CPVC is the only residential plumbing material that is immune to degradation or corrosion from exposure to chlorinated drinking water. CPVC is even unaffected by drinking water treated with aggressive methods that can increase the likelihood of premature failure in PEX and copper systems such as chlorine dioxide and chloramines. That means CPVC failures can almost always be traced to one of two causes: installation error or exposure to incompatible chemicals.

The Solvent Weld Process for Copper Tube Size CPVC

CPVC uses a solvent weld process to permanently weld fittings to pipes. When the process is performed properly, the pipe and fitting are fused into a single piece that creates a joint that is stronger than the pipe or fitting on their own. For plumbers who work with CPVC regularly, the solvent weld process gets to be second nature. But if you are new to CPVC, here are a few tips to keep in mind when using solvent cement. The tips provided are specific to Copper Tube Size CPVC (which is typically tan in color) and may not apply to IPS Schedule 80 CPVC (which is typically gray in color). Always consult your manufacturer for specific installation instructions.

• Use the right cement: Copper Tube Size CPVC can use one-step cement, such as FlowGuard® Gold 1-Step Yellow or new High Contrast Green Cement. The use of green solvent cement with CPVC was added to the 2024 codes of all major bodies to make it easier to visually inspect an installation.Because service plumbers often need to make repairs quickly and get to the next job, a specially formulated solvent cement, Oatey® Orange Lava, was developed. It enables one-step cure times as fast as 15 minutes for cold water lines. Always verify code requirements and follow the solvent cement manufacturer’s recommendations for cure times and installation procedures.
• Cut square and chamfer: Before applying solvent cement, the pipe should be cut square, and any tailings and bevel on the pipe end removed by chamfering.
• Avoid dry fits: A dry fit is simply putting a pipe and fitting together without applying solvent cement. This approach can increase the likelihood one or more fittings will not be solvent welded. Welding the system joint by joint is a better practice. You should check the fit of the pipe before assembling the joint. Without solvent cement, the pipe should fit tightly inside the fitting without bottoming out.
• Apply the right amount of cement: A good practice is to apply a heavy, even coat of one-step solvent cement to the outside of the pipe end. Then, using the same applicator without additional cement, apply a thin coat inside the fitting socket. Excess cement should not be allowed to puddle in the fitting assembly.
• Bottom out the pipe in the fitting: The more surface area of pipe that contacts the fitting, the stronger the bond. After the cement has been applied, the pipe should be inserted until it bottoms out against the fitting.
• Watch extreme temperatures: According to manufacturers of one-step CPVC solvent cement, the cement works best in temperatures between 40° F and 110° F. Outside that range, special precautions should be taken. Cements will cure more quickly in high temperatures and more slowly in cold temperatures. Check the can of solvent cement for proper working temperatures.

Expansion and Contraction

All piping materials will expand and contract based on differences between the installation and operating temperature of the system and changes in the temperature of the water flowing through the pipe. FlowGuard Gold CPVC can expand about 1 inch per 50 feet of straight length of pipe per 50°F temperature increase. If expansion and contraction aren’t accounted for in installation, the stress caused by this expansion can rise to 1200 psi. Because of CPVC’s incredible strength, this may not cause immediate failure in the system, but long-term exposure to these extreme stresses can cause failures after years in service.

In many cases, normal changes of direction can be enough to account for expansion and contraction provided the natural movement of the pipe is not restricted and there is adequate spacing between elbows and hangers. Overtightening pipe hangers may also restrict lateral movement of the pipe. For long, straight runs, loops or offsets can be used. If you have any questions, consult the manufacturer’s installation guidelines.

Chemical Incompatibility

If properly installed CPVC pipe experiences a failure, the likely culprit is contact with incompatible chemicals. Depending on the type and amount of incompatible chemical a pipe is exposed to, the failure may happen quickly or could take years to develop. For example, CPVC can be softened over time by the plasticizers contained in some rubbers and flexible vinyl products, so these materials should be prevented from contacting the pipe or fitting.

