The I Love CVille Show With Jerry Miller! - The Kyle Miller Show: Jeff Perry Of Piedmont Radiant Joined Kyle Miller

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Jeff Perry, Owner of Piedmont Radiant, joined Kyle Miller live on The Kyle Miller Show! The Kyle Miller Show airs live Thursday from 2:15 pm – 3 pm on The I Love CVille Network. Watch and listen to The Kyle Miller Show on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, iTunes, Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, Fountain, Amazon Music, Audible and iLoveCVille.com.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the show. I'm your host, Kyle Miller. Thank you for joining us today. I'm on a mission to bring you stories and insights of extraordinary individuals who have paved their own path to success and in doing so transformed their lives and their communities. But before we meet our guest today, today's show is brought to you by Apex Allies, your key to slashing costs and boosting productivity. With Apex Allies, you gain access to exceptional virtual assistance at half the usual cost of what you are paying, transforming how you handle administration tasks. Say goodbye to overwhelm and hello to more time focusing on business growth.

Apex Allies offers the support you need without the financial strain, making it easier to prioritize what truly matters. Visit GoApexAllies.com to evaluate your business efficiency with Apex Allies. With that said, our guest today, I'm excited to have you on here, owner, operator of Piedmont Radiant, Jeffrey Perry. How are you doing today, sir? Pretty good. Awesome. Awesome. Listen, I've heard about you from other guys that are in the industry. Hey, if you need work on boilers, if you need work with that, you are the man to talk to. So I'm excited to have you here in the show today to kind of give us your knowledge, why we use boilers, how it all operates, and just kind of like your story into this biz and how you've been

so popular here in Charlottesville. Yeah, sometimes too popular. I bet your phone rings off the hook. Unbelievable. Well, thank you for coming on. You're welcome. No problem. So to get started, Jeff, and we were kind of talking before the show started. How did you get into this business? Like, you have a bachelor's degree in engineering, so obviously you're pretty good with numbers, right? And you own a radiator. But you've got a story. Like, you've been doing this for a while. How did you get into this?

Did you just by happenstance, or how did that happen? So I was born and raised up in New York. Um, what's referred to around here as a damn Yankee. Um, I am third generation in his business. Okay. So my grandfather started the business in 1927. My father worked with him all his life he when he came back from World War II 1945 he opened his branch of the business in the same town

I worked with him most of my life as a kid as a matter of fact I have floating around somewhere I have a little magazine that was produced by a company called Myers Pumps. They still manufacture pumps today. And they produce four issues a year. And in that issue, they always highlighted a supply house. And they also highlighted a contractor that was in the area of that supply house and they also highlighted a contractor in that was in the area of that

supply house well in the third quarter of 1954 they highlighted my father I have a photograph in that magazine of me in a custom-made pair of coveralls at the age of 18 months, quote, helping my father. Right. So I can actually tell people that I've been in this business my entire life, and I can prove it. Right. So I've been doing this forever.

I obviously took time off to go to college. You're right, I got a four-year engineering degree. I also got an attached degree in math. So math is fine. Don't ask me to spell stuff right. Right. And after college, I didn't quite get the job. See, I was never going to do this.

It was like, I do not want to do this for a living right so I got an engineering degree and I had a goal but when I got out of college I didn't get the job I wanted so I went to work for a company that

offered me a job called Osmos and it gave me the ability for a company that offered me a job called Osmos. And it gave me the ability for a couple of years to travel the country because Osmos goes into a town and they either work for a power company or a telephone company and they inspect and treat telephone poles. So the foreman goes into a town,

hires a crew, does a certain amount of work, and then leaves. The upside is I got to travel all over. The downside is because you're only in a town for two or three months, finding a place to live is a pain in the butt because you can't sign a lease. Right. So as you get to be with them for a while, you got to pick where you went. Well, I was enjoying myself. I worked in Maine in the summer times. And then I got, I did North Carolina, South Carolina. I did some work in West Virginia.

