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Before you start your next do it yourself project. Listen to this, you got this is on the air you got this is hosted by ABT plumbing electric heat and air owner, Andrew Twidwell, and Rosalie Brown with a helpful hand. Here are Andrew and Rosalie.
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Hi this is Andrew Twidwell, owner of ABT plumbing, electric heat and air. Once again with the show, you got this, the show of DIY do’s and don’ts. And I’m zooming in with Rosalie Brown. I’m here in lovely Auburn. And it’s a we pre record this as most of you know, and it’s raining. I’m so happy. It’s been raining a lot. So it’s just been fantastic. You have no idea how amazing it is to like, not have to worry so much any longer. Yeah, I know. I know. Fire Season is not over by any means. But it’s definitely taken the the fear level down considerably. Right.
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And probably helped the air quality I’m guessing.
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Oh my gosh, yeah, ever since the fire happened, and we’re just not getting that smoke any longer. I mean, it’s a little when I drove in today, I checked the index, and it was like 72 or something. So it’s moderate, which, you know, I mean, it was in the six over 600 and Grass Valley and Auburn for quite a while here and it’s just been miserable, scary, scary. And it just puts you in kind of a does not know great place. You know, it’s weird. It’s weird having that small that smoke and you can’t go outside and you go outside, you get that sore throat or even I found I’ve been we did training for two days. And even in the training even though it started raining. Being indoors, I was talking a lot. And I could feel my throat because it’s still smoky. Right. And when it’s really bad, it’s you really feel it. You really feel like your throat. So yeah, as you know, yeah. So it’s it’s nice to take that edge off of everything. And also it’s nice. It’s been nice and cool. Actually, I’m like wearing a flannel and jeans and it’s kind of different, and it’s gonna heat up again next week, so, but it’s nice to have a little bit of a break. I’m pretty stoked. Because it’s scary living in Nevada County.
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It is really. Yeah, it’s scary. I know. So we’re so like, I think I’m in think I’ve started fall maybe I mean, you don’t know. But we’re kind of into Sweater Weather down here. Derek dare I say it. Like the high today is going to be 70 Something so I’m kind of good zone. Right? But it’s it’s crazy because I’m distracted because you know it’s parked outside my house right now. I’m gonna tell you even look at my social media today. Alright, not there is an Oscar Meyer wiener mobiel Park. Oh my gosh, am I so I’m like, I’ve long heard of these things. I’ve often when I was a kid, I thought that was magic. Now as an adult, I mean, I see it through a slightly different lens, but not that different.
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body on top of a car truck. Yes. So pretty
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cool, though. And then there was a person, there’s a person dressed up as a mustard. Little, you know, a thing of mustard. So I was like, okay, that it doesn’t get any easier. And I love it. And I’m here for it. And salary LA. Yeah, so my day started off like, ah, like, this is what I came here for handing out hotdogs or something. What was the deal with Oscar Meyer? carbene? Um, I don’t know exactly. I wasn’t allowed behind the red, the red wood thing, but I did go. I did get a stocking. And I do get some pictures. But I wasn’t invited to the MDP event. Right. Somebody’s having a hot dog today. But it also to be clear. Was their film crew there are no, no and it was fairly early though. So like, I don’t like my you know, Ostermeier hotdogs until like lunchtime. It was like, it was like 839 o’clock. I was like yeah, so I had a
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great breakfast food bill do in a pinch. But yeah, yeah,
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if I did, but it did make me think about like all the cool. Just weird stuff you see out there made me think of like the what were those called those derbies, boxcar derbies. Was that what they were, you know, extra nice, yeah. Okay. So it made me think of that how like these these people are like mastering these amazing like, you know, fabricate all these cool things. And I was like, yeah, yeah, that’s, it’s just I don’t know, it’s a little
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race in that soapbox Derby here in Nevada City with years ago when it was still going on before. rich guy rich got kind of burnt out and a little tired and couldn’t find a way to fill the shoes for promoting that thing. That was fun. We did it for a Rotary Club, and I was dressed as a duck Back driving the minecart scared the heck out of me because I couldn’t really see. And you’re going pretty fast down past the park, down the road. It was the steering was a little squirrely because it was just like a shaft that went vertically out of the bottom of the cart. And you had this wooden, like almost wooden steering wheel that kind of turn the wheels. Yeah, it’s probably a little terrified. I use the brakes a little more than I should have. I didn’t when
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I know that’s good. Hey, if you didn’t faceplant and get gravel in your face didn’t even happen? You know, come on.
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Yeah. But same sort of thing. Right? That. Yeah, making these cool things out of a vehicle. That’s fine.