Service plumbers are most likely to encounter chemical incompatibility under sinks where the pipe can be exposed to surfactant chemicals found in some household cleaners. In these situations, a CPVC-to-copper stub-out should be used instead of stubbing out with a length of CPVC pipe.

The FBC™ System Compatible Program can be used to identify materials that are compatible and incompatible with FlowGuard Gold, BlazeMaster and Corzan CPVC. For other brands of CPVC piping, consult with the specific manufacturer(s) for compatibility information.

Handling Aged Pipe

As it ages, CPVC naturally becomes more rigid and may even show signs of discoloration. These changes do not reduce the expected service life of the pipe when properly installed. In fact, the pressure-bearing capability of CPVC pipes actually increases with age. But aged pipe should be handled and cut differently than new pipe. A C-style tubing cutter, fine-tooth saw or wheel cutter should be used when servicing CPVC. Ratchet cutters or shears are generally not recommended.

The Professional Plumber’s Choice

Professional plumbers appreciate CPVC because it is easy to work with and results in a clean, professional installation that highlights the plumber’s craftmanship and commitment to quality. For more information on CPVC, including step-by-step installation instructions and other resources, visit flowguardgold.com.

Jonathan Simon is the North American residential plumbing manager for Lubrizol Advanced Materials Inc., the parent company for FlowGuard Gold Pipe and Fittings.

 

 

By Nikole Smith, Director of Product Management, Successware

Small business owners in the home service industries are on a constant quest for the tools and resources that will help them streamline and grow their operations. Two areas of potential growth that can help increase revenue with the right business management software: managing maintenance and service agreements, and closing the deal on opportunities that generate new sales with existing customers. Let’s take a look at a few ideas for each and some best practices to consider when choosing a platform to manage them.

Maintenance and Service Agreements

Maintenance visits can be used to fill the dispatch board during slower periods, and servicing customers’ equipment proactively ensures it’s less likely to malfunction during peak times. This is why maintenance and service agreements are essential ingredients of a consistent revenue stream.

Encourage your team to once a month reach out to customers who have unscheduled maintenance agreements. The customers will appreciate a proactive approach, and your team can fill in jobs on the dispatch board, creating a steady flow of work. Consider printing labels for a direct mail campaign or creating an email blast if you do not have the manpower to call them. Both are cost-effective ways of marketing to customers and reminding them they have a service due.

When agreement renewal dates approach, it’s a good time to reach out to the customer and ask about extending their agreement. You will want to pull a list of those who have expiring agreements and create a renewal document that can be mailed or emailed. The renewal document should include the coverage period and price of their agreement, as well as a renewal slip. Consider also including a marketing incentive that will entice the customer to continue doing business with your company, such as an opportunity to save 10% if they renew by the end of the month.

Managing agreements and marketing to these customers needs to be easy and time efficient so you can get the information you want without the hassle. This is where a robust business management software will help when it comes to searching and filtering agreements. You want to be able to view visits due by a particular date range, sort by equipment age, or filter by scheduled or unscheduled agreement visits.

Envision pulling up the customer record screen and having access to the related agreements right there without having to manually search. You can see if the customer is past-due for a maintenance agreement visit or if they have one coming up, then schedule it while on the phone with them. When a customer decides to renew, an invoice can be quickly generated and payment taken right there on the phone to make the agreement active. These are the types of platform features that will help your business get the most out of maintenance and service agreements.

Opportunities for Future Work

When technicians are at a job-site, they have a first-hand look at your customers equipment and can help identify any potential repairs or replacements they may need completed. These opportunities can help drive future sales and can range from necessary tasks like equipment repair to recommending optional purchases such as extending a warranty or signing up for a service agreement. Better yet, anyone on your team can identify them. From calls with new clients to finding sales leads on the job site, call takers and technicians alike should be getting in on the action.

After that, it’s up to the sales team or your back-office to follow through on these identified opportunities. Tracking follow-up dates is vital to ensure timely communication with the customer and simplify the sales team’s prioritization efforts. Again, this is where the right software with a flexible and well-appointed central hub can work wonders to streamline the process.

