Gadgets and Tips for Improving Project Quality, Production, and Profit
Date/Time: Tuesday, March 28, 2023 - 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM
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About
While working for another company in 1987, Bob Krell started doing duct cleaning—poorly.
At the time the work generally consisted of hooking up 100+ feet of vacuum hose from a truck to a system, blowing air in the vent openings, and hoping for the best! This limited approach seemed better suited to cleaning out clients’ wallets than the actual ductwork in residences, let alone commercial buildings. WTF? There had to be a better way to do this.
Could you really suck a high-rise building clean from a purportedly powerful truck on the street by running hose up the outside of the building? Yeah, there was actually a presentation at the first NADCA conference in 1990 explaining how to do just that. Portable duct vacuum equipment? Unheard of at that time. Rotary brushes with air assist--who needs that with a 20,000 cfm truck? Internal video inspection and robots? This isn’t Star Wars, son!
Having run a chimney sweep business to fund his Electrical Engineering Tech degree prior to that, it made sense to incorporate some of that knowledge into finding better ways to clean HVAC systems than using 1930s technology. Bob had already been using nylon chimney brushes on poly rods from London, chimney video inspection cameras, and a bunch of other repurposed technologies to speed things up and improve duct cleaning quality for years before he attended that 1990 conference in Phoenix.
Fast forward 34 years—Bob has transformed from a relatively inexperienced, unconventional, young tech-geek, show-off, to an experienced, unconventional, older tech-geek, show-off! For the first time ever (sort of), he will unequivocally open his bag of tricks to share many of the duct cleaning gadgets and hacks he came up with over the years. You won’t want to miss this informative and entertaining session in the Big Easy with one of the modern industry’s pioneers!