2009 Issue

21 I GOT INTO THE HVAC BUSINESS almost 50 years ago. It was the fall of 1959, and I was enrolling at theUniversity of Utah to finish the last few years of my mechanical engineering degree. I came from the aerospace industry, having worked in the aeronautical engineering divi- sion at Hill Air Force Base and both the rocket engineering and tool design divisions at Thiokol Chemical Corporation. Mr. Jerry Smith was one of my professors at Weber College. Jerry had been an engineer at Marquart, and was now teaching engineering classes at Weber College and working part time for W.R. Olsen Associates. Jerry knew I was working in tool design at Thiokol, and he offered me a part time job at W.R. Olsen Associates in Salt Lake City, designing HVAC systems, while I finished up at the University of Utah. They paid me well, let me work my own hours, and provided full benefits. It was a great part time job for a young college kid. I’ll tell ya’, compared to the preci- sion of tool engineering, designing HVAC and plumbing systems was a piece of cake. Instead of specifying the difference between a slip fit, a press fit or an interference fit. All I had to do was make sure it would fit! Back in those days there weren’t very many HVAC engineers in the state who were not affili- ated with an equipment supplier. Up until about 1958 most mechanical engineering in the HVAC business was done by the equipment suppliers. They designed the systems, sold the equipment, and made sure the systems worked. It made it hard to compete as an independent engineer, since those guys didn’t charge any engineering fees. Needless to say, the state began to notice the high price of mechanical equipment, and mandated the use of independent engineers on all state work, and that’s primarily what cre- ated the consulting mechanical engineering business in Utah. All of a sudden sales engineers had to decide between selling equipment in a newly competi- tive market, or going into the design business. It was that group of ‘sales engineers’ who were the seedlings for the consulting engineering business as we know it today. Systems were simple back then. Energy was cheap, Utah Power and Light and Mountain Fuel Supply were at each others throats trying to sell their brand of energy. There was a big push by Utah Power to sell all electric homes, schools, and office buildings in areas serviced by Mountain Fuel, and they did it by selling power for a penny a kilowatt with no demand charge. We designed a few of those systems, but much to the chagrin of the power company, we used electric boilers so they could be easily converted to gas when the power rates went up. The gas company in the meantime, just to get even, were pushing gas fired Arkla air conditioners. After a few years of feuding, I guess they signed a truce.There were quite a few systems designed as constant volume re-heat in those days, and some of them were all electric! Those electric ones were a disaster for the building owners. They were very costly to quite a few ‘older’ folks lived. Wanting to make sure we could keep them cool in the hottest weather, I added a little extra to the load. They finished the air conditioning installation just in time for an exceptionally hot July heat wave, and the custodian, being proud of his new air conditioning system, and wanting to show it off, turned the thermostat in the chapel clear down to 65F. Well you can probably guess what happened. When the older folks stepped out into the hot July temperatures, they started dropping like flies! They were seeking shade under every tree. Their systems couldn’t adapt quickly enough to such an abrupt temperature differential, and they just fainted. Needless to say, I got a call Monday morning. I had a little talk with the custodian, explained to him the human physiology as it relates to large temperature differentials, got him re-calibrated, and it never happened again. The Good Ole’ Days WAYNE CLARK PETERSON, P.E. , OLSON AND PETERSON, CONSULTING ENGINEERS, INC. The history of heating, ventilating and air conditioning [HVAC] business in Utah began right after Willis Carrier invented air conditioning! So here goes... A word about hand drafting. Even seasoned draftsmen’s hands would get so fatigued lettering the equipment schedules that I kept a little hand held massage vibrator in my desk to squeeze a few more hours out of an aching hand when we were facing a deadline. That part of drafting I don’t miss. continued on page 22 retrofit, but it was either that or tear the buildings down. You couldn’t afford to pay the utility bills and nobody wanted to buy them. Then there was the issue of building insulation, why install insulation when energy was so cheap? There were no energy codes, and we didn’t have any indoor air quality guidelines. Frequently the only reason architects installed insulation on the roof was to make it easier to install the roofing. The only benefit I can think of was that the snow never accumulated on the roof for very long, and that made the structural engineers and anybody who had to do maintenance up there in the winter happy. We tried to talk the architects into installing insulation for comfort reasons to avoid cold drafts at thewalls etc., but fewwould do it because of the initial cost impact. It was cheaper to just addmore heat. Buildings were frequently built without any insulation at all in the walls, except for a thin layer of celotex on the outside, and that was mostly to keep the wind from blowing through the cracks. They were cheap buildings, and that’s all that seemed to matter. If it was going to cost a dime, nobody wanted to hear anything about energy conservation. To put things in perspective, Arabian American Oil Company – ARAMCO, had recently put the Anwar oil field in Saudi Arabia on line, the world was awash in cheap oil. and gasoline was selling for 24 cents a gallon. Since the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints [LDS Church] owned several coal mines down in Emery County, lots of churches were still being designed using high firebox coal fired boilers. Steam systems were common, and air conditioning was not. If you could blow cold air on someone in the summer months you were a hero. Movie theatres, retail stores, modern office buildings, and the terminals of airports were air conditioned, but schools and homes and low cost office buildings usually were not. Neither were cars for that matter. I remember designing an air conditioning system for a church up in the avenues of Salt Lake where several general authorities and