I did a job in Roanoke with another foreman. It was a very large job. So as I got to be over two years with them, they asked me where, you know, Maine is only spring, summer, early fall. Right. Then they move you. So they asked me where I wanted to go. Well, I had never at that point in time in my life ever been to Florida. So I said, I want to go to Florida for the winter. Okay. Well, we've got a really small little job for you to do

down in South Carolina. And then when you get that one done, we'll pop you down in Florida. So I did the job in South Carolina. And as I was finishing up, they contacted me and they said, well, we've got a problem. We've been after this power company in Louisiana for years. And they've never let us do their work. We finally have them agreeing to do the work, but here's the problem. They want the foreman to have a college education. You're the only one we've got. So we're sending you to beautiful, scenic

Fort Polk, Louisiana. Yeah. Yeah. Ugh. And what time of year is this? Summer? So this would, oh, no, no, no, no. I would have been in Maine in summer. So this would have been late fall.

Okay. Maybe early winter. So I went down. I didn't want to, but I went down. And it was, I mean, it was off. It was rainy season. There's a whole story behind that. And I ended up saying, no, this is not what you told me.

I'm now like two and a half years into this company, and I just said, I've had it. I really need to do something with my education. And so I left. So I literally one day called the boss, and I left him a message and said, hey, your truck's in the parking lot of the grocery store and the key's under the front fender.

I towed my car everywhere I went. So I grabbed my dog, climbed in a car, and took off. Well, I happened to know on my way back to New York, I happened to know that the foreman for that same company that I worked with in Roanoke was living in Lovingston. He was doing a job for the same company in Lovingston. But the thing is that he had found himself a girlfriend, moved in with her, and when his job ended, he was quitting.

He was staying here. Yeah. So I passed, I was going to go say hi, so I passed her on away, visited, and, you know, big old farmhouse, five bedrooms, two spares. He said, stay a while. So one week became two, became a month, became two months. That was a very generous girlfriend.

Yeah. She was a down-home country girl. She was absolutely fine. Yeah. So, you know, I was beginning to run out of money, and I really didn't want to leave. I really liked it down there. So he said, well, stay. Go find a job.

So I didn't know much about, you know, I'm in Livingston. I don't know much about Charlottesville or Lynchburg, and Livingston's dead center. So I literally took a coin out of my pocket, and I flipped it. And I said, well, heads, I'm going to go to Charl of my pocket and I flipped it. And I said, well, heads, I'm going to go to Charlottesville and find a job. And tails, I'll go to Lynchburg. Not knowing the real difference in the cultures and the type of cities these two cities were. Charlottesville won.

So I drove up here and found a plumbing company down on River Road, a company called Brunkby Cataclysm. They're based out of Newport News. And I walked in and interviewed, and they hired me on the spot, and they were so excited because I was living in Livingston, and this was the year that the first set of condos were being built up on Wintergreen. Yeah. And they had the plumbing contract to do all the plumbing. So they said, this is great. Don't bother coming to the office.

Just drive up to Wintergreen every day, which is great on my car. Worked with them. Went from the plumbing department to the service department, and within a few years became the service manager. Fell in love with the secretary, which I know we're not supposed to say. So finally, talking with my dad, he was still running the family business up in New York. He was getting to a point in time that he needed help. And I kind of wanted to go home.

And I kind of realized, well, maybe I'm not going to do the whole. I mean, not that the engineering and the math was not benefiting me. Don't get me wrong. Right. But I began to see that maybe this was really where I belonged. So I grabbed the receptionist by the hand and dragged her to New York. She was born and raised down in Radford, so she's a Virginia girl. Gotcha. And went up and bought my grandmother's house.

So the house from the day it was built was still in the family. And went to work. Now, up in New York, everything up there is hot water heat. Okay. So, you know, maybe a few warm air furnaces. Okay. I mean, back then, no heat pumps. Right. Heat pumps were.

There's some there now, but that was a thing that hadn't really gotten up there yet. But everything was boilers, hot water. And that's what our family did. Okay. Plumbing and hot water heat. But everything was boilers, hot water. And that's what our family did. Plumbing and hot water heat. So I knew boilers. I mean, that's all I knew was as far as heat goes was how to design heating systems, boilers, and how to repair them, how to service them, the whole bit. And finally, my wife, after being up there for 10 years, so this would have been approaching 1980, 81. Okay. My wife said, I really would like to go back home. So, you know, I thought, well, okay. I mean, if I have to go anywhere other than my hometown, I sure don't mind going back to Charlottesville.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's kind of a no brainer. So I said, okay, I understand. I'll tell you what. We've got to figure out, if we do go back, we've got to figure out what we're going to do about a house. So I made a huge mistake. At the time, I didn't know that. And I told her, go down and visit family. Go down and visit friends. Just go down and see what the housing market's like. Right. Okay. So she goes down, visits, comes home a week later, walks in the door. No hello.