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Yeah, so sorry. I’m a little I’m a little, you know, like, who were all this world is wondrous today.
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Well, I am, I’m feeling the same way. Because we got this great weather. I’m stoked. I’m actually, you know, like, excited that it’s overcast and cool. As opposed to I do like the sun. And I do like a nice day. But this is a nice change right now, this time of year. So speaking of a nice change, here’s a good segue. You came up with a topic because I’ve you know, as you so eloquently put it earlier, you don’t even get back to me until like, once we’re like talking to each other on Zoom about a topic. So no, I didn’t I kind of looked over it about five minutes before the show. So So there’s two
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ways for me as a PR professional to frame that. Okay. One is that, you know, you can count on me, I can, okay. And the other is that you know, of all the fires in your life, I am I handle my staff, so you don’t have to work
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together. Like, right, I was dealing with personnel this morning I was dealing with, where are we going to? We have to buy a bunch of equipment right now for the upcoming cooling season or heating season. Where are we going to put all this stuff? Because we got some major price increases coming down the pike? Yeah. And managers meeting? Yeah. When stuff like that. Yeah. So moving in, to this to this topic, because it is, you know, we are in the changing weather. So we call this kind of our shoulder season, because you may be turning your furnace on in the morning, because it’s 50 degrees out, you may not be and we didn’t turn it on this morning ourselves. So it’s kind of quiet. But you start thinking about, you know, heating the house, and how can you do that. And one of the really cool things that’s happened over the last, I mean, I guess this is these, they’ve been around for quite a while, but they’ve really hit them, they really hit their stride in the last 10 years, is mini split systems. And we get a lot of questions about them. So with that, we kind of go over some of the pros and cons. Because like everything, you know, whether it’s a tankless water heater or water heater, or a conventional split system, or package unit, or a mini split for heating and air, there’s going to be pros and cons for everything. So some of the ways that we kind of go down this, this path of Thanks for finding this article, because it’s peaks and some stuff for me. There’s some really cool things that come along with owning that. Installing a mini split. That’s so so let’s go back a little bit. What is a mini split a mini split is it’s a split system. And it’s small, because, you know, think of what a normal conventional system would be a conventional split system where you have the compressor sitting outside. And then you have the furnace and air handler inside and you have a coil. And the air handler or furnace is what moves the air through the ductwork. So there’s two components to that split system. A mini split is just that same sort of version, except it’s a heat pump in cooling unit together. So it still has the condenser and compressor that goes on the outside. But as opposed to having a furnace or air handler that goes into a central location and duct duct work that goes throughout the rest of the house. You have typically you’ll have a head or a mini split head unit that goes in specific rooms that you’re trying to heat and cool. So there is no ductwork. So one of the big benefits is we lose a lot of energy through the ducts because most of the time we’re running ductwork through unconditioned space, either in a crawlspace underneath the house or in an attic. When you’re trying to cool the house. I’m sure you’ve experienced this during the middle of the summer. You turn the AC on in a conventional system and you’ve got the duct work running through the attic and the draft and all the grills and vents are in the ceiling. You get this big blast of hot air because those ducts have been sitting upstairs in a space that is hotter than the sun sometimes it feels like when you’re working in it. It can be you know, 130 150 degrees up in there. And it has to It has to expel that hot air before it can actually start to cool it. And then the air goes through it, and you’ve got some heat loss or cooling loss because of the inefficiency of the ducts. And let’s be honest, when we install a new system, they’re pretty much airtight. But we’re still allowed a little bit of leakage. The systems I was putting in 30 years ago, oh my god, the amount of leakage that we’re getting away with was ridiculous. I mean, so much leakage. So so very inefficient. Whereas a mini split, the heating and cooling unit is literally in the room, and thin refrigerant lines go out to the compressor. So there’s no ductwork to lose efficiency, you just have this one little copper line that goes out, you have a line set that goes out to the compressor outside, so you’re not losing any efficiency. So that’s, that’s one of the big things. The other nice thing about it is you have we call it zoning, an HVAC system, or HVAC industry, where you have, you’ll have a central system, and you have different thermostats in different rooms. And you can have dampers that turned on and off that zoned the system. So you can have one room that’s warmer than the other, they’re fairly sophisticated, and fairly problematic. And can be, can be a little bit of a chore to install.
