VO: You are listening to Cool Air Hot Takes.
Charles Jelen: Welcome, welcome to Cool Air Hot Takes. We are back in better than ever for season two. We're your host. I'm Charlie. This ray of sunshine to my right is Dan Gentry, and this show is all about buildings energy, HVAC. So if any of that is interesting to you, you are in the right place.
Dan Gentry: Thank you so much to everyone who's listened, reviewed, commented, sent us hot takes and questions.
We love the feedback. It's because of you guys that we are back and we're so excited to jump into the next season. We've got even more industry insights, expert interviews, and of course, hot takes.
Charles Jelen: Remember, there are a lot of different ways that you can reach out to us. You can send us an email, cool air.hot takes@trained.com.
You can leave us a review on Apple, leave us a comment on YouTube or Spotify, and also find all of this information in the show notes of every episode.
Dan Gentry: Now. We've made a few upgrades to the show. We've put in some investment to make sure we're supporting all of our audience. So for our friends in Canada, we're very happy to announce that the podcast is now streaming on all major platforms and available in 5 75 Volt.
If you don't understand that joke, find a Canadian and ask them.
Charles Jelen: I love that. Alright, Danny, boy, what do we have lined up for today?
Dan Gentry: Oh, we got a, we got a packed episode today. As always, we're gonna get you caught up with HVAC headlines. Then we're gonna follow that up with an interview with Rob Trickett from Flow Control Industries, and he's gonna be talking about PIC or pressure independent control valves.
Gonna be a great one. Then we're gonna hit the mailbag. We're gonna take some, uh, listener questions and then, uh, of course, we're gonna wrap it up with the stat of the day.
Charles Jelen: I love the stat of the day. All right, our guest today is Rob Trickett. He's the VP of Sales and Marketing at Flow Control Industries.
Why is Rob joining us today? Because remember this little Diddy, this little hot take, the thing that people should be designing more around, ran across another project today. That it just needs it and it's pick valves.
Dan Gentry: Pick valves. You're a
Charles Jelen: big pig valve guy. I, I am big pig valve guy. I know I am a big pig valve guy.
And we're finally doing it here. Pressure, independent control valves. I stand by my hot take. More people should be using them and designing with them. So Rob's gonna join us today. We're gonna walk through all things, pick valve, what they are, how they work, and how they can benefit designs and clients in the long run.
But before we do that, Dan, it's good to be back in the studio. Oh, it's great to be back. I've got a high expectation of where this hot take is going, but uh, season two, episode one, what's the first hot take of the season?
Dan Gentry: Well, we've had some time off. Maybe our listeners had some time off, let's say, but we're always still working.
So my hot take is we need a national week long holiday. For everybody can take a break, shut everything down and let's just do a nice long summer vacation holiday. Nobody goes to work, obviously, except for the critical. You know, some people are probably gonna have to, but most people let's not you, not you, not not, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not let's take some time off and just enjoy life. We all work so hard. Take your boat out, take a motorcycle out, have some fun, and just don't work.
Charles Jelen: What do you wanna call this national holiday?
Dan Gentry: Um, it's the national Holidays. It's called National Holiday. Yeah, it's huge. It's a week off and it's gotta be in the summer.
We all get outside, touch grass, go see your friends, recharge those batteries. Work life balance. I'm a big work life balance guy. Okay.
Charles Jelen: You got out on the boat last week, didn't you?
Dan Gentry: Uh, you know, for our listeners, my face may appear red and, um, I've been trying to. Do good on the sunscreen, but um, yeah, I got some sun.
Charles Jelen: You did, you did get some sun listener. There's a shade of red that we're working with right now.
Dan Gentry: Yeah. Me and aloe Vera, we
Charles Jelen: go way back. Okay. What do you got? Alright, so I don't actually have a hot take. I have kind of a, an update, which I think is kind of fun is Okay, we had a sponsorship request. Oh, whoa.
That's right. Uhhuh. Okay. Pinnacle Marine President of Pinnacle Marine. His name is Rob McMahon. Big listener, big friend of the show. Okay. Uh, but we're very happy with our current sponsor. Uh, we're, you know, train does a great job, so thank you, Trane. Thank you. Uh, we've gotta give Rob a little shout out to, that's a shout out.
Exactly. Yeah, to shout. If you're looking for commercial boats, for whatever you use commercial boats for, whether it's a dinner cruise or national people around, or a national holiday holiday, uh, reach out to Pinnacle Marine. Thank you, Rob, for being a great listener.
