Learn how you can earn $30,000/year renting your RV There appears to be some concern about what is really going to happen when the new, residential unitary air conditioning efficiency regulations go into effect later this year so we put together a list of questions and answers to help HVAC contractors keep current on what they need to know about these new standards. I heard the new regulations were being challenged in court.  Will they get thrown out entirely? Although there are some legal challenges to the exact implementation date, the next round of efficiency standards for residential air conditioning is still expected to apply to air conditioners and heat pumps installed on or after January 1, 2015.  And, even if the challenges are successful in delaying the enforcement date by a few months, contractors should still try to become familiar with the structure of the new regulations because that is not likely to change.  For example, there will actually be three, new minimum efficiency levels with the new regulations because the standards for air conditioning are different for the three specified geographic regions.  

For more information about the actual regulation you can click on the following link: In 2005 there was a large build ahead of old, low efficiency systems.  Will there be a build ahead like this in 2014? In 2005, there was a build ahead of 10 SEER systems just prior to the 2006 implementation date.  It is unlikely that there will be a build ahead of that magnitude since the move from 13 SEER to 14 SEER in 2015 will be less challenging than the 2006 move from 10 SEER to 13 SEER and the cost increases driven by the 2015 change will be much smaller.  Also, since 13 SEER AC systems can still be sold into the northern region, there is less stress about having unsalable, low efficiency inventory around after the new regulations go into effect. What product changes can we expect from these new regulations? The most significant product change in 2015 will involve moving all split-system heat pumps in all regions to the new national heat pump efficiency minimum of 14 SEER and 8.2 HSPF. 

Since most, if not all U.S. manufacturers already have 14 SEER heat pump systems today, many are probably just refreshing their 14 SEER designs to optimize their product offerings for high volume.  Depending on the outcome of the legal debate mentioned above, contractors can probably expect to see the planned elimination of 13 SEER heat pumps from OEM lines and an increased offering of new, low cost, 14 SEER heat pumps which should be available on time for 2015 stocking programs.how much do air conditioning units cost to run Will the yellow “hang-tag” efficiency labels be changing with the new regulations?my ac unit keeps runningOne consequence of the regional nature of AC standards is the change to the FTC energy guide label. window air conditioner repair in chicago

This is the yellow label that is attached to the unit with SEER and HSPF rating of the unit shown in relation to the range of similar models. One change to this label is that it will not show just one rating point for split-system air conditioners and head pumps (i.e. systems that consist of an outdoor condenser and an indoor coil).  Split-system air conditioners and heat pumps will now be shown as a range representing the lowest and highest SEER ratings for all of the condenser’s certified coil combinations Consider a unit with rated efficiency that can range from 13-14.5 SEER depending on the selection of the indoor system, blower and coil combinations.   It is possible that this outdoor unit might have a suitable Indoor match which would allow it to be installed in all three regions.  In this case, it would become important to track both the outdoor and indoor model numbers and check the rated system performance for each installation to ensure it is compliant with the new regulations.

Are there any tools we can use to determine if the indoor and outdoor equipment is qualified?By entering a few parameters like the outdoor and indoor model numbers you can determine the expected performance of the combination.  The ruling on enforcement method is still pending, but it would be prudent for contractors to prepare for the eventual regulation changes by becoming familiar with this directory since it is likely that contractors are going to be involved with the process of insuring that the equipment they are installing meets the minimum regulations. Do we know how the DOE is planning to enforce the new regulations? Although the specific roles and responsibilities of the contractor, distributor and manufacturer are not defined yet, it is likely that all parties will be involved with some aspect of enforcement.  In any case, contractors should be able to verify that the equipment being installed meets the minimum standards provided by the new regulations and also meets the expectations of the consumer.

Typography is an old art. Long before the introduction of the international standard system of units (“metric system”), printing equipment manufacturers all over the world have established a bewildering variety units to measure length, many of which continue to The printing and publishing software market is at present dominated by manufacturers (Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Quark, etc.) located in the United States, the last country on the planet that has yet to make significant progress towards the introduction of modern standardAs a result, the use of standard units is far from well established in digital typography, to the significant annoyance of users all over the world. system, we have now a well established, consistent, and globally accepted set of length units, ranging from subatomic to cosmologicalThe use of archaic ad-hoc special purpose units has become obsolete and should be strongly discouraged. It is time that the typographic community finally abandons its

