Does your company provide a 24/7 service? What’s the longest or weirdest hours you had to work?

Do balancers need to be licensed there? I’m out of Albany, NY and was working at a site in Springfield. There was a guy there who said he was a sheet metal inspector and told me I needed to be licensed to balance in Mass. I can’t find any licensing on the Mass dot gov site for it.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently studying for the NEBB Certified Professional (CP) exam and thinking about stepping into a supervisory role with a TABB company in the near future. I’ve been a tech with my current firm for over 20 years, so I have plenty of field experience, but I’m curious about what kind of pay and perks others have negotiated when making this kind of transition.

Any tips or insights would be greatly appreciated—especially if you’ve been through a similar career path!

Thanks in advance!

So I'm starting work on a large government project, the first system that they have ready is the CHW.

Quite typical set up, lead lag pumps, no secondary loop going out to the chillers.

Strainers have been pulled, system has been flushed and bled of air at the highest point.

Pumps are tested at 60Hz, all control valve and balancing valves open. 1600~ GPM out of 1272, pump is throttled back using total balancing valve until we sit slightly under 150ft of head. Which is the design printed on the pump data tag and the curve. Impeller size is confirmed correct by a zero flow test.

Readout of the system has all the water hanging around the two closest mechanical rooms. All AHUs have split CHW coils, so top and bottom circuit setters(IMI steel models), there is also a FCU located in each mech room. Cutting of the system starts, attempting to push water to the mechanical rooms furthest away.

After two days of balancing the system is proportionally balanced. Total flow has suffered in the process, the total valve is now wide open. The distribution total is around 84% of design, chiller total flow is around 86%, total valve reads 87%. The pump test using the manufacturers curve however reads 150.4/150ft, so 100% of design.

Most of my valves closest to the pump are metered back around 20-30% open, with the valve furthest away from pump 100% open.

Have you guys seen a loss this large before, it seems to be a trend in my area where the pumps while appearing to be good at first ultimately end up looking under sized.

I will post more info for clarification if asked.

For you evergreen guys out there. I have the 15" hood with 1x4 and 2x4 skirts. Are you storing them in the hood case?

Pre-construction walk through found 50-60 of these on VAV HHW coils. Have anyone ever seen one before? Looking for literature about it. Searching the internet has found nothing productive.

What would be a good base wage for both experienced and trainee? If you feel it depends on where you are located please say the State you would be talking about for this info.

What do you typically use to meet the CEC requirements?

How many of you are union vs non union

Im in the SMART apprenticeship for TAB though NEBB certified. My employer hasnt been able to guarantee me a full 40 hours and its starting to hurt. Also payong me the apprentice union scale. Because im still an apprentice i cant just drug up to another shop. Im stuck where im at til i turn out. Non union shops around me have been dangling an instance $15/hour pay bump and competitive benefits in front of me and its looking more and more appealing. Obviously id lose my pension contributions and have to pay back the education loan agreement money but it seems ill still come out on top

Combine that with the fact that Cx and Controls arent union either (which i both consider as end-games in a TAB career), im having a hard time justifying staying in the union

Sorry to make a post thats more general career advice than specific to TAB. Ive just been getting frustrated with the lack of work

"Why aint it lining up on the fan curve???"

Anybody make the jump from TAB to commissioning?

I've been fielding the market and Cx firms are giving me the best offers

Seems the biggest downside is more travel but Im ok with that. most of my TAB projects have been out-of-state anyways.

It looks like an old armstrong valve body but a new armstrong dial?

Anyone familiar with Field Commander? We have a job using these controls and the control contractor has been less than helpful. We need to find some way to plug in and balance these.

Since moving into balancing full time from installing any recommendations on a smaller service bag ? And what does everyone typically carry

Any one have some sage advice on improving productivity. Been doing this for a couple years now and started keeping track of how many hours I spend on each piece of equipment. Ive been given a general rule of thumb for estimating how long something should take and based on my records I'm slow.

I have the reputation in our company as being very high strung about my work and been criticise for taking too much time "thinking not doing" a few times now. My reputation seems to be that it'll be done right but done slow. On the flipside people are hesitant to question my work. Thats nice, but i now want to start learning how to speed things up (without sacrificing quality obviously).