Dan Gentry: Wow, thank you. That's super cool.
Charles Jelen: Yeah.
Alright, next up listener. We got your HVAC headlines,
VO: HBAC. Headlines your news today.
Charles Jelen: Alright, listener. At six o'clock in Oslo, here's your headlines. Headline number one, a new flow battery takes on the data center energy crisis. Go on. This one's from Clean Technica. Let's break down this headline a little bit. So first they mentioned the data center energy crisis.
What is this that they speak of? There's lot going on with data centers. Big deal. They're building out a lot of, uh, data center capacity all over the country and in general, there's not enough power to power all of the data center that they wanna build out. And you're seeing this reflective in wholesale energy markets.
So if you look at PJM Miso, they're having all time high capacity auction prices, which is leading to higher energy demand pricing. And this is a direct correlation to the US primarily not having enough power to feed the data center, build out demand. The second part of it is a new flow battery. Right?
And so what is a flow battery? Are you familiar with flow battery?
Dan Gentry: Uh, I have to admit that I have no idea what this is.
Charles Jelen: Alright. It's niche. A flow battery is a form of energy storage. It's similar to the concept of a battery you'd find in your car, only the duration that it provides power is much longer.
So you think of typical lithium ion batteries, like a Tesla power bank. It's going to last for a few hours. Flow. Batteries are typically designed to discharge over days, if not weeks. Oh, right. So the reason this is attractive to both the data center market as well as utilities is because in general the renewable energy that we're bringing onto the grid is intermittent.
So a lot of wind, a lot of solar. You don't know when it's gonna be sunny, you dunno when it's gonna be windy. And so trying to plan out how firm that capacity is hard. If you add batteries to it, you firm up that power and flow. Batteries are potentially a. Great way to build out the electricity demand that we need using renewable energy that's coming outta the grid for data centers, for anything that needs electricity.
Yeah, so the next obvious question here is, well, how close are flow batteries? They're actually here. There are pilot projects today using flow batteries. The company that's referenced in this article is called XL Batteries, and they recently announced a partnership with Prometheus hyperscale data centers on a multi-year flow battery agreement.
So coming to a, a hyperscale data center near you is potentially flow batteries, which is kinda cool.
Dan Gentry: Yeah, that's super cool. I think my takeaway there is it's really cool that, uh, data centers are driving a lot of this because they have the need and they have the funds and the capabilities and the scale to actually realistically make it happen.
Absolutely. And so they drive this early innovation and then demonstrate that it can be done at that scale and then look at. Scaling up or down or whatever that looks like after there. So, good job. Good job data centers.
Charles Jelen: Alright, headline number two, shipment data for heat pumps. This is looking at the res space.
This article comes from A CHR every quarter. A HRI releases numbers on the residential side of heat pump, furnaces, air conditioning units. So first up, gas furnaces. This is that thing that's usually in your basement that's hooked up to all the duct work that goes around your house. That furnace has a fan in it that also has typically two coils.
One is a natural gas coil that heats up the air. One is an evaporator coil that cools down the air. So this gas furnace number is the gas component, the heating component that they're looking at, and. They are up big year over year. A 22% increase from 680,000 units in 2024 to 830,000 units in 2025. I don't know if that's a rebound number.
Mortgage rates have come down, so maybe there's an uptick in home builds there, but I'm not sure what to exactly pin that on. It's probably a number of factors, but it's up big in the first quarter. Yeah.
Dan Gentry: Like I would imagine those to be relatively stable year over year. And that's, uh, kinda crazy. It's, it's interesting at a minimum.
Charles Jelen: So next up is heat pump units, which is that condensing unit that sits outside. It does cooling, but then it can also reverse and do heat pump heating. Those units are up 7.7% in the same timeframe, so 880,000 units up to 950,000 units in 2025. My takeaway from that is that there are a lot of people installing hybrid units.
Mm-hmm. So they're doing a gas furnace with a heat pump outside. So you get two forms of heating. You can do high efficiency, heat pump heating when it makes sense. And then when it gets really cold, you go back to gas heating and you kinda get the best of both worlds.
Dan Gentry: Oh yeah. And up here we do hybrid.
Obviously it's a small sample, but I think that's the trend,
Charles Jelen: especially in cold climate because some of the heat pump technology either gets really inefficient where it doesn't make financial sense for the homeowner to do it because natural gas is generally cheaper or the technology just can't keep up because it gets minus 20 typically here.