Consider creating custom opportunity codes in your platform to help organize opportunities. These codes can describe the nature of the opportunity and the customer’s specific needs and allow them to be tracked by job type or potential revenue. They will come in handy when you want to filter customer records based on follow-up requirements or job type. You also want space for making notes about customer interactions – what was spoken about and direction for future follow-up.

The right software will help create a sales job from the opportunity once the customer agrees to an estimate or to have the job completed. A good software system will also help track employees who had a hand in getting the opportunity to a booked job. The employee who identified the opportunity and the salesperson who reached out to the customer should be on the opportunity/sales job and carry over to the invoice, ensuring the proper people get a commission for the jobs they convert.

Managers need comprehensive reporting capabilities to track their team’s performance and get a snapshot of how much additional revenue is being brought in from opportunities. When these reports are segmented by opportunity codes, it’s easier to identify which opportunity types have the highest closing rates and which need improvement. Effective reports can help monitor employee productivity, showing the number of calls being made, appointments converting to jobs and what is being sold and billed to customers.

When you have access to reports that show how many opportunities each technician is identifying in the field, that information can be used to coach them on how to better identify things that may need to be repaired, replaced, or offered to customers.

Choosing the Right Business Software

Managing agreements and opportunities doesn’t have to be complicated. With the right business management software, your team can easily track these customers and market to them, as well as identify and pursue new jobs that are there for the taking. It’s a win-win-win for you, your employees and your customers.

Nikole Smith is an experienced Product Management leader with more than 20 years in the software and technology space. As Director of Product Management at Successware, Nikole leads diverse projects and initiatives from strategy development to implementation. Nikole is a master when it comes to analyzing critical business requirements and identifying gaps and potential opportunities. She has vast experience in both the hospitality and technology industries. Prior to Successware, Nikole worked for Choice Hotels International for 17 years.

Advanced electrode boilers are being installed to replace outdated, inefficient fuel-burning equipment in district heating applications as part of broader effort to meet ambitious International Energy Agency decarbonization goals.

District heating—the generation of heat in a central location and distribution of it to local residences, businesses, and industry at greater economies of scale than individual heating systems—plays an important role in helping the transition to clean energy in the fight against climate change. The challenge, however, is that district heating, used to provide hot water and heat within buildings through an insulated pipe system, must soon pivot from burning fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy.

“District heating networks offer great potential for efficient, cost-effective, and flexible large-scale use of low-carbon energy for heating. However, the decarbonization potential of district heating is largely untapped, as 90% of the heat supplied in district networks is produced from fossil fuels …,” according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organization that provides policy recommendations, analysis, and data on the global energy sector. The 31 member countries and 13 association countries of the IEA represent 75% of global energy demand.

Aligning with the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario requires significant effort to rapidly improve the energy efficiency of existing networks, switch to renewable heat, integrate secondary heat sources, and develop new high-efficiency infrastructure.

Fortunately, innovation in the form of the latest, high voltage immersed electrode or jet type electrode boilers makes district heating much greener, particularly when the electricity comes from renewable sources like solar, wind, and hydro power.

Municipalities and businesses relying on district heating are already pivoting away from often inefficient, outdated equipment that produces excess carbon emissions in favor of economical electrode boilers that can quickly, flexibly rival the output of large gas or oil-fired boilers in a much smaller footprint, The advanced electrode boilers do not have a high minimum operating level to make them immediately available and offer much faster start-up and shut down time while being safely and easily maintained.

The Renewable Promise of District Heating with Electrode Boiler Technology

District heating systems offer substantial potential for improving energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and integrating renewable and waste heat sources, particularly within urban centers.

In this effort, an increasing number of district heating plants are turning to high voltage, electrode boilers to absorb excess power production, quickly provide grid service, and cost-effectively balance out fluctuations. A growing number of municipalities are also installing new or retrofit high voltage electrode boilers that are compact, economical, and produce no emissions. The upgrades often entail retrofitting or replacing boilers (the heat source) with cleaner, more efficient electric alternatives, along with the heat distribution network (pipes/ heat exchanger stations).

