Things You Didn’t Know About HVAC, for Engineers & Owners
Joe Kalina – Introduction
My name is Joe Kalina. I work for Gilbar. I’m a sales engineer. I focus on working with engineers, contractors, developers and owners. I work a lot on the engineering side to design systems, select equipment, and think outside the box to develop new equipment, especially for some of the more challenging projects we have as of late with electrification projects and the limited infrastructure to support those. Leading into why New York City is different, with Local on 97 and the various initiatives in place requiring us to electrify new and existing buildings, there’s not really enough power to do that very often. So, we’re trying to figure out unique ways to apply various types of equipment with energy recovery or heat pumps (water source and air source), and geothermal to be able to do what New York City is trying to see us do.
Tell us a little bit about what the sales side of that process looks like; the selling of HVAC equipment for large buildings and particularly in New York City.
I’ll come at it from two different angles. One would be a typical plan and spec job. Let’s say one of the larger engineers in the city designs XYZ Ave. which is some 70-story, super tall building. Generally, one of us would have been working with that engineer from the start to help with design. But, from a sales point of view, a contractor or an owner would generally send us the plan and spec drawings and ask us to take a look at it. We would start pricing the equipment based on what’s on there. We would talk with them about a schedule, as far as when they expect the building to be built, when they would expect to have the equipment on site, whether it would need to be stored or not, when they expect to have it started up, etc. A lot of that ties into pricing and ensuring we give them what they expect.
Something that we’ve been dealing with, for example, are refrigerant phase-outs. If a job is getting pushed out to 2028, we can’t necessarily give them the equipment on their drawings from 2022 that they were expecting to purchase. So, a lot of this comes into the conversation to ensure we’re giving them what they expect.
Another side of it would be more of a design build or owner-direct opportunity development. Let’s say they come to us with an existing building and they “Hey, my cooling tower is dying. My chillers are 40 years old. I know we have to do something here. What would you guys recommend?” We would go to their building; we would walk through it with them and assess what they have on-site. We would assess the rigging path, which is something that isn’t talked about nearly enough, especially with New York City (and our vast amounts of space everywhere). We would walk them through the different types of systems and propose how they could be implemented in their building and then dive into that more later on with an engineer from a design standpoint to see what’s truly feasible.
Gil-Bar is very well known in the city. This is a highly technical field, but it also comes down to relationships and customers knowing that we can deliver on certain things. Tell us a little bit about what they like about Gil-Bar in particular and working with us in New York City.
I think Gil-Bar has a few things that are unique compared to most other Rep firms and most other places you can get HVAC equipment. One would be that the people who work here, in general, are incredible. They’re at the top of their league as far as the people you’d want to support you, whether it’s from a technical aspect or from a sales and support aspect. People come to Gil-Bar because they trust us to do everything for them and stand by them from pre-sale, through the sale, after the sale, 20 years later when they want to replace the equipment, and so on. We’re not only thinking outside the box from an engineering standpoint to make sure we can give them the best equipment for the best application as efficiently as possible. We’re there the entire time, and if there are issues afterwards, they know we’re going to be there on-site to help them fix it. They know we’re going to be there if they call us in five years and say, “Hey, this popped up, what can we do?” We’re going to show up and help support them no matter what. That’s really what sets us apart, our support along with us being able to think outside the box in our engineering prowess.
Ambient has other partners outside of Applied Sales as well, such as in service and commissioning. Do you find that’s also an advantage, having those kinds of resources available outside Gil-Bar, in different areas?
Having multiple arms of Gil-Bar under ambient, whether it be Veritas or MIH (service and commissioning), is incredibly helpful. Customers know we’re going to be there to support them with a full range of services, maintenance, and guidance to help rig equipment. Being there after the fact with commissioning, which is such a broad topic in and of itself, generally isn’t taken care of the way it should in a lot of buildings anyway. So, knowing that we have that to support them, and then having upwards of 40 manufacturers on our line card, helps us create the right fit in terms of having to think outside the box or not for a particular building. Even if there are lead time issues, or unexpected tariffs popping up, or anything like that, we’re able to pivot with equipment types and move around between factories to be able to give them what they want and keep it where they expected.
Transitioning to the technical side, we have a broad range of customers, and they all have different needs. Some on a particular job might care about efficiency, a lot of them might care about straight up cost or particular job. Then there are things like the rigging path you mentioned. Tell me some of the challenges that you might run into on a regular basis with clients that we often can fix, or that we’re experts at.
Thinking of some things that have come up recently, a popular building conversion design now is converting office to residential. Alot of these buildings are in Fi-Di with these wacky footprints and they’re all over the place. For these instances, we’re looking at what the infrastructure is currently and what the proposed new system types are. They may not necessarily line up from a feasibility and cost standpoint.
For example, if we’re trying to apply XYZ system where there’s already existing condenser water piping and we’re running all new refrigerant piping everywhere, it’s going to cost an arm and a leg, versus being able to utilize the piping they already have, which may be completely fine, and then doing a heat pump chiller or something like that.