No hi, hon. Walks in the door and says, I bought a house. Okay. Not what I had in mind. Wait, she didn't call you and ask? No. She just was like, walk in the door, bought a house. Bought a house.

We have to go down and sign papers and all that. Fortunately, she did okay. And that's back when you could afford to buy a house right uh and what we did because we weren't ready to come down right away so we turned it's a split level so we turned the basement into a little apartment with its own entrance blocked off the upstairs and rented it to a professor yeah which was good because he at least treated the house okay so i didn't move fast enough for her i i thought i mean she was happy now for a while we had a house she knew it was going to happen sooner or later and i finally i said okay i i got you so i already know what i'm

doing i've got multiple people down here saying if i ever came back, they were ready to hire me in a heartbeat. Right. I know what I'm doing for a living. What are you doing for a living? Right. So she's an appraiser. She was doing appraising in New York. She had gone to NYU to their appraisal school.

She's very good at what she does. And I said, go down and see if there's, can you get a job at an auction house or something? Yeah. So, okay. I should have learned from the first one. She comes down, visits for a week, stays in her little apartment, comes back home. Hi, hon, I got a job. I start in two weeks.

I love how your wife is just, we're getting it done. We're making it work. This is going to happen. Well, by coincidence, the professor had gone and bought a house. So the whole house was empty. So I said, OK, I'm now being forced to move this along. So what we did is we moved half our stuff down she moved into the upstairs she got a job she got a

part-time job at the University and a part-time job at an auction house here in town back then called Harlow Powell auctions and I said well okay well I've got to figure out what I'm I've got jobs I'm in the middle of. I've got, you know, I just can't leave. So we kind of lived like that for about eight months. I would come visit. She'd come visit. So finally I started to close the business down.

Yeah. Because I have a half-brother, and he wasn't quite ready to do this yet. He was still too young. Yeah. So I started, finally closed it down, moved down here in 82, and went to work for another company. And we opened a hydronics division, hydronics being hot water heat.

Okay. The term that we use. Were you like some of the first ones in town here to start that? Yeah, there's only per se one other company in town that specializes in it. Okay. And the founder of that company has, they're still around, but he's kind of gone on his what he's not there anymore um i'm still even to this day i'm about it yeah now there are plumbing companies and other people in town that dabble okay and unfortunately not unfortunately for me, but unfortunately for the business and for the customers, I make, I get a lot of jobs and make a lot of money fixing other people's stuff.

Yeah. Because hydronics is not just stick some pipes together and you're good to go. Right. There's a lot to it. For a while, I was teaching some hydronics at k-tech oh wow okay to the adult education yeah the yeah the guys that are working for someone and have to get their journeyman's card and stuff so i was doing that for a while um but so i worked for them for a while and a friend of mine who worked there left and went to work for a very large mechanical company here in town, Southern Air.

They're based out of Lynchburg. They have 700-plus employees. They do commercial. He went to work for them and kind of convinced me to go with them. So I went and work for them and kind of convinced me to go with them. So I went and worked for them. I soon found out, and what drove me to find out that this was not my thing, was that I was one of the project managers for the Paramount Theater. Okay.

Which, at the height of that job, we had 55 there wow it was unreal and it was too much stress for me yeah i'm more residential like commercial right um and really the hydronics is where my real interest lies so after the paramount theater um I said, that's it. I can't do it anymore. Right. And one of the reasons I left is that to really take you on a side trip,

in 1990, I've always been, ever since my father introduced me to sports car racing, I have always been a sports car racing fan. Mm-hmm. And we followed it everywhere. We would, from up in New York,

we'd go up to Watkins Glen. We've been to the 24 Hours of Daytona and a lot of the big races. Well, I found out that there was a gentleman here in Charlottesville that raced. And I finally got introduced to him. And we talked for a while, and then he went his way, I went on mine. And before he drove off, he said, maybe I'll call you sometime. Well, he didn't take my number or anything. I think it's just a polite way of...

