Best Of

Keep an eye on Ebay, you can get some good deals on some Very Nice pneumatic test instruments.

Don't buy the first thing that you really want. You'll undoubtedly find a better tool for less right after you click Pay Now.

Actually if you can find some older Honeywell/ Johnson Controls / Siemens / Landis and Gyr or really old school MCC Powers catalogs they had some basic stuff in the "engineering" sections of those. I think most of those can be found in PDF form on the interwebs.

Aside from that some basic things to understand would be spring ranges of dampers and valves. A lot of systems that I used to deal with relied on the using spring ranges of a heating or cooling valve manipulate the overall control. Heating NO open valve 3-8 PSI Cooling NC valve 8-13 PSI. The concepts of direct acting vs reverse acting.

The use of EPs and pressure regulators to drop the house or main air of a system to facilitate night setback. Reciever controllers and pilot positioners are good to review.

Some basic tools are small allen key thermostat wrench, squeeze bulb with gauge for testing and calibrating. Good analog pocket thermometer, good side cutters, hemostats for pinching lines off. Grainger should have a few kits or Kele is a good place. I'll look to see if I have any old documents floating around

I've noticed now it by default has some sort of filtering turned on that seems to filter out the items that people don't quite know what they have so they haven't described them correctly so they don't have insane prices.