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And there’s a lot going on a lot electronics going on with it. So you know, we’ve had some systems where we’ve had to go out in service that other people have installed and literally had to replace everything, the entire system intercommunicating system, many splits are don’t have that issue, because they have the the head that goes in each room. It’s already it’s already zoned. So I can like we’ve got them in our office. Right now we’ve got one in each office, we’ve got one of the main room and we’ve got one of the break room. So if no one’s in the break room, it’s not on, I don’t even have my system on right now. Because it’s kind of you know, we’re in the shoulder season, no need to turn the HVAC on, we have it on the main the main room. So it’s automatically zoned in with that with the zoning, that means you’re not heating or cooling those rooms that you’re not utilizing. So you can save a significant amount of money, we had one customer, when we first started going down the path of mini splits. This is probably about five years ago, we’d worked on it before, but we weren’t really installing a lot of them. We installed the 30 SEER Fujitsu system, which is the top of the line system per customer. And she was able to cut her heating and cooling bill by half 50% savings. And she had an old package unit that was very inefficient. But one of the issues. We’ve also had some some customers that we’ve installed the systems and they have not realized any savings. Because of the fact that they’re heated, they’re still utilizing it as if it was a central system and heating the entire home and not using it as a zone system, cooling heating and cooling the rooms that they’re in. So you can save a substantial substantial amount of money if you’re using the right way. So that’s one of the cons, you know, you’re not heating and cooling the whole house. To really make it work. Like it’s supposed to, you want to be heating and cooling the rooms that you’re in. But you can have but the nice thing about that is, I don’t know about you, but if you live with another person, most people experience heat in a different way. And cool. Like my comfort level is much different than my wife’s, I’m really happy that we just drove across country and in my truck, I’ve got it zoned. She can have her side a lot harder than I can have mine. Even when I’m just in a T shirt and shorts, and she’s got jeans and a sweater on. She’s still cold. So she turns it way up. And the same thing goes is true in our house, you know, she likes it at like 72 to 74 degrees inside the house and I like it around 7170. But you know, I’m looking at husband, we leave it at 72. I also I don’t mind the heat, when it’s hot, I’ll let it go up to 80 degrees and she doesn’t like it over 80 degrees. So you have that ability. Like if you’re not both in the same room, you can actually you can actually tailor that room for your own comfort level, which is pretty darn sweet. That’s luxury to the nines, right? It’s pretty amazing. You’re awfully quiet.
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I like to you’re on you’re on a roll. Well, you’re
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not talking too fast. Am I?
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Now your intro I gotta tell you though, your intro is always very fast. But once you get into this, and you start applying it to like how it affects the common person, you know, like how the system could work in an average house and like why, you know, really zone specific zone heating or cooling is so amazing. I mean, I look at it and go, Okay, I’m with you. I’m flowing with you. I get it, you know, so you’re in a good place. I try not to jump in and divert you because you are Mr. Squirrel. So you’re never had them here man
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manager’s meeting this morning. That was one of the complaints. Why do you squirrel again? You never squirrel? Yeah. shiny object.
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So, okay, so let’s talk for a minute about my, my, my wife. So so that’s my so that’s my my question is like so I do have question. So if I were to be looking at, you know this system, right is this going to be comparable in cost as me installing a brand new kind of condensed like a big system like this is a relatively smaller
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if you’re if I’ve had, if I’ve got a house, it has a conventional system already installed and they want to go for mini splits, it can actually cost more. In some situations, if I’ve got a if we’ve got to do a bunch of work on the ducting, then it starts getting to parallel. Or if I’ve got a brand new system that I’m just putting in and that there’s nothing there, you can save some money putting in a mini split system. We’re also you know, as we move forward with a lot of the climate regulations, we’re moving away from gas as a heat source. So this kind of falls in line with that. So it’s a very green product using electricity. And I’ll say something else on this topic, because this is something I just heard the other day I was watching. I was reading an article about a lot of the new regulations and things. One of the benefits about using electricity for a lot of people is going to be a leveling off of the peaks and valleys of the what we’ve experienced with natural gas and propane costs and heating, well, if you do have heating oil, because those are commodities that fluctuate dramatically. So you can have one winter that you’re paying twice as much as you’re paying last year, because of the fact that the natural gas or propane has gotten has gone through the roof, electricity tends to be pretty flat, the cost of electricity doesn’t really fluctuate as much, because it’s not tied to that commodity as much. So it can be really it can actually level out your, you know, your your bills, which is pretty nice. But you know, that being said, it’s still, it still can be using electricity can still be more expensive. If you’re not using the system correctly, if you’re not heating and cooling specific rooms, if you’re trying to heat the entire house like you would with a conventional system. We’ve seen people’s bills not go down, have actually gone up a little bit. So, you know, there’s pros and cons with everything right? Was there gonna get into efficiencies