So one Saturday, I'm at home. wife I'm outside working my wife comes out and says uh there's a guy on a phone something about racing I said okay so I picked the phone up and he said listen I'm going to be out at the race shop getting the car ready for this upcoming season uh why don't you come out and hang out you can help me i just left all the tools where they were laying for whatever it is i was doing and i took off and went to work for him for the day yeah um it was actually his way of kind of seeing whether i knew my way around a screwdriver. Right. So after that day, he said, well, if you'd like, here's the deal. You would be a volunteer.

You wouldn't be paid. But I foot the bill for everything. If we go to the races, I transport you. Depending on where it is, I fly you. I put you up. I feed you. So everything is covered. Right.

And you get to join us. I jumped on, I mean, I'm a race fan. I jumped on out like a heartbeat. Right. So I worked for him as a volunteer. So that was only weekends and race weekends, stuff like that. So I was still working. Finally, when the Southern Air and the Paramount Theater ended, he offered me a full-time job, paid as the crew chief for the team.

So for two and a half years, I was the crew chief on the race team. He didn't race the whole season. He was not a professional driver. He was a very good driver, but he wasn't pro. We got to go to races and I got to work in the race shop every day of the week and got paid to do it.

I was in like freaking heaven. What happened was the rules changed. The car that he had, these are one-off cars. These are custom carbon fiber and all kinds of high-tech stuff. For him to continue racing, he would have had to have gone and bought a new car at Big Bucks. So he decided to stop racing. So at that point in time, I knew I had to go back to what I knew.

So I opened in 2007. I opened Piedmont Radiant. So that was all, that was your, the journey. That's the journey to get here. To have your, this is now in New York. Was it your company in new york you were the so primary or you were kind of working with your dad on that well i was working with my dad but my dad had the way we operated my dad had perry plumbing and heating i had highland heating and cooling up there i did air, which wasn't very much. Right. You installed windows?

Huh? You installed windows? Windows? Yeah, in New York. So Highland, so the area that my hometown's in is called the Hudson Highlands. Okay. So I called it Highland Heating and Cooling. Got it.

So technically we had two companies. Right. But we worked together. Gotcha. So we jokingly refer to Piedmont Radiant as the southern division of the Perry family business. My brother, my half-brother finally, he ended up getting into it too. So he was up there working with dad still running up in

new york he's still he's still in the business um my father continued to work uh my my father finally retired at 86 okay he my brother would send him on little piddly jobs as he got older. He would have a helper with him to drive, and my father would go in and fix sinks or faucets and fix a toilet, that kind of stuff, to give my father something to do. So finally, in 86, he said, that's it.

Gotcha. So in 2007, you're starting Piedmont Radiant. Yep. You've already got a lot of contacts, obviously, in the area. A lot of people knew you already worked for a couple companies. So I'm sure it kind of was like, oh, Jeff's on his own. We're going to just call Jeff. Let me put it this way.

From day one, I never advertised. Never advertised. I have never advertised. I mean, that's saying something. You're almost 20 years in. You're 17 in right now. To having no advertising. You don't have a website. I don't. You've got to look up Piedmont Radiant to find his number. You've got to Google or something, I guess. You found it. Yeah, there's no Facebook. There's no anything. I don't.

I'm old school. Look at me. I'm 70. I'm going to be at it for a little while longer. I'm not going anywhere. But no, I don't do the whole social media and the whole website. I'm kind of of the opinion is the last thing in the world I need is more work. Right.

I mean, I've always stayed small. I've never wanted to be overly large because I've seen too many people, both small companies up in New York and people here, that grew and grew and grew. And the owners just ended up having ulcers and headaches. And, I mean, I know a couple of my friends up in New York that had a business, one electrician. He ended up folding up because he just couldn't do it. He kept, I mean, he ended up with 20-some employees, and it was like, you can't take time for yourself.

