost Penny. Let's listen to the previous one. I would recommend to any new mechanic tech, please do not focus heavily on the mechanic because it's easy to forecast heavily on the electrical side. This is where the challenge comes in. To me, honestly, the When I first got into the service department, they told me, you know, 50% of your calls are going to be electrical in nature. And I found that that was not the case, at least not down here, because down here, I would say 80% of the year we are cooling. And even in the part of the year when we have to run the heat in the afternoon, we might be running the air conditioner. So the number one problem between two problems on clogged coil, excuse me, clogged drain and low on refrigerant, that probably makes up this time of year anyway, more than 60% of my calls. So if you can diagnose something that is low on refrigerant and you can clear a drain and maybe take steps to prevent water damage or install a float switch or something like that, you can handle A lot of the calls down here. As far as the electrical goes, it very much does help to figure out how to read schematics and the symbols and what each little symbol means. And with big equipment, I found that it's very important because it can be confusing to try to trace out wires. I work mostly on residential equipment, and I found that it's very easy to trace out wires. At least now, there was some equipment made in the past where all the wires were black. Um, and that's not very nice, but you can trace out wires, like, from your contactor to your compressor and see which ones come and which ones run, and, I mean, there's ways I've learned to identify which one is which anyway, but, um, tracing out your wires and being able to see the path of the flow of electricity on most residential equipment, to me, has been fairly easy. And even the more complicated inverter stuff. You're talking about a condenser, even the big ones, no bigger than that door right there. So, finding sensors and everything has a plug on boards and stuff with this new equipment. The electrical, to me, was the easy part. When it came to commercial work, some of the actual mechanic work, like changing a 300 horsepower motor or a water pump on a chiller or something like that. Some of that could be much more challenging than any of the electrical ever was for me. Y'all forgive me, today is going to be short. My intention today was to have two lives, one for members about starting a business and running a business and another one just to talk to y'all like this. But I kind of had a difficult morning. partially because of that call I told you about where my fittings were not the correct size and it made my job almost impossible. I couldn't, I could not use the fitting that I had. It did not work. It was quite frustrating. And it made me feel like the fittings were, I don't know, metric or something. I mean, they just did not line up and I couldn't use them properly. And I And I tried literally for hours until I figured out that. They just don't fit. You don't expect a 16x14 to not be a 16x14. Well, guys, I do hope everybody's having a decent weekend. I know that some of the people across the country are going through some really bad weather, or at least they have been in the last couple of days, and my heart goes out to y'all. We've had violent wind and lots of rain over, I would say, the last six weeks. And so it's been wet, wet, wet. It's been very hard for the guys cutting grass to do their job because it's raining almost every day. It's been hard for installers to do their jobs because it's been raining almost every day. But we have not seen the flooding like was on the news last night in the middle of the country and like Mobile, Alabama and other places. This is, um, so... Y'all be safe out there. My heart goes out to y'all. I'll loop. We'll try to stay in touch with people over the next couple of days. Like I said, I'm going to be in South Carolina. That is where I'm from. That's where basically all my family is from. There are very few of us that do not live in South Carolina. I don't think my sister does. I don't. And I have one cousin who may actually live just across the border in Charlotte. Hello, Morgan from Morgan's Maintenance. Thank you for chiming in. If y'all aren't familiar with him, he does a live on Thursday nights. He's entertaining. He's got a nice little studio set up there, and I chime in on his lives when I can. He goes live, is it 7 o'clock? 6? I forget, but I get a little notification that he's going live, and I'll chime in and say hello, even if I can't listen. Y'all do take care of yourselves out there and forgive me if I'm not as active on the Insta and the YouTubes the next couple of days. I've got a lot I got to deal with and I'll catch y'all on the next one.