Electrode boilers utilize the conductive and resistive properties of water to carry electric current and generate steam with great responsiveness and efficiency.

“An A.C. current flows from an electrode of one phase to ground using the water as a conductor. Since chemicals in the water provide conductivity, the current flow generates heat directly in the water itself. The more current (amps) that flows, the more heat (BTUs) is generated, and the more steam produced for use in district heating,” explains Robert Presser, Vice President of Acme Engineering, a manufacturer of industrial and commercial boilers with operations in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

When supplying district heating, electrode boilers are much more responsive and flexible than fossil fuel burning units.

“With electrode boilers, the energy input and adjustment are very precise and virtually immediate. In contrast, increasing or decreasing the temperature in a gas fired boiler is a slower process because it takes time for the heat in the boiler to rise or dissipate before reaching the targeted output,” says Presser.

Advanced high voltage electrode steam boilers like Acme’s CEJS also have a 100% turndown ratio, the ratio between a boiler’s maximum and minimum output. Most gas boilers have a ratio of 10:1 or 5:1, which means the units take a significant time to reach full capacity.  The CEJW and CEJS immersed electrode hot water and steam boilers have a minimum output level of 7-8% of rated capacity, still far better than a modern gas-fired boiler.

“With a 100% turndown ratio, you can leave the boiler in standby at low pressure and bring it to full capacity in about 90 seconds as needed, which no other boiler type can achieve today,” says Presser.

“Communities and businesses utilizing district heating also appreciate the eco-friendly nature of electrode boilers. Without combustion, these boilers are clean and emission free. The design also eliminates many environmental issues associated with fuel burning boilers such as fuel fumes, fly ash, and large obtrusive exhaust stacks,” says Presser.

The energy efficiency of electrode boiler technology, however, is one of its most remarkable characteristics.

“For district heating, the extraordinarily efficient power-to-heat generation capability of electrode boilers, in which almost 100% of the electrical energy is converted into heat with no stack or heat transfer losses, combined with an ability to use and balance intermittent renewable energy, makes the technology crucial today,” says Presser.

As an example of energy and design efficiency, Acme’s CEJS electrode steam boiler produces maximum amounts of steam in minimal floor space, with boiler capacity from 6MW to 68MW. The electrode boiler operates at existing distribution voltages, 4.16 to 25 KV and is up to 99.9% efficient at converting energy into heat. The boiler can produce steam in capacities up to 270,000 pounds per hour, with pressure ratings from 75 PSIG to 500 PSIG. All CEJS boilers are designed to ASME Code or EU Pressure Vessels Directive and are certified, registered pressure vessels. Electrical standards meet CSA, UL, or CE requirements.

According to Presser, there are additional reasons for municipalities and businesses to use high voltage, jet type electrode boilers for district heating. “Electrode boilers can match the heating output of fuel burning boilers while converting almost all the energy to heat. Electrode boilers also are much smaller than fossil fuel burning boilers so are easier to use in smaller structures,” he says.

For residential or commercial property owners, electrode boilers also lower costs for installation, operation, and maintenance. Gas-fired boilers require fuel lines, storage and handling equipment, economizers, and emission control equipment. Advanced jet type electrode boilers have a minimal number of components and electrical controls, with fewer parts. Under normal operation, the absence of excessive temperatures and electrode burnout also assures long operating life.

In addition, the units further lower operating costs with automatic controls that reduce the need for operating personnel.

The most advanced types of these boilers, such as Acme’s CEJS or CEJW, also offer greater safety than traditional fuel burning models. “With the electrode boilers, there are no combustion hazards because there are no flames, fumes, fuel lines or storage tanks. There are no problems with heat buildup or electrode burnout even if scaling should occur, and thermal shock is eliminated. Also, there is no low water danger since the current cannot flow without water,” Presser explains.

Unlike fossil fuel burning boilers, electric boilers require minimal maintenance since there is no burner, no material burned, no soot created, no chimney, and no wearing mechanical parts, says Presser. With fewer parts than more complex fossil fuel burning units, electrical boilers are also more compact and simpler to install than conventional systems.