zoning? Oh, yeah, we should talk we should hit on this too. Or they talk about humidity. Something I found out when I in my travels is a lot of people a lot and a lot of locales, you turn the AC on just to keep the humidity down, even though you don’t necessarily need to cool. It’s not really an issue for us. Even though we live in a dry climate. I was just in a training session this weekend, this weekend, this last the last couple of days. And the trainer was like, what you don’t have mold in the system. I’m like, No, we really don’t have mold in our system. He’s like, every system you open up on the southeast and East Coast, you’re gonna find more than the ductwork. The issue so which is great. But that’s one of the benefits of mini splits is there’s no ductwork. But so we get the question all the time, like, I just bought this mini split system, I installed it, can you come in and charge the system. We used to do that. But it kind of bit us in the behind a couple of times where the people that installed it really didn’t know what they were doing. And then came back to us and said I’m not going to pay you for all the refrigerant that was released into the air because, or, or the nitrogen, whatever we were using to try to find the leak even though they installed it, so we just stopped, we stopped doing it. So unfortunately, and I’ve had a couple people call us and like I’ve been trying, I’ve been calling around all over the place trying to get help with the system I installed. This is really not a DIY thing. I know they’ll say you know, you can get like a Mr. Cool on Amazon or offline, or online. Rather, if you know what you’re doing, go for it. But if you’re at all skeptical about your abilities to do it, and you go in and buy this and start to install it, just be aware of the fact that you may not be able to have any buddy that will be able to come and save you. If you if it’s not functioning the way you thought it shouldn’t be functioning because most companies once once we touch it, we kind of own it, you know, at least that’s what we do in our company because you know we’re legit and we’ve been around for 21 years and we Actually, you know, find, we take pride in our work. And, you know, if we touch it, we’re going to take care of it. But if you if you install that you didn’t really know what you’re doing and a licensed contractor and really have no other than no knowledge of how to install it other than YouTube, you can mess these things up pretty bad. And we’re just not going to touch it, no one’s going to touch it, we’re going to install a whole new system for you. That’s the only way around it. So be aware of the fact that this is I know, I’m going over some beating this to death, but it is really not a DIY project. Just not
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right, even though, right, even though we’re talking about on DIY show, like if you, if you were to put it in yourself, what you’re what you’ve essentially said is that you can assume that you’re gonna have to maintain the risk of maintaining yourself, right, because most professional companies
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and getting it right the first time or the second time yourself, right, you can’t just go to the corner store and buy refrigerant, you have to be you have to be certified, we have to all our guys that deal with refrigeration refrigerants have to have a license to deal with refrigeration. And you as a homeowner probably don’t have that license. So if you Nic align or cause a leak when you’re installing it, because a lot of them come pre charged, no one’s gonna come and try to save you on that one. Yeah, you might be able to find a chuck in a truck kind of contractor. So one bad outfit that might be looking for a few extra bucks, but it’s gonna be rough, it’s gonna be hard. So with just with that knowledge, I wouldn’t if it was me. And to be honest with you, even myself, even knowing what I’m doing. And I’m a licensed contractor, I went in some ways by myself, I’d have my installers do it because they know way more than I do, because they install them all day long. Every day, you know, year after year, I have installed one of the things in 20 years. So anyway, those are some pros and cons of these things. And, you know, just a reminder, we’re moving more into an electrical, non gas environment where you know, California is the it’s 2025 is
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I think it’s 2035. Actually 2035. Well,
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we’re moving away from all Yeah, I can’t remember all the numbers.
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I mean, that’s what the agenda is right now. But what we can, what we can agree, and that’s going to shift because it’s 2035 is like a long time for now and a lot of legislation from now. But we were talking earlier about kind of the the kind of interest growing in cars that are part electric part, get, you know, all of these hybrid vehicles fully moving into electronic vehicles. So I’m just going to plug this right now. I don’t that was your plan. One of the cool things that we were talking about is that abt is set up to help install Evie charger, installation stations in your home. So
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if you have an electric car, and you need a charger, or if you’re thinking about getting electric car and like, Oh my God, how do I charge I think we can actually come in and install a charger for you. And it’s super cool. And it’s in its electricity. So it’s again, not a DIY thing. It’s it’s pulling a circuit from the from service panel. And dedicated circuit that dedicated to 20 line for your high speed charger. We can do that. So if I can get any help, you can call us at five three to 230 9092 230 9092 You can find us on the web it easy zbt.com. Like us on Facebook, we got a lot of interesting stuff. We’ll probably have some stuff about mini splits, who knows? On our Facebook page. And we have some funny stuff where at least I think it’s funny. And yeah, and thanks for listening and we’ll catch you guys next week. Have a great weekend.
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Bye. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Rosalie. Now let’s get that project started. You got this. We’ll be back next Friday morning at nine o’clock on Cancio Newstalk 830
Transcribed by https://otter.ai