William Monk

I studied computer engineering and economics at UC Santa Cruz. Neither is an obvious route into heating and air conditioning, and for a while I did not think of them as connected at all.

What changed my mind was watching how the trade actually makes decisions. A great deal of residential HVAC runs on rules of thumb — a ton of cooling per so many square feet, replace what came out with the same size, add refrigerant until the line feels cold. Those shortcuts were reasonable approximations decades ago. They are still in daily use, and the houses they are applied to have changed enormously since.

An engineering background makes that hard to accept, because every one of those shortcuts has a measurement that would settle it. Static pressure tells you whether a system can breathe. A temperature split tells you whether it is doing work. A load calculation tells you what the building actually needs. The instruments are not exotic and the methods are published. They are simply skipped, because skipping them is faster and nobody checks.

The economics half of the degree explains the other thing I care about. Most of what looks like an equipment failure is a decision made years earlier — a system sized by guess, a duct run nobody balanced, a leak topped up rather than repaired. Those decisions were cheap at the time and expensive over the life of the equipment, and the homeowner is the one who pays the difference without ever being told there was a choice.

How that shows up in the work

We measure before we quote, and we write the numbers down. If your airflow is restricted, you get the static pressure reading. If your ducts leak, you get the leakage figure before and after. If a room is uncomfortable, you get its share of the load next to its share of the air.

It also means telling people when the answer is no. A meaningful share of the homes that ask us for a panel upgrade do not need one. Duct cleaning is genuinely worth doing under specific conditions and largely pointless outside them. A denser filter on a system that cannot move air through it makes things worse. None of that is good salesmanship and all of it is true, so it goes on the website.

Commercial VRF

I hold factory certification on the LG, Mitsubishi and Daikin VRF platforms, which is the part of the business I find most interesting. These systems report a great deal about themselves, and a fault code is a starting point rather than an answer.

We take on commercial VRF regardless of who installed it. A lot of buildings end up with systems whose original contractor has moved on, and the manufacturer certification is what makes it possible to read them properly rather than guess expensively.

Areas I work in

• • Residential and commercial HVAC
• • Variable refrigerant flow systems
• • Load calculation and system sizing
• • Duct design, leakage and air balance
• • Combustion safety
• • Indoor air quality and ventilation
• • Building electrification