Tag: rucking

Rule #1 – Always Look Cool

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

The past two weeks here in Cincinnati have reminded me just what humidity is all about. While the static charge in my garage at home is at an all-time low, the humidity is enough to make me wish I had gills to breathe. Even rucking before work has become a rather sweaty event. When I am rucking, one of the 4 Rules of Rucking is, #1 Always Look Cool. This is an idiom as in don’t let people see you sweat. If you are stressed, just stay cool, keep a level head and look the part. A good pair of aviators always helps to hide what your eyes can’t.

Then I open my garage fridge, because every Midwesterner has their old kitchen fridge in the garage, right? Grab a nice cold aluminum can out. And before I can put it in a thermal insulating housing, I see the condensation of the humidity forming on the aluminum. This makes me think of some of the electrical panels I encountered during my time in machine shops.

I once approached a vertical machining center whose spindle chiller, with a thermo-couple failure, had been cooling the spindle continuously during the summer months. This spindle looked like the ice-cold aluminum can I had sitting out on my workbench yesterday. Fully covered in condensate from the humidity in the air. Condensate collected on an aluminum can and leaving a ring of water on a workbench is one thing. Water running down a high-speed spindle and causing issues with a dry machining process is another. This also reminded me of a recent call where a new customer wanted help sizing a Cabinet Cooler System to replace an air-to-air heat exchanger that had failed. When walking through the information needed to size the panel, I reached the Internal Temp Desired field, and there was a pause. While I thought maybe they were checking their notes, they came back with 72°F. I wrote down the value on my notepad, then asked, “That’s oddly specific. Is there a piece of equipment that alarms out over 72°F that we are trying to protect?” The response I received was no. So I asked what the need was for this low set point.

I dug further with them, and it turned out that’s what they kept the engineers’ office set for in the summer, so they thought my question was odd and figured, if they are comfortable there and their computer on their desk operates well, then it must be a good temperature. This is not an incorrect statement. The control cabinet for the machine would operate just fine at 72°F; however, all the electronics that were in the panel were rated up to 104°F before they overheat, so it doesn’t quite make sense to extend the cooling capacity needed to reach that 72°F requested set point. Once we talked this over, we settled on the standard of 95°F for the internal set point with the understanding that by using a thermostatically controlled system, they could adjust it down lower if they really wanted to. In the end, we saved them some energy by sizing the Cabinet Cooler System to meet the demands of their industrial electronics, not what makes a person feel comfortable.

This isn’t always the case; occasionally, there is a panel that requires a low maximum temperature in order to keep a critical piece of equipment stable. This is why we ask the questions to validate any concerns with the data we are viewing as Application Engineers. This is also why we have built in a number of warnings/alerts on our Online Cabinet Cooler Sizing Calculator.

If you have a panel that needs to be cooled, the online calculator has fields for all the information we need. If you want to walk through the math behind the calculator and talk through the reasons we ask for the information that we do, you can either call, email, or even live chat with an Application Engineer, and we will gladly walk you through our process and the math to determine which Cabinet Cooler System is right for your needs.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS
National Business Development Manager

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

When You Get To Asheville

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment
1 – Steve Martin & Edie Brickell – “When You Get To Asheville”

Over the past week, my amazing wife and I traveled to Asheville, NC for a long weekend away. This is our second year going down, and I can most certainly say that we will be going back. Our days consisted of going to a small mom-and-pop type diner for breakfast, loading the cooler with water, and then picking a hike to hit up. This time we hiked mostly in the Pisgah National Forest and while we did not hit the same elevation as last year, we still managed to double the first hike of the week on the second day and felt great once we reached the end. I also chose to make the hikes hard on myself by carrying my trusted GO-RUCK GR1 to carry our water, first aid kit, and a 30 lb. steel plate, because you should always choose the harder thing.

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While we weren’t at elevations like Pikes Peak in Colorado, we still felt the difference in the air between being in Cincinnati and being in the mountains. Maybe it was just the fact it was cleaner. When we crested a hill on the trail and stopped to take a quick break, we looked around and realized that after all the switchbacks we had just gone through, we looked over the valley we had just climbed out of and were at the tree tops of the valley and still nowhere near the top of the mountain. This got me to thinking about how I was working harder because I had a steel plate, walking too many lunches where I just sit for 30 minutes instead of walking and that is immediately connected to the ACFM calculations for an air compressor and just how a compressor will have to work harder to produce the same volume of air when elevated because the air is thinner. This is going to change the air density, which results in a lower atmospheric pressure due to higher altitude.

Altitude is just one of the factors that matters in the calculation to determine a compressor’s output at different locations. The other factors include relative humidity, which was way better in the mountains than here in Cincinnati, and the actual temperature, again better in Asheville than Cincinnati.

If you are wondering about the equations I am referencing, we’ve blogged about them many times and even have a Webinar that touches on the math and reasoning behind these different values. Check the equation below and the links above.

In case you were wondering, the post-Ruck/Hike hydration is always better after events, it also always helps to have a good partner in crime to enjoy all the experiences with you. Thankful for the ability to connect all these hobbies and my knowledge of compressed air on top of sharing it with others. If you want to discuss how to calculate some ACFM or SCFM consumption and outputs of your compressor or application, or if you want to talk about rucking, hiking, or any of your favorite trails, give me a call, chat, or tweet.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS
National Business Development Manager

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

1 – Steve Martin & Edie Brickell – “When You Get To Asheville” – CBS, Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RzhTN9zW3w

Getting Back To It – One-Step At A Time

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

I’ve blogged in the past about how one of my favorite things to do is to get out of my comfort zone and over the past year, that has been a struggle for me physically. I’ve slacked off on my rucking and event participation and continued to grow my knowledge level. That’s started to weigh on me over the past few months, so I began to change it. In all honesty, I was okay with being meh. That’s not okay, and I started changing it, how you might ask? It all started with my friends and my daughters.

