Bigger must be better.

RonWHC

Last week was not a good one. Had a customer call several weeks ago & ask for a boiler price. Told him we were filled up. Not this season. He asked for a recommendation for another company. Gave him one.

He called back last week. Had 4 quotes. All over the place. I agreed to look @ the quotes & the job. The actual installed radiation was 113 mbh. Heat loss 102 mbh. 4 offices.

He had a quote for 136 mbh net. The closest. 175 mbh. Not too far off. 388 mbh. They must not have heard that he was not heating the 1st floor Pub (based on 3,000 sq ft?). 220 mbh. Based on the 10,000 btu per radiator method. Sent him a note w/ the numbers. No one would move. The kicker. 2 of the folks had (supposedly) measured the radiation. He will go w/ the 136 mbh folks. Excess btus up the stack.

Got a call from a another customer. I had quoted on a boiler for a 1-pipe steam job. 12 apartments. Measured the radiators. Came up w/ a 19A-4 Smith. Oh yeah. Needed vents. Particularly @ the end of the main in the crawl space. The competition quoted a 6 section. Because the old 5 section never heated the place well. Bigger boilers are always better than proper venting. They beat me by $1.5 K. Went down $500. Not good enough. Another 250+ mbh up the stack.

Climate change, anyone?

S Ebels

The rockheaded owner

Will pay that $1,000 difference over and over and over again. He's gettin' what he deserves.

EBEBRATT-Ed

I agree. This goes on all the time. When I was in school they made us do heat loss and heat gain calcs the long way by hand. Thank God they did. This was long before computers. Back then people had an excuse, it took some time to do it right. (not a good excuse but an excuse.)

Whats their excuse now? Slant Finn will give away their software which will do fine on the average house, and with all the computer programs available it's just lazy and stupid not to do a heat loss.

They just won't spend the time. I will admit trapsing through a building and measuring windows, radiation and removing outlet covers to check insulation is time consuming.

How about ballparking the thing based on experence and the old boiler? Then if you get the job do the heat loss and put in the right equipment. Tell the owner you wil give him back the difference if smaller equipment will do the job. Problem is your prie may be to high.

Better yet. Talk the homeowner into having a heat loss done under a seperate contract (and get paid for it) It is for their benefit anyhow. Then everyone can base there bids on the same number.

frank_25

presentation

Whenever I, in representation of the company I am employeed by, have made presentations of the company work in meetings with Boards, manageing agents, G.C.'s, Engingeers, Architecs and owners, we have pics, naturally. Sooo, why not on the smaller jobs? A picture is worth a thousand words. [where did I hear that before?] That tool has worked more often than not. The pics posted here on the wall are usually something out of the ordinary. Why don't we take pics of the everyday jobs? The pics I've posted haven't been of the single family house job. The so called cookie-cutter jobs. Our bread and butter jobs. My pics put the iceing on the cake. bwdik?ijap

Steamhead (in transit)

And

however much fuel we have left, will run out sooner because of this and many others.

You can just hear these oversizers- "I'm a heating man and I'm OK, I sleep all night and I work all day!" (with apologies to Monty Python, yes I stayed up late to watch it again).

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John L

sounds familiar

If this scenarion has happened to me once it has happened a 100 times , so I have developed a plan of sorts to counteract it. First of all let me say that some people are as dumb as a box of rocks and no matter what explaining I do they will not be moved, so to those folks I say "Soynara" and I leave them my card. Also if they are not willing to listen now, they will not listen later when they have a problem and they want to pin it on me. The way I see it is that all these systems somehow all worked perfectly b4 I came along, and then mysteriously when we change them, and something happens, they always say it worked ok b4.When we change out systems, we own all the problems, past, present and future, so we have to be careful of what we install, or we will live with the results.

For those other folk who will listen, I approach it from a an economic and "light" technical perspective. I have some documentation with me from the D.O.E. website that explains about oversizing- that gives me 3rd party credibility and kind of removes the emotion of having me be the expert. I also show the HO my charts that I use when calculating the boiler size, that way they get a "feel" for what I am trying to accomplish and for me.
When there is sizing issue and I am having difficulty communicating my thoughts to them- I simply stop there and say to the HO that the system has a quantifiable volume of water that needs to be heated and that we have pre determined multipliers that we use to find the size of boiler that will heat that volume. We will use the boiler that matches closest to that.

When I get this far, I ask them a very simple question that has worked every time I use it. The question is "Does that make sense to you" because if it does we can move on tto the next part.

The next part is the money, and most building owners are saddled with high operating costs particularly energy costs.

When I have come across boilers than are oversized, I ask to HO if they think that a boiler that is oversized will cost more to operate that a properly sized one. If they understood the first part of my sizing using the charts etc. they usually will say yes.

I try to attach a $ figure to every thing that I do, so that when a price difference occurs I can point to the additional cost I incurred to install the sytem the way I did.

As i indicated not all Ho's will buy into the idea but will and that's what matters.

Go ChiSox