Finally, the electric units are exceptionally quiet compared to fuel fired boilers. Unlike gas-powered burners that throttle like turbine engines almost continually, electric boilers keep operational noise levels down.

With all the advantages of high output jet type electrode boilers, in addition to their value in balancing out the use of intermittent renewable energy in the power grid, it is evident why a growing number of communities and businesses are selecting them for district heating.

As the effects of climate change become more severe, the urgency of switching to clean energy and decarbonizing the energy sector will only increase across the globe. In this effort, district heating paired with electrode boilers will be a vital part of the solution, as member countries strive to meet the IEA decarbonization goals.

By Del Williams, a technical writer based in Torrance, California.

By Heather Ripley

If you’re like most home service business owners, you understand the need for a strong marketing budget. Getting your company’s name and services out in front of potential customers is a necessity if you want to grow and scale your business.

But if you’ve never considered how adding a powerful public relations plan to your budget would sharpen your marketing message, 2024 might be the time to consider it.

Solidify Your Brand

While advertising your services helps get your name out to your target audience, nothing solidifies your brand in their eyes like a steady and consistent message. Whether you’re telling your company’s story or simply creating campaigns that boost your reputation, PR helps you refine your presence.

Public relations, simply put, is the art of building relationships so that you can tell your story to the people you want to hear it. A marketing campaign is great for telling others about yourself, but it takes a PR campaign to get others to talk about you.

For example, you may be running a special on furnace installations for the winter months, and you’ve purchased several ads that promote this special. People might be attracted to your company because of the special but they’re more likely to hire you based upon your brand reputation.

If you want people to trust your team with their HVAC needs, you need an expert PR team who can pitch your expertise out to your local media. Imagine how much consumer interest you’ll obtain if you’re seen on the local news talking about the energy efficiency of new furnaces.

Maintain a Positive Reputation

If you’ve worked in business for any length of time, you know that a crisis could happen at any time. It’s really a matter of “when” instead of “if” one occurs.

And it’s during these business crises that many home service companies hire a public relations professional. Having an expert in communications is often the best move if you’re trying to regain public trust.

But it’s even more appropriate to hire a PR team or have a communications strategy before you have a crisis.

Ongoing PR can help you build a relationship of trust within your community. Whether you’re asked to share tips on how to keep your pipes from freezing during a cold snap or you are working locally to support a worthy cause, associating your home service business brand with good news builds a positive reputation.

If you’re already seen in a good light, it is easier for the public to forgive any transgressions. This makes your job much easier when a business crisis occurs.

In-House or Agency

No one knows your business like you do. That’s just a fact.

But, just because you know your team, your business budget and the way to get your customer service representatives to charm the customer doesn’t mean you understand PR.

Public relations is about building relationships and it’s a multi-faceted task. It requires media outreach, well-written press releases that have a news angle and a flair for reputation management.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do it yourself. If you already have some established relationships within your local media or within the trade publications that cover your market, you can always pitch yourself. Just be sure that any communications you send to the media use proper grammar and, preferably, are written following Associated Press style.

No matter if you decide to handle your own PR or if you decide to hire a public relations agency, the fact remains that PR should be a part of your marketing budget.

Incorporating PR into your existing marketing strategy should never be considered an expense. Good PR is as much an investment into your company as purchasing new equipment or hiring trained technicians is.

So, if you’re looking to grow your home service business to reach the next level in 2024, make sure there is a healthy line item in your business budget for PR.

Heather Ripley is founder and CEO of Ripley PR, an elite, global public relations agency specializing in the skilled trades, franchising and B2B tech industries. Ripley PR is recognized as the top PR agency for the home service industry. It also has been listed by Entrepreneur Magazine as a Top Franchise PR Agency six consecutive years and was named to Forbes’ America’s Best PR Agencies for 2021. Ripley is the author of “NEXT LEVEL NOW: PR Secrets to Drive Explosive Growth for your Home Service Business,” which is now available on all audiobook platforms. For additional information, visit www.ripleypr.com.