Yeah. Turns off you switch over to a natural gas site.
Dan Gentry: And I think what's super cool is you get a little app with it so you can see what stage you're on. I love, you know, data and apps and like that. It makes me want get a heat, heat, heat pump in a, in a new control system app. Because you wanna use the app?
Charles Jelen: Yes. Alright, next up we've got Rob Trickett, vice President of Sales and Marketing at Flow Control Industries. We are going to get into pick valves. Don't go anywhere.
Hey there, listener. It's fun talking about massive a hundred thousand ton chilled water plants, Mr. Big Water plants over here, Dan Gentry, he's always talking about how big these water plants are, but I know most of you are working on smaller plants that have their own set
Dan Gentry: of challenges like getting to higher efficiencies or updating to the newest controls, or dealing with tight retrofit constraints for aged equipment.
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Dan Gentry: Oh man. This chiller packs a punch, reducing installation costs and enhancing system performance. And now it's available up to 500 tons.
Charles Jelen: Ready to upgrade your system? Contact your local TRA account manager today or visit trane.com/agility.
All right. Listener, episode one, season two. First guest. We've got ourselves a real renaissance man today. Rob Trickett grew up in Michigan, as Dan would like to say. He's a, uh, Michigander. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. He spent summers in Alaska commercial fishing. He attended the University of Washington. He did law school in Virginia.
He lived in Russia working for a rocket company, which I'd like to. Explore that one. You'll learn more about that. He's an avid traveler with recent trips to Turkey, Thailand, the UAE, Ireland and Korea. He currently lives in Austin where he enjoys driving his rivian drinking bourbon. Hopefully not at the same time and loves movie quotes.
So. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world. Rob joins us on Cool Air Hot Takes. Rob Trickett. Welcome to Cool Air Hot Takes. How you doing?
Rob Trickett: I'm doing great. I have no idea how you got all of that information if you were like somehow planning bugs in my house. But, uh,
Dan Gentry: that wasn't
Rob Trickett: an amazing
Dan Gentry: intro.
Rob Trickett: I, he is awesome. I, I wanna hear more about this guy. He sounds awesome.
Charles Jelen: That was good. Uh, name of the show is Cool Air Hot Takes. We ask all of our guests that come on to bring a hot take with them. It can be in your personal life, it can be in your business life, anything in between. So, Rob, what, what is your hot take for 2025?
Rob Trickett: Well, I hope this counts as a hot take, but what I'd say is that all the innovation in the world that happens in the central plant. Is meaningless unless we get control of the distribution system. Okay. I love it. I love it. Yep. And I know that a lot of people are gonna be offended by not having anything that they do in the central plant seem like it's meaningful.
And that's certainly not where I'm going with this, but I'll give you a couple of examples that go to prove that all the engineering in the world. It doesn't help if the rest of the system isn't working. Right. So on a new construction, there was a project on a large stadium in Las Vegas where they play football that we can't talk about the name of it, but, um, no idea what you're talking about.
Yeah. They were actually looking at it as a value engineering project and I think it was designed for 16 degree Delta T came in leveraging our valves on the distribution side, and of course a lot of other equipment along the way. But we're able to design that at 30 degree Delta T. And what that did is it allowed them to remove over $10 million in just structural steel for supporting the piping.
So if you just look at the cost, it was going into the building construction, it was over $10 million. And not to say anything about the carbon offsets of that. So. These things have to work together. And I look at PVS as an enabling technology, right? It helps everything else to work well. So you've gotta have that distribution system dialed in.
You can really reduce your load and uh, that'll help you to have more efficient equipment, but also you can downsize some of that potentially.
Charles Jelen: So you gave the listener some excitement here, understanding what the outcome can be. But let's start with right, talk about what, what is actually new? What is, what is a pressure independent control valve?
What problem are we trying to solve with these valves?
Rob Trickett: I. So if you look at all of these systems, when you get into commercial HVAC systems, they're using water in a closed loop system. They're moving that water around, and as valves are opening up and closing throughout that system, it's changing the pressure profile at each individual terminal unit, whether that's an air handler or a fan coil.
And as those pressures change. As anybody who you know has ever been in a shower in an older home and somebody has flushed the toilet and it changed the pressure for them, maybe the temperature right? It, it makes a difference when things open up and things close, and all we do is we capture any of that change before it gets to the air handler.
