Wrapped this two weekends ago and I am still coming down off it. 1978 switchgear feeding half a hospital campus, bus insulation failing, no replacement parts in existence. The plan: **Weeks 1-6** — ...
Passed the practical and got the card today. Five years, two contractors, one very long stretch where I thought about quitting. Things I got wrong that cost me time: **I was afraid of looking stupid...
Customer has a 1974 house on a 100A service, wants two 48A chargers. Standard load calc says upgrade to 200A, which means a new service drop, a meter main, and a POCO coordination window that is curre...
Fleet truck, intermittent crank-no-start. Maybe once every ten days. Driver says it cranks normally and just does not catch, then twenty minutes later it starts fine. Two weeks of it sitting in my ba...
First full cooling season with A2L equipment in volume and I want to compare notes while it is fresh. What the training covered fine: mildly flammable classification, no open flame, sensor and mitiga...
Doing a surgery center addition and training two guys who are both good brazers and both new to med gas. Watching them work clarified something for me about how this gets taught. They can both braze ...
Just finished a critical data center fiber run, 62.5/125 OM1 (existing infrastructure, not my choice). Testing with a Fluke OptiFiber Pro. Some channels testing at about 0.5dB above calculated budget,...
Six months of daily use, mostly commercial service work and motor troubleshooting. Short version: it changed how I approach a service call, and I did not expect that. **What it does that other clamps...
Plant office wing, 120/208 wye, one 20A branch circuit feeding a row of workstations. IT is complaining about intermittent equipment resets, always in the afternoon. Measured N-G at the receptacle: ...
Bidding a new restaurant build, 120-seat, full commercial kitchen. AHJ requires an indoor grease interceptor. PDI standard says to size based on drainage fixture units and flow rate, but the owner's a...
This is a personal situation but I think a lot of apprentices face this. I had a JW ask me to do a task in a way that I thought was wrong (not dangerous, just not code compliant based on what I've lea...
This is a consistent problem at one client's conference room. When a presenter closes their laptop lid to set it aside (keeping it plugged into HDMI), the display goes blank and won't come back withou...
2100 sq ft, 2019 build, decent envelope, blower door at 3.1 ACH50. Ran a full Manual J with actual measured infiltration, real window specs, and the true orientation. Comes back 27,400 BTU sensible at...
Deployed nine Teams Rooms for a client this quarter. All certified hardware, all on the Microsoft-published bill of materials. Three of them had problems that the certification does not catch, and all...
We've started seeing more rejections on duct detector placement from our local AHJ. They're citing NFPA 72 section 17.7 more aggressively and rejecting installs that were passing 5 years ago. For tho...
Independent transmission shop, four bays, three techs plus me. Raised the door rate from $138 to $163 in February. Parts margin unchanged. Lost two long-term fleet accounts over it. Kept everything e...
Small church, 250 seats, problematic acoustic space (hard walls, low ceiling, parallel reflective surfaces). Two Shure SM58s on stage, 4 JBL SRX815P tops. The system rings out around 2.5kHz no matter ...
New 4-bedroom, 3-bath build. Uponor PEX-A throughout. Central manifold in the mechanical room feeding 22 runs. Manifold is a Uponor Stainless Steel with individual shutoffs on each port. Every run is...
Laying out fiber infrastructure for a new 5-building campus, max run between buildings about 280 meters. We'll be running 10Gb Ethernet now with plans to upgrade to 25Gb or 40Gb in the future. OM3 is...
Experiment: for one year I ran M12 only for service calls, M18 stayed on the van for install work. Wanted to know where the line actually is rather than carrying both everywhere. **Where M12 was comp...
Hospital job, 340 drops of Cat6A. Every drop certified and passed on a DSX-8000. Customer stood up 10GBASE-T and about thirty ports in one area are negotiating at 1G or throwing CRC errors. The drops...
110.14(D) says calibrated tool, manufacturer's spec, no wiggle room. Curious how many of us are actually doing it on every resi panel versus doing it on commercial and eyeballing the house work. No j...
Running a Dante network on a Cisco SG350 managed gigabit switch. 14 Dante devices (mix of Yamaha QL5, Shure MXA, BSS BLU-100, Crown amp rack units). Started getting intermittent audio dropout across ...
Notifier NFS2-3030, retail strip center. Intermittent ground fault on NAC 3. Clears itself. Three previous visits by two different techs found nothing. Pattern I finally noticed going back through th...
Testing season is on and every year I watch newer testers make the same handful of mistakes. Here is what my process looks like now. **Before you touch the device** - Photograph the tag and the namep...