Not a shabby pace for 35-pound ruck and second ruck back at it.

Rather than trying to do a 180 and completely disrupt my relaxed style, I took the approach of 5mm changes over time. That’s right, I am in the US and I just used the metric system as my primary measurement. So what does this look like, well first it started with less sitting and more standing. Even when at work, I try to stand most of the day at my desk, I’m grateful I have the means to do so through a standing desk. Then, rather than just hanging out while my kids are at their practices, I’ve taken that time to start rucking or at the very least walking/volunteering and working. These are different movements that I didn’t have over the past several months, and it’s honestly been 5mm changes and I can already feel the improvements in my sleep, and my energy throughout the day. The best part is, I can really relate this to being a great approach to an industrial compressed air system as well.

Over time a system can age, efficiencies lower, leaks start to form, equipment wears down or gets built up on it and starts to require more maintenance. Just like my personal journey, we can easily get these back on track by making small 5mm changes in our daily operations. We don’t have to completely gut and revamp a compressed air system or just throw more compressors at the system to fix it. We can follow the Six Steps to Compressed Air Optimization and work towards a renewed system.

Processes lead to continuous improvement.

The first point is to get a baseline, find out where you are, and then go from there. This is easily done with Digital Flowmeters w/ Wireless Capabilities. Then, rather than trying to change an entire facility, focus on one spot, one line, or even one machine. Then start to evaluate that specific point for leaks, and open blowoffs. Fixing just this one machine by reducing leaks, and replacing open blowoffs can begin to shift the efficiency within the system and drive the desire to do more. This return will also generally give the system the ability to handle expansion to other new lines as well.

Keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be a drastic change or complete teardown and rebuild. It should start with a baseline and then perform small changes from there, so the data can be collected and return can be measured to justify the means. We outline this process and do everything we can to offer items needed for each step of the process to ensure you have one single contact along the process, an EXAIR Application Engineer.

If you want to discuss further how we can help you keep ticking away at these 5mm changes within your system, please contact us.

Brian Farno
Application Engineer
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

Putting In The Work: No Matter Where

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

Last week I was on vacation with my wife’s family.  We had the good fortune of going to Lake Norman, NC and renting a house for everyone to stay in.   While vacation was on a lake and we all had a boat load of fun (mainly because we had a pontoon boat for a week).  Work still needed to get done.   This wasn’t work from the Application Engineering position here at EXAIR.  This work was physically more difficult.

This was training for an event I will be doing hopefully within the next year.  I’ve been attending a Tuesday morning workout for the past six months or so with two other men, who are both Marine veterans and I thank them for their service.  This work we put in on Tuesday morning and a few other random times throughout the week is all for the same events.   The events are put on by a company called GORUCK.  (Yes, just like EXAIR, it is all CAPS all the time, one word.)  These events are classified as endurance events and are lead by either an active or retired Special Forces cadre.  There are different versions but they are all heald to the same standard for participants.  Put in the work, rely on your team, and everyone will get through it together.

At most of the events very few people know each other that well.  This makes forming a team within the few hours you are together very difficult.  That is until you are under a time hack when everyone has their weighted ruck on their back, you have a few hundred extra pounds of sand bags to carry and because it is fun to watch the Cadre gives you a casualty that now has to be buddy carried.  The main focus is to get people of all walks of life, all abilities, all physical aptitudes to come together, build into one another, and make sure everyone is at the end getting a patch to wear on their ruck.

This is why, on every Tuesday I try to put in some hard work mixed in with a lot of stairs.   While I was on vacation and could have easily let that weekly training go, I didn’t.  Instead I got out a deck of cards for the number of reps to each exercise, grabbed a 60 lbs and 40 lb sandbag and went to the tallest section of stairs we had close by, the dock stairs.

While going through the exercises, panting and glistening (for those that don’t know that’s the fancy word for seriously sweating), my youngest daughter came down to “help” me workout.  The look on her face was at first confusion, then after a brief talk and explaining I am trying to better myself by doing this, she switched to full on support.

Burpees have never felt so good until you have a 4 year old cheering you on.  Once I was done with all of my reps and had made over 6 trips up and down the steps with the 60 lb. sandbag I carried my sandbags and followed her in to the house for some well deserved breakfast.

This work could have been easily pushed to the side and not completed.  Instead, I embraced it and did it.  I was going to do the work even if anyone wasn’t watching because I want to better myself so that I may better any team that I am part of.

This same level of dedication is put in to everything we do here at EXAIR.  Customer service, production, assembly, product design, order entry, accounting, and marketing all dedicate to ensure that we fill the needs of our customers because we want to become a strong part of their team.   Whether it means digging deeper on testing a product in order to get some data at different operating pressure, or creating a 100% custom product that we have never manufactured before, we dedicate to the customer and ensure that all possibilities are exhausted so that the customer and EXAIR can both succeed.

If you have any questions about how EXAIR can help your team to reduce compressed air consumption, increase plant efficiency, and save energy through compressed air usage, please contact us.

Brian Farno
Application Engineer
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF