The Choice Mechanical team has put together helpful articles, guides and resources for business owners facing commercial HVAC challenges. If you have questions, need an estimate or are facing an emergency situtation, please do not hesistate to contact us.
A commercial boiler low-water cutoff has one overriding purpose: stop heat input before an unsafe lack of water exposes heated surfaces. When it trips, the interruption may be inconvenient, but the control is doing the kind of work that protects pressure parts,...
Every pound of clean condensate that returns to a boiler plant brings back two things the facility already paid for: treated water and heat. When that condensate leaks, flashes from an open vent, backs up behind failed traps, or never reaches the receiver, the boiler...
Boiler water may look clear while it is depositing hardness on tubes, carrying dissolved oxygen into pressure parts, foaming into the steam line, or concentrating dissolved solids beyond the treatment program’s control. By the time scale or corrosion becomes visible,...
A steam trap is small compared with a boiler, but a failed trap can change conditions across an entire steam system. One failure may release live steam into a condensate return. Another may hold condensate inside a coil. Across a facility with dozens or hundreds of...
A burner can produce heat and still be operating poorly. The flame may look acceptable through the sight glass while excess air carries energy up the stack, carbon monoxide rises at one firing rate, draft changes as building exhaust starts, or a dirty heat exchanger...
A leaking boiler tube is the end of a failure process, not the beginning. Plugging or replacing the damaged tube may return a boiler to service, but it does not explain whether scale, oxygen corrosion, poor combustion, low water, erosion, or thermal stress will damage...
Yes, many older commercial buildings can be retrofitted with heat pumps. The harder question is whether a particular building can be converted without creating new electrical, comfort, ventilation, or peak-heating problems. A commercial heat pump retrofit is not a...
A server room can be cool at the wall thermostat while equipment at the top of a rack is already receiving overheated air. The room-average temperature may look acceptable, but recirculation, blocked airflow, a failed fan, or loss of cooling capacity can create...
A make-up air unit can be running and still fail its job. The fan may turn while the building remains negative. The burner may fire while discharge air stays too cold. The BAS may show the outdoor-air damper open even though a broken linkage leaves the blades nearly...
The capacity printed on the existing rooftop unit is not the building’s load. It is the size of equipment someone selected—perhaps twenty years ago, before new windows, LED lighting, added ventilation, changed tenants, or a warehouse conversion altered how the...
How to Prevent Building Automation System Alarm Fatigue A building automation system is supposed to help facility teams identify problems quickly. But when the BAS generates hundreds of repetitive, low-priority, or unnecessary notifications, alarms can start having...
When one office is hot and the room next door is cold, the central air handler is not always the culprit. In many commercial buildings, the last device responsible for controlling airflow to each zone is a variable air volume box. If that VAV box cannot measure...