current unit mess in two ways: Metric typographic units are already used in Japan and to some degree in Germany and other European countries. dominance of US-originated typographic software without proper support for metric units at all levels currently hinders the further deployment of metric typographic practice. The German draft standard DIN 16507-2 suggests that all length measurements in digital typography should beIt suggests further that dimensions should be multiples of 0.25 mm, or where a finer resolution is required multiples of 0.1 or 0.05 mm. No more points, picas, ciceros, inches, etc. and all their very typesetters use the unit Q (quarter) for font sizes, where 1 Q = 0.25 mm, i.e. the same modulus recommended by DIN 16507-2. This measure nicely coincides with the most common pixel size onFor example a typical display area of 320×256 mm, divided into 1280×1024 pixels, makes each pixel 0.25 mm wide.

This draft standard defines (among many others) the following two If we write say “Helvetica 5.0”, then this means we have a font that was designed for a 5 mm line spacing. It will typically have an H that is 3.6 mm or 10.2 points tall (72% of 5 mm). trivial: in a 60 mm high column, we can write exactly 60 mm / 5 mm =The baselines of text become neatly aligned with a millimeter grid, and if millimeters are used to describe both font size and font height, their relationship becomes easier to handle than if different units such as mm and points were used. do not have to juggle any more with conversion factors such as 72.27If you write “Helvetica 5.00/5.25” then this means that you use exactly the same font as above, but with 0.25 mm more baseline skip than it was designed for. DIN 16507-2 contains a list of preferred metric font sizes, together with the corresponding preferred 72% font heights in mm. table below shows, in addition to these values from the standard,

the corresponding preferred 72% font heights in Postscript points, for easier comparison with the old font sizes. Note: the point sizes of US fonts do not always refer to the k/H height that is defined by DIN asSome font manufacturers (e.g., Knuth) also refer to the size of taller characters such as “(”, so be careful not toInstead, try to find out the baseline distance for which a font was originally designed if you want to convert properly to metric sizes. (The above mm values are from the old DIN 16507-2:1984-05 draft. you implement metric font sizes, please make sure you get the latest version of the actual standard from DIN.) Again: The font size refers to the baseline distance for which the font was designed, and is used to generally identify theThe font height is the actual height of characters such as H or k. The font height is typically 72% of the font size as a preferred value, but this is of course left to the discretion of the

One writes “Courier 6.0” to get the Courier font designed for 6 mm baseline distance (where the height of an H is typically 4.3 mm or 12.2 pt), and one writes “Courier 6.0/9.0” to get the same font but to use it with 50% more space between the lines. Authors such as argue instead that font sizes should be based on the x-height. This clearly has a number of advantages: Possible disadvantages of using the x-height as the reference dimension for denoting a font height might: Draft proposals for an international standard on font sizes drawn up in the late 1970s were based on the height of capital letters and did not find international agreement. Both x-height and the size of capital letters are attributes stored in existing font files, therefore scaling font sizes such that the x-height or H-height matches a specified length in millimeters is easy to implement on top of existing font-management mechanisms. An idea that might at least be worth considering is to define a

Unlike the values given in DIN 16507-2, this could be a geometric series in which the quotient of neighboring sizes approximates a root of the square root of two. standard paper sizes were designed to be magnified and reduced by factors of sqrt(2) or sqrt(sqrt(2)), and for example standard technical drawing pen sizes follow the same progression. series of standard font sizes could either be designated in a millimeter length and made available via pull-down menus, or it could be designated by an index number, as is already done for ISO paper Instead of giving a reciprocal pixel size in dpi, it would be much more convenient to specify the pixel size directly in micrometers, as it is also common practice in the semiconductor industry. The following table shows a few commonly used typesetting resolutions in both µm and dpi: So far, phototypesetters have traditionally used metric resolutions (with 10 µm = 2540 dpi being most common one), while laser and

inkjet office printers currently still mostly have inch-based While US-originated typographic software frequently does allow to switch into some sort of metric mode, these metric modes usually have lots of loose ends and were obviously never used in daily work byAdd-on metric modes often suffer from bizarre rounding bugs (you enter 210 mm and always get ugly 209.902777 mm displayed, alignments on metric grids do not work out, startup defaults are often fixed to US units, etc.), and the metric support stops at critical details like the font or pixel size, such that in the end metric users still have to constantly convert between millimeters, points, inches, and 1/inches. realize that over 95% of the world population grew up using the metric system and that it is therefore prudent to design a system today from the very lowest level up purely in metric units. units like the inch and the various points should only be an add-on