Do you guys have a place on your reports for the return fan tracking offset for AHU’s that have supply and return/relief fans, or know how to determine this?

Where does everyone buy their red caps to cover traverse holes?

What do y’all prefer, Make Up Air (MUA) or Make Up Air Unit (MAU)?

I am looking to purchase a box/roll of poly tubing that is more durable than the typical Shortridge material and is a long enough bundle that we can trim to suit for multiple applications. Doesn't matter if it's clear or black, but it cannot be the rigid plenum rated tubing. Does anyone have a go-to material & provider with sizing that has worked well for your team?

What are some notes/observations that you frequently include in your reports? I'll go first: "electrical measurements not safely accessible." This note is now all over our reports because a guy was attempting to gets amps/volts off a mini split through a light switch style disconnect. When attempting to put the cover back on, he fried a transformer. It probably would of helped if the electrician didn't pull a mile of wire into a handy box.

Recently theres been quite a bit of friction between the field and the office following someone's promotion.

We have two principal players in the office, our NEBB CP and an "office guy."

NEBB CP has 20+ years of field experience and did everything from sheet metal, service, controls, TAB, and even design for a bit.

The "office guy" never held a tool in his hand and was only hired on to do pre-production paperwork and invoicing. He doesn't have any technical background

Now there's been a shift were the "office guy" is starting to take on a more of a "manager" role and all of us field techs are kicking back hard. It's gotten to the point were some just ignore him and only talk to the CP.

At first I thought guys were being unreasonable and tried to give him a chance, but he's does shit like pull us off jobs that are on fire to go an 1.5 hours across town to do some stupid BS job that could have waited. He also ignores basic pre-planning questions we techs specifically ask him before going to a job. For example, he wanted to send me to a hospital to do a survey of some equipment - just on the roof, no need to go inside. Naturally I asked what does the equipment serve. Got no response and come to find out it was 3 laboratory exhaust fans serving active fume hoods. Then he was mad at me for refusing to perform survey work until this was properly coordinated with the active lab. After that I started ignoring him and only going through the CP too.

The attitude us field guys have is that the "manager" of field techs should have a reasonable amount of field experience or technical background. There's been whispers of guys strongly considering leaving an otherwise good outfit to start their own thing because of it. I would bet my career more than half our techs would jump ship if that move goes through. We all also feel that if they are just going to hire people with no field experience for "management" positions than there's no upward mobility for the guys actually generating the company revenue. There's also rumors that "office guy" is studying for the NEBB CP, because the requirement is only years of "management" experience. Suffice to say, morale is at an all time low.

Meanwhile the office has been real stubborn about this and considers it as "growing pains" for the new "manager."

Do you guys deal with this? Or would you move on to something better?

Sorry this was mainly just me venting to be honest.

EDIT: needless to say "office guy" is related to people in the office

Been doing a lot of hydronic balancing with large systems that have variable speed pumps controlling to a system dP setpoint.

The way I have been taught is that you first set the system for full flow and set the dP for your worst case coil. Then you can go one by one and just set the circuit setters on each coil individually. The reasoning being that the dP will automatically adjust so you only have to touch a circuit setter once.

This doesnt really make sense to me. It almost sounds like being able to only touch each dampers once on a fan if the fan is controlling to static pressure setpoint. Im not sure if that works.

Please let me know if this is the proper way. Im an apprentice and all the journeymen swear this is how you do it but Im having trouble understanding the principle that allows you to just go to each coil and set the flow once and then your good to go.

I guess it just sounds too good to be true

I'm working on a project with KMC Controls thermostats. It's a federal site so wireless routers are not allowed and we are getting our steps in every day to travel to the panel to make control changes and back to the work zone. There are many reasons why Controls is unavailable to support so we won't go into that for this question. Does anyone have experience with KMC and if their service tool has an interface that supports TAB adjustments such as flow coefficients and setpoints adjustments?

Edit: the terminal unit controllers are KMC Conquest.

I am sure many of you are more techy then myself, so maybe you can help.

As many of you know it can be very difficult to get some control software yet as TAB contractors we are expected to have ALL types of new and old software.

I was thinking we could set up a Dropbox or some type of shareable folder and share any control software that we have that doesn't require a key or registration. It could be helpful to list the types of chords that go along with this software.

Thoughts?