So I'm small. If I want to go do something. Now, obviously, you've got guys to help you, right? You have a couple of employees. I have a couple of employees. Yeah, that you can do stuff. I've got one young kid that's pretty good. He's getting there, yeah.

It's nice because this, I mean, with this industry, right, and radiant heat. Tell me a little bit about radiant heat. So radiant heat is simply, there's a couple of kinds. You could refer to someone that has a boiler and a whole bunch of cast iron radiators. You could call that radiant heat because those radiators are radiantly putting heat into the space. Right. But true radiant heat is installing piping, tubing in a floor. I mean, you could do ceilings and walls too,

but 98% of what we do, it's in the floor. Okay. And you put warm water through it it's not it's usually not very hot water okay which is one of the benefits you don't have to heat the water very hot okay and it the objects in the space. Okay. Furniture, walls, ceiling. So, which then warms the air.

Okay. And one of the benefits of radiant heat is the fact that with conventional heat, you get temperature stratification so if you were like this space here we've got 20 foot ceilings yeah so in the middle of winter real cold outside the heating system here going full bore if you were to take a thermometer and look at the temperature of the air at the ceiling right and look at the temperature of the air down the ceiling, and look at the temperature of the air down here, that would be much warmer. Right. Because hot air rises.

With radiant heat, it's the opposite. Okay. The temperature of the air up at the ceiling is less than the temperature of the air down here. Okay. And, of course, whenever you want to heat a space, you're only interested in the first six feet because that's where you are. Right. You don't care what the temperature is up there.

Right. Except when you're wasting fuel by heating all that air. Right. With radiant heat, that's one of the real benefits is the fact that it's very gentle. The air doesn't dry out. Mm-hmm. unlike blowing air. In our business, anybody that's in the hydronics business that's been in it a while, refers to blowing air heat like furnaces and stuff.

We refer to that as scorched air. It's our little nickname for a blowing air system gotcha because it really dries the air out yeah with radiant doesn't do that okay so it's a matter of having a boiler that heats water and you pump the water through this tubing that is in the floor if the house is i I mean, the ultimate system is to have a slab on grade, so a concrete floor, no basement, no crawl,

and the tubing is in the concrete. Okay. And you heat that water to a temperature that makes the floor toasty. What typically is that temperature? Of the water? It will vary depending on how cold it is outside,

but just as an average, you're looking at only having to heat water to 100, 110 degrees. Okay. Because I have a boiler at the house, and I have a thermometer on it, and I think it does like 140. Does that sound right? That sounds low.

Because you told me before we started this, you told me that you had what we refer to as hydro air. What it is is a coil or like a radiator that's in your duct work. The air blows over that coil and blows air out the grills. Okay. 140 is low. Now, you may have looked at the temperature gauge on the boiler and only caught it when it was at 140. That might be it. But on the average, a hydro air system like what you have, the temperature of the water is going to be 170, 180.

You know what? Maybe I have seen 170 before on it. Maybe that does ring a bell. So the downside of that is that it takes a lot more energy. If you had a, the example I use to my customer is if you had a cubic foot of water. Right. And this cubic foot of water was at 100 degrees. And this cubic foot of water was at 170 degrees.

And you wanted to raise them both 10 degrees. It takes a lot less energy. So a lot less natural gas, propane, oil to heat the 100 to 110 than it does to heat the 170 to 180. Makes sense. Even though it's only 10 degrees. They're both going up the same amount, but it's a lot less. So with radiant heat and us only heating water to 100, 110, 120, it doesn't take as much energy.

Yeah, so you burn less fuel. So the savings in regards to the cost of that is much less then. Correct, and with the boiler technology we have nowadays, it's even more cost-effective. Yeah, you were telling me. It's crazy how it goes. It can adjust by the temperature. The way the boilers work nowadays, and this is code, by the way.

So back in 20, maybe 15, the Department of Energy passed a code that said that all boilers sold in the United States has to have the capacity to do what's referred to as outdoor reset. Now, outdoor reset is nothing more than the fact that the boiler looks at the temperature outside. Okay. And depending on how cold it is outside, it varies the water temperature.

