for strictly steam, strictly the best news from AHR

for now I don't want to overwhelm Jay Vath but give him access to our blue sky on what is needed on a steam control. They are only going to make one and i would like us at the table before they roll it out, instead of afterwards to complain about what it doesn't have.

They might need real world test bed eventually although i think getting a wish list on the wall is a good start to open some dialogue. they are surely going to blackboard and bench a bunch of ideas before they go out in the field to test.

one area of really important feedback is going to be good sensor and good sensor location understanding the need for precise signal but some extent of environmental isolation depending on how tolerant of the steam environment it can be made. in my active testing of setups i've been going combat with a 4 foot dead end 1" tree to a brass adapter for the plastic hose output to my UEI meter. That seems to give very reliable results through a half dozen cycles without carrying damaging system environment to the 'digital gauge', i.e. test meter, but don't know if eventual humidity occupation of that pipe spells long term path for damaging temps or moisture or how resistant a sensitive transducer can be. I should side by side that with a loop and calibrated instruments to see the relevance the loop for readings. It could just be lousy controls that have lead me to believe for years that i'm not reading well through loops because theory says it should work. Maybe there is a relevance of the crosssection of the loop with various real world frictions involved. These are the kind of things that could be figured out on a bench for a while but then confirmed in dirtier real world installations.

There has not been a lot of engineering around this question with most vapor pressure gauging and testing equipment I've found being developed to monitor airflow in ducts rather than aimed at our uses reflecting higher temperature and humidity.

Then there is the question of the marginal cost for additional features, e.g. maintaining condensate temp. sensor with addition of pressure sensor, stack sensor, or others desired, and outputs e.g. how many stages are ideal and what is the marginal cost of including 3 or 4 if the vast majority of utilty is 2. desirability of variable outputs for modulating either inputs or loads. for that matter, what about one or several inputs for conditioned space to inform the algorithm. And what will be the addressable parameters.

and then there are the market questions. Without putting competing distributors up here down to the dollars and cents level, i have more macro dollars and sense reality in mind that this control is currently cruising a grand. Really hard to justify in most applications I service for what it currently does. With it being redesigned, if it can replace the function of other controls, e.g. especially vaporstat, and has utility across a range of small to large residential and commercial applications could there be enough of a unit market to make this a more universally affordable approach – a lot more features without pushing the price up and even the potential for moderating pricing a little if the installed base starts to increase significantly.

One can envision there might be a small market for larger buildngs that might get caught up in some kind of carbon control regime, or god forbid they actually can do the math and would see comfort and energy cost savings. But I'm hoping to avoid this constant tug of war between simpler less fully effective 'residential' controls and orders of magnitude higher priced 'commercial' pitched strategies, because steam is a small enough niche to begin with.

Also a fully featured control could inspire more work on staged fire or staged boilers or moderating fire that have never really entered the realm of possibility for the 'everyday' steam market.

brian