BINGO!!!

Luckily I passed on my first attempt!! I can't say the exam material was uber tough, but the questions were super tricky. It was easy to get confused and have to read the questions over and over again. I finished with about 50 minutes left and don't think I could have sat in that room for another 5 minutes without going nuts. I was so anxious to see if I had passed at the end that it reminded me of when the NFL Super Bowl XLII Champion Giants' defense held off the New England Patriots (pronounced pay-tree-oughts) at the end of the game. Intense! Almost a little.... TOO MUCH!

Well, it was good to get it over with before the baby comes. Now we'll just have to see how easy/hard it will be to build green.

Yardwork

With the help of my Stepdad, Oscar, Jenn and I reworked our mulch beds and put down some new mulch in the front of our house. Jenn added some color near the mailbox and Oscar and I added a plastic border around the mulch bed near the house. The old mulch used to spill over everytime it rained so that's why we added the new border. I think it turned out nice, but we're all pretty sore.

Go green!

Go green, buy a growler!

64 oz of hoppy goodness!

CES Brunch 2008

Me and the boys from Baskervill were invited by ACES to a half day seminar to learn more about the CES group.

We don't work on many projects that involve mechanical penthouses but it was cool to see how everything gets packaged together. The two other seminars were on ERVs and the Fan wall technology. I hope to work with more of these products in the future. Both have LEED potential and just make sense to use. Esp the fan wall... this thing is SWEET! (There are alot of cool features available on the fan wall so I recommend checking out the CES group website) I got to check out the trailer that was at the seminar and stand inside of it while it pushed 24,000 cfm. It was so quiet that you could have a regular conversation without having to yell. (Disclaimer: the fan was running at only 0.03 inH20, it may be slightly louder at higher pressures) The ERVs will be tricky to get on a job without being VE'd (value engineered... aka cut from the budget because the owner is too cheap to do job right) but I think we can make it work on some of the larger jobs we work on. We'll see.

MOJITO!

Headed up to Minnesota to check out two of McQuay's factories. The trip was made possible by the boys from ACES, Scott and Patrick.

Day 1
I pulled an all nighter the night before flying back from Colorado so I was a little tired by the time we rolled into the hotel. We met up for drinks before dinner and I was the last person there. Everyone was pounding drinks when I got there so they were starting to feel pretty good. Dinner was next door in the Mall of America. Good eats, for sure. After dinner, we headed back to the bar for some more drinks. Stan continued to drink a different kind of liquor with every drink he ordered. Little did we know how much we'd be talking about one of Stan's drink selections, the now infamous MOJITO. There were endless amounts of references made the next day to Stan's mojito. Stan was a good sport about it and took it in stride.

Day 2
Getting up and out of the hotel by 7:30 was a little tricky. Breakfast was a blur and the 45 min ride to the factory provided some much needed sleep. After watching a quick video in the McQuay office, we headed into the RTU factory. WOW! It was amazing to see how these units are built. We got to make a loop around the factory and see each phase of the process. We even got to check out the fairly new "Maverick" unit. They were testing one unit before shipping it out and I could barely tell it was running while standing beside it. It's a pretty stout unit. After lunch we headed to the other factory where they make the air handlers. We got a better look here how the coils are made, each fitting at a time. The coolest thing was seeing the the foam filled panels and getting to hold one. It was heavier than I thought and super strong. I hope the rest of the industry makes foam inject panels a standard in the near future.

All in all, I was impressed with the quality of the McQuay units. I definitely feel comfortable specifying McQuay in the future.