Because if you think about it, you don't need as much heat in a house if the temperature outside is 40 and you're only looking to take the chill off the house then if the outdoor temperature is zero and the wind's blowing right so the way that this outdoor reset works is thermostat your thermostat calls for heat the The boiler says, oh, I need to turn on. How cold is it outside? Well, the temperature outside is 40. I'm only going to heat the water to 100 for a radiant system. So let's stick with radiant system.

I'm only going to heat the water to 100 or 90. All of a sudden, the sun sets. Cold front moves in, the air temperature outside starts to drop. The boiler sees that and automatically starts raising the water temperature going out into the floor. So that by the time it's 10 degrees outside, the water temperature going into the floor is now 120 which means you're producing more heat so instead of keeping the house set well 70 degrees right it's gonna it's gonna keep the house 70 degrees it's still gonna keep the house at 70 but it's gonna it's going to keep it at a even temperature during that whole time as well is what i'm understanding because it fluctuates it yes and it's going to burn as little fuel as possible because here's the other flip side of the coin at the same time it's looking at that outdoor temperature

and saying oh well i only need to heat the water to 100 degrees it then turns the flame on and just like a gas cooktop okay i know how you can take a gas cooktop and you can turn the dial and you can go from simmer to high. Yeah. So the amount of gas you burn and the size of the flame changes. So does the boiler. So the boiler says to itself, okay, well, I need to heat the water to 100 degrees. It turns on, and it looks at the temperature of the water leaving the boiler. And it only burns the exact amount of gas needed to hit that number.

Okay. So the flame inside the boiler modulates. It varies. Gotcha. So that it'll burn the smallest amount of gas needed to make sure that we still get that 100 degrees. Right. Now, there are houses, obviously, that have more than one thermostat.

Okay. So let's say you have a house that's got three thermostats, so three zones of heat. Right. They all work independently. So what happens is the first thermostat calls for heat, and the boiler turns on, looks at that 100 degrees going out,

and sits there, and it burns at a really small flame, and it meets its requirement. All of a sudden, a second zone calls zone calls well the boiler can see that because all of a sudden now there's more water going through it right the water temperature drops so the boiler says oh something's going on so it automatically raises the flame so that now both zones are getting that 100 degree water. Okay. And are there, like, is there, like, flanges, or is there gaskets that open up, or valves that when that second, when you have those?

There are, so there's a couple ways of doing that. Depends on your philosophy, how you like to do heat. Yes, there are valves. You can do, they're motorized shutoff valves. Okay. They're referred to as zone valves. Got it. A lot of people have them.

I don't like them. Okay. It's a preference. Okay. Do they work? Sure. Is there an issue with them? Not really.

Okay. What I like, and there's a couple reasons why. I don't know how technical you want to get. But what I do is I install a separate pump on each zone. Okay. So zone one calls, that pump turns on. Zone two calls, that pump turns on. So each pump is sending water only to that zone.

I got a visual on it. So you have your main trunk line here and your zone coming off this way, another zone coming off this way, another zone coming off this way. You have the pump on the intake valve, right? You're pumping out to go out to the zone. You have it there. And so when that kicks on, more flow of water pushes through and that's it. So each pump will send water to where it's designed to go to. Yeah. That's interesting. The reason, a quick version of why I don't like zone valves is the problem is when you have, say, three zone valves, you have one pump pumping through those zone valves. Okay.

So the issue, unless you install, oh, I could go on forever. Unless you install a variable speed pump that knows that a zone valve has opened, you've got a pump that just pumps at one speed, which is most everybody. Okay. First one opens up, it sends a certain amount of water through. If another one opens up, well, now you're robbing water because now you've got to ask that pump to pump through two zones and not just one zone. Okay.

So the flow will vary to each zone. When you have each zone. When you have each zone have its own pump, it's always consistent. Got it. That makes sense. So that's my preference, but you'll find a lot of guys around here, more of the guys that dabble in boilers,

will install zone valves. Gotcha. They're easy to buy. They're easy to install. um uh just not my thing the so radiant heat you like that heat over any other heat what about cooling what about so oh boy you're getting into a topic here. So here's the problem with radiant cooling is out there. Okay. If you lived in Phoenix where you didn't have issues with humidity. Okay.

