Ice Building Up On Coil

This is usually caused by the coil being stopped up with little air flow going through it. The remedy is to have the coil cleaned by a professional.

Another reason may be that the unit is low on freon. Again, you need a professional to check the system and determine if the unit's charge is low, or if the coil needs cleaning.

For the upstate South Carolina area contact Hughes Enterprises LLC for a HVAC specialist to check your unit with no service fee!

Since 1988

After receiving my Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science in 1987, I have had a very diverse and wonderful time working in the HVAC industry. I have many Certificates under my belt and lots of time spent in many places working on many different systems.

In 1988 I went to work for a distributor of Landis & Gyr Powers controls. At this time, the Personal Computer was becoming a household item, and the HVAC control industry was getting on board. The programming language was very similar to the VAX 11/750 that I learned in college, so the transition was very easy. What wasn't easy was knowing how the HVAC equipment worked, or what it even looked like. I didn't know the difference between analog and digital at that time, much less the difference in wiring in series or in parallel.

For the first two years of my career I spent many long hours correcting mistakes, and talking on the phone to my engineer to learn the simple basics. Or so I thought at the time. In 1990 I went to work for Honeywell, and they opened up a whole new world of HVAC equipment and controls for me. I went from just using a laptop to commission a simple air handling unit, to wiring thermostats, programming chiller plants and boiler plants, graphics programming, and several varieties of other related tasks. My job was to terminate wires, and verify proper control of the equipment, whatever that equipment was. The latest and greatest versions of the systems that I was putting in meant that Tech Support was of little help, because it was so new. Again, long hours of learning, but I enjoyed it.

After four years of deadlines on several projects at a time, and spending many days out of town, I went to work for a local distributor for Barber-Coleman. Here I was an Engineer, Start-up technician, Service Technician, and Tech Support. For about a year, it was nice being home every night and working on projects that were simple. Most were small commercial installations.

Then in 1995 Johnson Controls contacted me to be a Project Manager over two projects they had going on in Greenwood, SC. Fuji Film, Inc. had just finished building the Quick Snap Camera facility, and was in the process of building the Color Paper plant. My responsibility was to manage the commissioning of the Quick Snap plant which was starting up at the time, and to manage the installation and commissioning of the Color Paper plant.

I actually ended up going to work for Fuji at the Color Paper plant, and have since been moved into the site wide maintenance group handling the (you guessed it) HVAC systems across the site. I am still at Fuji, and every now and then I dust off the old systems skills and get to work on new projects that require me to use the various skills I have learned over the years.

In 2006 I started Hughes Enterprises LLC to perform HVAC service and sells. It seems that no matter how long I have been in this career, I still work long hours and learn alot!

Since 1988 I have seen equipment go from big and complex, to now people buy digital thermostats at Lowe's that do the same tasks that we use to spend hours programming in the past. Residential units have gone from simple relays that filled an entire section, to a small logic board that controls the whole unit. You no longer need a Computer Science major to program the chiller plant; that's been done so all you need to do is input the parameters, and off it goes.

There are many more examples of how this industry has changed over the years, but I am not wanting to write an encyclopedia, just a blog.

Please join in and send your ideas, experiences, technical information, solutions, and other pertinent data.

Thanks,

Tom Hughes.