The other thing I would say comes back to rigging. I’m working on a job right now that you would think at face value is pretty simple: “We want to replace our rooftop unit”, except the rooftop unit is on the roof of a 64-story building, which a crane can’t reach. So in reality, selecting a packaged rooftop unit ends up being a full knockdown, custom air handler that has to go through these weird 3-foot wide hallways around these ridiculous tight corners, along with a full knockdown custom condensing unit to mate to it.
It’s all heat pump; all energy recovery still, but that completely changes the design and outcome of the job compared to a packaged rooftop unit. From that standpoint, it’s also setting expectations because it also costs a lot more money to do that. Is that in the budget for this year? Do we need to walk the owner through an ROI and maybe have a conversation about moving this to next year, and for now do $5000 of short-term fixes with MIH to limp it through the next year? Let’s see what’s actually feasible and what works for them.
I’m wondering if you want to talk about geothermal, in terms of HVAC technology.
I touched on how there are jobs that were designed as early as 2020. Some of these jobs even go back to 2018. These drawings that are 8-10 years old may get sent to us to bid or the client sends it to us and says, “Does your pricing still stick? Do your designs still stick?” In reality, the refrigerant for the equipment specified has been phased out for the last year. Because of that, maybe the equipment’s getting larger. Maybe we need to do an entirely different design, which then sends their budget way over what they expected 3-4 years ago.
As a result, a lot of these jobs are pivoting towards looking at geothermal for example, which wasn’t available four or five years ago. There were no people that could drill wells efficiently 400 or 500 hundred feet in downtown Brooklyn to be able to achieve some of these high-rise buildings and make it cost effective. So, some of the things we’re looking at now are those jobs that were five years old that are suddenly coming back. Maybe they’ve changed hands of ownership. Maybe they sold off the property and kept the old design. Maybe we reassess that for geothermal, because that’s enabled us to make a lot of very large buildings right along Brooklyn’s waterfront work. There are many more people now making drilling more achievable within a set budget, especially with New York City’s electrification and Local Law 97 expectations and requirements. Geothermal is helping us offset a lot of the grid load and still achieve the efficiency ratings they want us to with water source heat pumps, water-cooled VRF, or other various types of applications we can do for a high-rise building.
New York City is the market leader in a lot of ways, so if we see something market-changing it’s probably going to be around here or someplace similar. When you start thinking about the next 5 to 10 years, what do you see as a game changer, either a technology or a process in the industry that’s going to change everything?
I think it’s incredible looking back 8 to 10 years, seeing what kind of geothermal jobs there are now. We worked on 1 Java St. for example. 1515 Surf Ave. is another one. These huge jobs in Brooklyn where they are drilling these wells and you ask, “how is this even possible?” Myself, 10 years ago, would have thought it was ridiculous if someone mentioned that to me. Now moving forward, over the next 5-10 years at least, district geothermal will be the next path as far as large scale electrification applications to one, make it less cost prohibitive, and two, have it be applied to existing buildings as well that are right on the cusp of having that infrastructure available.
It’s never going to be possible to apply air source heat pumps to them and require a complete electrical infrastructure upgrade for every building. You may have seen as you drive down the West Side Highway or any of these places, that these various developments of 16 buildings that are all the same 10 to 15 story building have just been sitting there for 30 years. I think trying to assess those now moving forward from a district geothermal standpoint, especially farther out, getting out onto the island or upstate, going up towards Westchester will be something we see more.
Another thing that’s coming up more is that we have a building we’re trying to revamp into an office building, residential building, or even hospitals now.
“We want to replace all our equipment.”
“We want to make stuff heat pump.”
“We want to make it more efficient.”
Those are some of the high-level keywords we hear all the time. The question is how do we do it? How do we make it work?
A lot of these projects start off by proposing some type of air source heat pump solution. Many times, they’re not able to make that work because it requires a tremendous electrical infrastructure upgrade just from replacing the equipment they have. Let’s say they have a regular condensing unit paired to an air handler with ADX coil and a hot water heating coil in it. We may propose replacing it with VRF connecting units and a new air handler. Now the hot water is being generated by a new air source heat pump, for example, a split cascade system that we have. We’ll figure out that now instead of it requiring 150 amps, it’s at 400 amps. Oftentimes what ends up being presented is some form of energy recovery. It’s important to talk about the different ways we can implement that and what’s realistic and what may not be for every project. Energy recovery wheels, run around loops, and heat pipes, just to name a few. Each of those have their own place. In a healthcare setting where we want no cross contamination, we’ll most commonly use runaround loops so that we have a coil in the exhaust Airstream. At any given time, there are various exhaust ducts throughout the building being vented with energy we can recover. We can throw in a Konvekta system, or various other types of custom runaround loop systems with exhaust coils in those airstreams. We can then put the other coil in the air handler so that we’re running water with glycol between the exhaust Airstream and the supplier stream and the air handler, recovering heat that would just be rejected from the building, and with no cross contamination. Energy recovery wheels are another one, which are probably the most common type of energy recovery device that’s implemented nowadays. It’s incredibly effective from a cost standpoint compared to the energy we can save with it. Those help us bring down our electrical load, because instead of having an 80-ton air handler, we’re now recovering, say, 30 tons, so now we only need a 50-ton air handler. So instead of it being at 400 amps of load, we’re only at 250.
That’s what makes the project achievable.
Great. Thanks for your time today, Joe.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
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