Go for it. Got it. You can do it. So you run chilled water through that same tubing. Got it. It's the condensate that's going to cause all of these. And it absorbs the heat. Mm-hmm. But we're in Virginia. Yeah. We have to deal with the capital of the United States.

We have to deal with humidity here. Right. So the problem is that, and the problem that I've had with it, and maybe the controls are much better now. I don't dabble in radiant cooling. I just... So the problem that you can potentially have is that if you're running chilled water through the floor, if you mistakenly hit the dew point, you're going to have a lake. Got it.

Because all the moisture in the air, because you're below to have a lake got it because all the moisture in the air because you're at you're below the dew point it's going to condense and just end up raining in a house got it so you have to so the issue becomes yes you can do radiant cooling but you also have to have some form of a system to now dehumidify the house at the same time. What is so... That's not a good option here. Noted. I get it. Not to me. Yeah.

I'm sure there's somebody out there that will argue this whole point with me. Okay. Yeah. But your point is very... Makes sense. And if you understand dew point and where moisture creates

and how water even just destroys all houses uh correct it's like it is the life and the death of everything living in this world and non-living because water is the most damaging thing to houses that there is oh yeah i mean a tree doesn't do near like a tree could fall in the house and a water could still do more damage than a tree. And I've seen it happen. Now, the tree happens a lot faster. Give water some time and it'll cause major issues. What kind of material with the radiant heating? I've done some reading on it in regards to what's the best material? You're saying the concrete, that's the best material to do it in?

Can you, in retrofitting? Yeah, so you can retrofit. But the real simple explanation of why concrete is so good is because if you think about it, if you had a house that had a four-inch concrete slab, whether it's your main floor and it's a single-story house on a slab, or whether it's a your main floor and it's a single story house on a slab or whether it's a basement you got four inches of concrete and that tubing is in the concrete if you heat up that four inches of concrete that is just one big ass radiator right if the heat turns off it continues to radiate right you have a power failure it continues to radiate. Right. If you have a power failure, it continues to radiate.

Right. For hours. Right. So it's the best material. However, retrofit. You've got a couple ways to retrofit. So I'm doing one. I'm quoting one right now and what it is it's an existing house

up on wintergreen they are they've almost gutted the place including they took up the flooring they left the sub floor so the plywood down got it all the hardwood or whatever was there i don't even know what was there is gone they want me to add radiant heat to the main level right which is a wood structured floor so i can't we're not putting it in concrete right so the way you do it is there are several products in the market that allow me to put panels on top of the subfloor. Okay. Depending on which product, the panels are either half an inch thick or five-eighths of an inch thick. So it's not very deep. Right. There are grooves in the middle of these products that you snap the tubing into. The best product is a product made by a company called Rehau. They're pretty much the people that invented PEX tubing, PEX pipe. German.

They are the company I use for all my radiant products. They make an extruded aluminum panel called RAU panel, R-A-U panel. And it's a six-inch wide aluminum panel. It's got feet and a groove in the middle. So you lay that, then you lay a two-inch piece of furring strip, then another panel, then another furring strip, then another panel. The furring strips are there so that your contractor, your flooring people, have a place to attach their flooring. You run the tubing through the grooves back to the boiler,

back to the distribution area, and then you put your flooring on top so that's a retrofit system but to do that retrofit the floor the existing floor has to be gone right everything's going to raise up it and everything's going to raise up either half or five eighths of an inch right so as i tell everybody that wants to look into this kind of thing i said you've got to worry about what are you putting in for flooring? What steps do you have? Your first step's going to be off now. What door sills do you have? So these are all things that have to be worked around with the contractor.

The other method, which is a little bit less efficient and much more of a pain in the butt for me, is to put the tubing on the underside of the subfloor right the way that's done is there are also aluminum plates they're just flat plates with a little bump in them where the tubing goes yeah you screw them to the bottom of the subfloor and then you put the tubing in the groove. Got it. And then you insulate.

Okay. So the aluminum plate touches the bottom of the subfloor. Yeah. And transfer its heat. So you can put two of these. If you have a standard construction house where in most construction, the floor joists of a house are 16 inches apart. So two of these go in a floor joist space. Got it. And same thing, hook it to a boiler and off you go.