We absorb any pressure change in the system, and we maintain a constant flow. Constant
Charles Jelen: flow through the coil equates to a, a discharge air temperature control that is constant.
Rob Trickett: Sure. And obviously if the conditions change, the flow is gonna change, but it's not going to change unless. The conditions change.
Right. So maybe another way to look at it is if you had a single lane highway and you had one car that was operating slowly, all of the other traffic would be stuck behind it.
Charles Jelen: Mm-hmm.
Rob Trickett: In essence, with pressure, independent control valves, were giving every single car its own lane. So it can be as efficient as possible, go as fast as it needs to go, and what it's doing is not affecting the other parts in the system, and that overall calms down the system and allows it to be more efficient, uses less pump energy, and overall is gonna use less water.
My big question is, why doesn't everybody use these? It's a great question. I think at a perfect world, almost every system would be better off, but the reason people haven't gone to them is really twofold. One, this is, I'm gonna say a newer technology, even though we've been around for 35 years. But initially it was expensive, right?
Lots of people had. All valves, standard control valves, and that means that the price was pretty low. We were the only ones for quite a while that were making pressure independent control valves, and the volume wasn't that high, so costs were high. As people moved into it, we started to see prices coming down and it made a lot more sense and it.
Is a lot easier to make the argument to move to pressure independent. In fact, it's almost a a no-brainer at this point, but where flow control industries came from, our founder actually started in the oil and gas field. He was doing pressure independent control valves for sub-C oil applications where he was injecting antifreeze into subsea oil lines that were up to two miles.
Subsea pressures and temperatures were extreme up to 10,000 PSID. When he then transitioned and said, Hey, this is a great idea that we should use in the commercial HVAC space in the hydronic space. It was really simple to work with. 70 pounds of differential pressure. It was, yeah, it was. I was gonna say, those first ones sound expensive.
Oh, man. Right up to a quarter million dollars, right? Oh, geez. Set for, you know, 20 year lifespan in a salt environment that is, you know, below freezing temperatures and very high pressures, but making a valve. That's gonna work in an HVAC system was really easy. And so, you know, we ended up with a valve that really lasts the life of the other equipment that's there.
Right. And I think where a lot of the other people came from, they were coming up from making simple valves and this was a little more complex. And there were some issues as those came to market, particularly early on. Some of their parts were plastic. Those were swelling under heating and cooling. Some leaking occurred, and so a lot of people got turned off in the early days on pressure independent control valves, and our job is to go out and get them reinvigorated to start using them again.
But that's why we put in a 10 year warranty with ours. And a lot of that was to address some of the concerns people had. I wanna get
Charles Jelen: back to the advantage side of this and the big driver on why I'm, I'm such a big pick valve fan, is when you can decouple the discharge air control from the pressure in the system, which is what your valves are doing instead of.
Lowering the delta T from design, you actually get your design delta T regardless of the load on the coil, which I think is a really, really important point to get across because most coils will give you full delta T when they're fully loaded. But when you go to part load, which is most of the time, you typically in a traditional pressure, depending control system, you end up with lower delta Ts as you go to part load.
You talk to a lot of people that run plants and one of their number one problems is low delta T for the entire system is the plant was designed for 12 degrees, 14 degrees, and they, they're at six, they're at eight. Walk us through what you're solving there.
Rob Trickett: I'll say two things. First of all, full load, you're absolutely right, should be at design Delta t.
When you back off from that, you should actually be increasing. Yeah. Your delta T. Yep. And the reason you can increase your Delta T is 'cause you've got all that surface area, you've got all that capacity and you're only using part of it. And to help illustrate this, any valve can get high delta T. All you have to do is close the valve down.
And run less water through that coil. Now it's gonna get hot in the room if you're running a chilled water system. Yeah. Right. So that's the key is that we've gotta control the temperature and allow the valve to do what it's doing in the background. It's controlling those fluctuations, and that's what causes the low delta T.
So when it's overheating and then coming back down, it's equivalent to, you know, if you were driving a car down the road and you set the cruise control at 60 miles an hour, right? Mm-hmm. That's one system. That's a Delta P valve or a PICC valve system. The other system is going from 50 to 70. It's hitting the brakes, it's going back down to 50, then it's accelerating back to 70, and at the end it's averaging 60 miles an hour.
Charles Jelen: Can't stand those people, by the way. I can't stand those people. Use your annoying cruise control. Oh my gosh.
