NCI Article Library

High-Performance HVAC Resources

Clearwave is the Way to Go

What do water heaters, strainers, shower heads, humidifiers, dishwashers, faucet washers, swamp coolers, shell-in-tube heat exchangers, etc., have in common? SCALE! Why is Clearwave the way to go? Straight from the customers, "After one week the flue temperature of my...

Choose Your Venting Options Wisely

There are many applications in the field where conditions don't allow for conventional methods equipment venting, or when existing venting won't work. When you're faced with the decision to add venting assistance, you have two basic options: Draft Inducers, or...

Carbon Monoxide- When It’s Hot, It’s Hot

Two questions that come up quite often in our seminars is "why take CO or Combustion readings in summer?," and "why take diagnostic training in the spring?" The thinking is "the heating season is over and by the time we use the information from class next fall, it...

Carbon Monoxide Test Numbers: What Do They Mean?

As you test for Carbon Monoxide and measure combustion efficiency, you'll begin to gather test numbers. Let's take a look at some of the standards, and what test results mean under different testing conditions. CARBON MONOXIDE IN AN OCCUPIED SPACE Reactions to various...

Carbon Monoxide Goes to the Amusement Park

If you've been through an NCI CO seminar, you've been taught that when performing carbon monoxide analysis on equipment, CO should be stable and that rising CO is the most dangerous of all CO patterns. On the other hand there are isolated cases where CO is not stable...

Calculating Heating Energy Savings

Calculating Heating Energy Savings It is safe to say 98% of equipment in the field is underfired at factory settings, making that equipment quite inefficient. It can also be said that two-stage equipment can be even worse, especially in "low-fire" mode. To tune this...

Beyond the Venting Tables

There seems to be a lot of confusion about how to size a flue or chimney when multiple appliances are vented together in the field. Let's take a look at two flue sizing methods that you can choose to apply. The first utilizes the published industry venting tables. The...

Barometric Damper Test and Installation

We've just released a new Barometric Damper Installation Procedure that will enable you to easily determine how to diagnose the need for, and install, barometric dampers under a variety of field conditions. Let's walk through a typical multiple vent scenario...

Barometric Damper Adjustments – Gas vs. Oil

Traditionally, our industry is familiar with setting up barometric dampers on oil equipment, but not gas. This might be because the set up for each is very different. Oil Set Up When setting a barometric damper on oil equipment, a draft gauge is used and a draft...

AFUE: Does it Represent True Performance?

When selling heating equipment, odds are most of us are discussing rated efficiency and how much fuel our customers may save with higher rated equipment. Much of this savings will be based on the listed AFUE (Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency) rating of the...