So do you think the engineering degree and the math that you did with all the calculations that you probably have to run for this to make sure it flows? Don't get me wrong. Engineering-wise and mathematically, I'm overqualified for what I do. Okay. But don't also get me wrong. I use this a lot.

Yeah. So it was not... I've never considered it a waste of my parents' money. So... Right. No, it's just interesting. I find it fascinating, especially because you've got to figure out how much flow goes to this room, what's the cubic feet of this size room.

Exactly. I mean, it's one of the things when I – so for a while I taught at KTEC. Okay, yeah. I had an agreement with another person that taught. So this is night classes, one day a week. They're three-hour classes, and they are, these students are employed, and they're there to get their journeyman's card. Right. Well, the book that was being used had a one or two chapters on hydronics. The guy I was working with, the guy, he was a friend of mine. He works in the HVAC industry.

Right. He taught, and he knows very little about hydronics. So we approached the KTEC, the Albemarle County, and got me to teach two or three weeks of the semester of the hydronics. Got it. So one of the things we talk about among many things that I touch the basics. Right. Because these guys, these kids are not currently in the hydronics business.

They're in the HVAC. But you never know, A, you never know what they're going to end up doing for their life. And B, you never know when they're going to walk into a house and see a system. So one of the things I talk about is, well, how big does a pipe need to be to move a certain amount of BTUs, a certain amount of heat? How much flow can you put through that pipe? be to move a certain amount of BTUs, a certain amount of heat. Right. How much flow can you put through that pipe? And it goes on and on. Right. I mean, so, and how are old systems designed?

Mm-hmm. Because there are a lot, there are a lot of old hydronic systems in this town. Yeah. Now, Park Street, Locust Avenue, they're everywhere. I've been in a lot of them. I've seen them. Big old cast iron radiators. And we pull them out.

Well, you know, I once told a customer, I got a short story about that. So I get a phone call from someone that has a big old farmhouse out in the country. And he wanted me to come out look at his system so i go out and i meet him and we go down the basement there's a big monster old boiler and a whole house full of big cast iron radiators right so he asked me he said so i want you to give me a quote i want you to rip all the radiators out i want you to give me a quote. I want you to rip all the radiators out, and I want you to rip the boiler out, as much piping as you can get to,

and just take it all out. Yeah. I said, why? Well, my wife doesn't. They take up too much space. I said, this is a, you know, early 20th century, 1900s farmhouse with single-pane windows and, you know,

who knows what insulation. Right. What are you going to do oh we're putting in heat pumps yeah and i'm thinking no no so i said you sure you want to do this he said yeah i mean we're going to do it so i said all right i'll quote you he says so what would what do we do what are you going to do with the old radiators? I said, well, do you have an old barn or something? He says, well, yeah, I mean, I do.

I said, well, why don't we store them in the old barn? He said, well, why would we store them? I said, when you find out your heat pumps are not going to be comfortable and you're going to want to put all this stuff back into your house again. I never got the phone call back to do the job. So. back into your house again. I never got the phone call back to do the job. So, well, it is what it is, right? He'll learn. Just FYI, my house, 1880, old farm house,

hard pine floors. I had an old boiler in it, and I was like, I can't do this. Put two heat pumps in it. My first winter there, my electric bill was $970 one dollars one month and I said and it was cold in the house and I was like mmm we gotta do something about this so that's when I put the boiler in with the forced forced air and so the radiators are not hooked up just the forced air with a boiler yeah yeah though I would like to have put some radiators in because I think it would be better. But I appreciate you, Jeff, coming in, sharing your knowledge,

sharing about the radiators. I've learned a lot in this, and I need to have you come out to my house. But you didn't learn to keep your radiators, did you? No, I just learned too late. That's what it was. I learned too late because it had all the pipes and everything. I cut all that stuff out and ripped it out. But that's unfortunate.

You won't be the first. I get a lot of phone calls from people that ask me if I want their old radiators. Yeah. Well, again, thank you, sir, for coming in, sharing the story. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. Piedmont Radiant is your business. Look them up.

He doesn't have a website. But if you look him up on Google, his phone number will pop up and you can give him a ring. He is the guy to call, obviously. He's taught everybody around here even what radiant heating is. So give him a call, check him out, and until next time, thank you.