Rob Trickett: But one of those systems is gonna be far more efficient than the other. Right. And it's, that's where you're getting the efficiency, right? It's the, it's the braking, if you will, and the acceleration that are causing the inefficiency.
And all of that goes back to the central plant then, and the pump energy and the power that's needed to run these systems. And again, if you can do it from the get go where you know, if you're getting a higher delta T mm-hmm. You can actually reduce the size of the pipe because you don't need as much water.
Right. So now if we reduce the pipe size, that'll allow us to reduce the pump size, that'll reduces the electrical load. And then we can put super high efficient equipment into the central plant. But maybe we don't need as many chillers or we don't need as large of chillers. And so where a lot of people we're talking about getting 15 or 20%.
Theoretical, more efficiency out of their compressors, out of the different technologies, we can just go and put PVS out there. Mm-hmm. And see, I've seen 45%, geez, increases in efficiency just by changing out the valves. And all we're doing is helping the other equipment to operate more efficiently. It might be a system that has three chillers.
And we're able to let them operate on two. So
Charles Jelen: where should people start? What's the general recommendation on where designers should look first to deploy pick valves?
Rob Trickett: Yeah, so if we're talking about existing construction, I would look for the air handlers that are closest to the pump, that are moving the most water because.
Those are going to affect overall performance more. It might not make sense to get out to all your fan coil units that are in individual rooms, and let's say it's a hotel and you've gotta go in and open up every ceiling. They can't rent the room that night. But if you can get the big ones that are, let's say that hotel is a casino that are servicing the casino floor, those might make a lot more sense if you're doing new construction.
I would argue that anytime you have a coil, whether it's a fan coil, an air handler, you should put in a pick valve because by. Taking out balancing valves, you really don't need to go through and do t and b. Certainly not on every single valve. These are coming out pretty well. Pre-com commissioned. It's not going to affect the other valves in the system when you replace one.
So there are a lot of places where you're saving money. In new construction. And that's to say nothing of the fact that if we can start reducing pipe size and all of those things, even if we just go apples to apples, it's probably a similar or slightly better cost when you take the labor into account.
Yep. Um, so I would say everywhere that you've got a coil makes sense to have a pick valve.
Charles Jelen: Is there a rule, like if you can get to 80% of your load on pick valves, 70, 70%, like what's the general rule of thumb on that? So
Rob Trickett: when you're talking about a retrofit, what we will typically see is that building will tip into balance somewhere between 60 and 75%, I would say.
Right. Okay. That's helpful. And you might not get every bit of the, the savings out of there, but if all you're trying to do is get designed delta T, you're gonna get that somewhere at that point. But you'll see. Less than that, we'll see improvements at the individual air handlers. Yep. But not enough to make the whole system come into line, if you will.
Charles Jelen: Right. But the, so the pump energy savings is, is by the cubed of the flow. So if you can go from a six degree delta T to a 10 degree deltaT, t even if you can't get back to a full, say 12, 15, whatever the design was, that's still a tremendous amount of energy out of the building.
Rob Trickett: Yeah. And again, we did a, the Johnson Space Center and these guys, you know, it's.
Government building, it's nasa. They didn't have a ton of money, but they knew they had a problem. They were trying to put new buildings on, didn't have the money for a new central plant, so mm-hmm. They just came to us and said, Hey, how would you attack this? Right? We can't afford to go and put pick valves across our campus.
We've got 45 or 47 buildings. And so we took a look and we checked which buildings were operating with the lowest delta tees that were also close to the plant, and so on the first. Go round. We, we attacked three of those buildings. They saw the improvements. It was enough to take back to the powers that be to show, Hey, look, we improved this.
And each year they were doing another three or four buildings. And then one day I think everything just worked because that was it. They didn't come back to us and it wasn't anywhere near that 45. It was probably. 30 of the buildings got taken care of. Sure. And that's the other side of it, right? We're not just talking about efficiency, but in a campus environment, we're talking about increasing your capacity.
So your ability to grow and add new buildings to an existing system, you know, we'll see 15 to 20% capacity improvement pretty commonly. And how that's
Dan Gentry: super common too in any campus or district energy sort of plant where they have all these chillers that we can't load 'em up, we need more. And I think it's awesome to think about you can put in valves and get more capacity outta your system or design these valves into your system and save $10 million or, or pick a number.
It's like, it's very powerful when we're we're talking about a valve.
Charles Jelen: Absolutely. Alright, last one. Before we let you go here, what's the one thing you want listeners to go away with?
Rob Trickett: I mean, it comes back to my hot take, right? All right, let's get control of the load out on the distribution side, and then let's attack the problems that are going on in the plant.
Because if it's an existing building, we may be able to solve it just by getting that load under control. But even if that doesn't solve everything, it's gonna give you the true number that your load is. And allow you to properly size everything in the central plant. Here. Here. Love it. Like it. All right, Rob, thanks for coming on today.
Charles Jelen: Appreciate it. Thank you. Absolutely appreciate your time.
Hey Charlie, where do you get all your information? Well, uh, mostly Grandma Diane's 1984. Hardcover, encyclopedias. Oh, and, uh, engineers newsletters.
Dan Gentry: Ah, yes. That's what we're talking about. Engineers, newsletters. Listeners, let me introduce you to the ultimate resource for HVAC. Engineers, engineers, newsletters offer self-paced learning on topics like acoustics, water piping, ashray standards, and sustainable systems.
You got it.
Charles Jelen: They also have in-depth. The 60 Minute Engineers newsletter, live videos, which are available on demand. And the best part of all this, it's all free. Sounds awesome. How do I get in on this? Just join the over 40,000 professionals who already rely on engineers newsletters. Subscribe now at trane.com/ian.
And now back to the show.
Dan Gentry: Alright, listener, this one is inspired by you. We're gonna hit the mailbag and as always, send us an email, cool air.hot takes@train.com. Leave us a review on Apple or leave us a comment on YouTube or Spotify if you'd like us to check out your question and have us kick it around a little bit. First question up to you Charlie.
Charles Jelen: So question one. This comes from Pat Vanish in Chicago, Illinois. Question I have relates to site selection for these very large high tech i, e chip, fab, et cetera, and data center projects. It seems like there are some areas of the country that really seek these types of buildings and some states, counties that push back hard on these types of projects.
Do you get a sense of how these firms go about deciding where they're going to locate their project? Also, do you get a sense of how different states and counties go about pursuing or pushing away from these firms? Uh, it is a great question, pat. Good question. Deciding where to locate, let's say a data center power, I think number one, number two and number three is available power right now.
Um, other considerations. Clustering for higher performance. So locating data centers together or locating them near urban settings and policy. I can tell you the Midwest is a growing area for data centers because land is cheaper generally, and there's more power available. On the policy side, I think is where you see local pushback.
You hear concerns of local groups for data centers around sound. And that's primarily from the HVAC equipment that's outside from the generators that they have on site, and then pollution from those generators. So running a diesel generator, the construction traffic, these projects can take a long time.
Brownouts, blackouts from the grid. I think a lot of these concerns can be mitigated or are just trumped up a little bit. So we can design the HVAC systems to limit sound. Not a problem On the pollution side, I don't think that's really there. Generators for data centers, for most every data center, they're only there for emergency backup.
Dan Gentry: And these developers like aim for efficient clean systems too.
Charles Jelen: Absolutely. So those generators are only there. They're not there for regular use. And a good case in point on this is what happened in Maryland. So there was a really large data center and that project almost didn't move forward because they were only granted a fraction of the generator permits they needed for the build out.
Yeah. So. What happened is the governor signed a new act into law that modified the rule to exempt emergency backup generators for data centers. Mm-hmm. And now this project is moving forward. Why that is such a big deal and why it's important for communities to care about this is if communities deny a data center from coming in.
They're gonna go somewhere else. The upside can be tremendous financially. So Loudoun County, Virginia, which is the biggest data center kind of conglomeration in the world, took in $663 million in tax revenue in 2022. Whoa. Just from data center operations.
Dan Gentry: That is
Charles Jelen: wild. Right. So Pat, really good question.
Thank you for sending it in and, and I think we circle back on this and talk to somebody that's actually citing data centers. Yeah, I think that's a good interest future episode.
Dan Gentry: Okay. Question two comes to us from Emma Van Fosen in Minneapolis. Thank you Emma. Her question is, which next gen low GWP refrigerants count as drop-in refrigerants?
Another great question. It's a bit of a loaded question. I think, yeah, I really would consider very, very few refrigerants truly drop in, like take the fluid out, put the other fluid in. Usually at a minimum, you're gonna have to deal with oil compatibilities. You'll probably have some controller changes, maybe settings, maybe some sensors, especially today.
There are gonna be some differences. Now, when we get into the say next gen low GWP refrigerants, we're talking about a lot of flammable refrigerants. And so when we introduce that into the equation now, we've really taken the concept of drop in or being able to use existing stuff pretty much off the table where the designs that are using these.
Slightly flammable fluids have a different design, have different safety aspects that have to be adhered to within that design. So maybe not the answer you're hoping for, but uh, that's what it is.
Charles Jelen: I agree that concept of drop-in is really, really hard, and I just think the safe, conservative approach, there is no such thing as a drop-in the way that most people think of.
I'm just gonna swap the refrigerant out and, and I'm gonna get everything that I used to get. Right. Performance capacity, and everything's gonna work like it's supposed to.
Dan Gentry: I mean, even when I think about when we change from 1 23 to five 14, like you could take that same piece of equipment, take 1 23 out, put five 14 in, but you're gonna sacrifice performance.
You're gonna sacrifice capacity, lift temperatures, so you're still gonna pay for
Charles Jelen: something. Yep. Alright listener, that is all we have time for today. We had a bunch of questions that come in, hang tight for future episodes. We wanna get to 'em just to not have enough time. So thank you for sending it in.
Please continue to send in your questions. Send emails to Cool air.hot takes@train.com. We will add them to the list. Next up, we've got your stat of the day,
Dan Gentry: stat of the day. Here comes Joe, the
Charles Jelen: day of the day. All right, listeners, stat of the day. I like this one. I think Dan likes this one 'cause I've been in a car with him and I know which side he falls on.
This is fastest drivers by state.
Dan Gentry: Okay.
Charles Jelen: Who's got the lead foot? Who's got the lead foot and who doesn't? Who does? Yep. All right, so this came from mental floss. Great name. We're looking at average driving speed across the entire state. That includes interstate, highways, urban, all of it. We're gonna do top three, bottom three.
Top three in terms of fastest Wyoming comes in at 71.8 miles per hour average. Mm-hmm. New Mexico, 71 and Idaho at 70.5 miles per hour. Those guys are driving fast. Yeah,
Dan Gentry: that's fast. You know, I kind of thought Montana was gonna be on that list. I. I would've
Charles Jelen: totally picked
Dan Gentry: Montana as well. I mean, Wyoming, that I get that.
Charles Jelen: Yeah,
Dan Gentry: it makes
Charles Jelen: sense. Alright, bottom three. You wanna take a guess at who the Gordon Lightfoot are?
Dan Gentry: Gordon
Charles Jelen: Lightfoot,
Dan Gentry: I mean in the Eastern state. Uh, a smaller state. Uh, let's go with, uh, New Hampshire. I. Well, who else you got that you already got? You got one? I got one. Um, so I wanted to guess New York. 'cause I was thinking New York City.
That was a lucky guest by the
Charles Jelen: way.
Dan Gentry: What was, oh did you say New York? I wanted to say New York. But uh, then I thought about, well, you know, you got the city there, but then the rest of the state is all big. So then I'm thinking Connecticut or Delaware or something like that.
Charles Jelen: Okay. Alright. Well, you did good.
Yeah, you're right. The slowest drivers in the country are all in the northeast. Number three, Maryland 54.7 mile per hour average. Vermont number 2 52 0.8. And the slowest, you nailed it. Slowest drivers in the country, New Hampshire, 49.9 miles per hour. They're going slow.
Dan Gentry: Maybe there's just a lot of, uh, beautiful things to see and leaf peppers.
Charles Jelen: They're
Dan Gentry: peeping. Yeah. You know, leaves changing colors.
Charles Jelen: I
Dan Gentry: get it.
Charles Jelen: All right. Thanks for listening to this episode of Cool Air Hot Takes. We are very happy to be back for season two. Remember, new episodes I released every two weeks on Thursdays. A couple thanks. We gotta throw out there. First thank you to Rob Trickett from Flow Control Industries. That was a great interview today.
Thank you to the listener for tuning in and thank you to our lovely wives. Megan and Amber, thank you so much for the constant encouragement to leave the room and talk about HVAC. It paid off. Look at what we're doing here. Thank you, ladies.
Dan Gentry: Remember we're after your hot takes and questions. You can leave us a comment on Spotify or YouTube.
Leave us a review on Apple. Or drop us an email@coolair.hot takes@trane.com. Don't forget, you can also leave us a rating wherever you listen. And until next time, stay cool and keep those takes hot.
