Dan Rettig, senior product manager for heat pumps and sustainability at Lochinvar, sat down with ES Magazine for a podcast interview discussing mechanical room decarbonization and retrofits. Here is a transcribed and edited excerpt of the conversation.
When we start to move from a gas product, to maybe more of an electrical product, whether it's a heat pump, or straight, resistive electric boiler, water heater, those are going to require higher electrical capacity. So now you may have to bring in more electrical to that mechanical room, do you have to lay out new panels? And have space for new panels to bring in if existing panels aren't large enough? That's going to be something different as far as what that mechanical room looks like. A lot of times your current products are powered off 115 volts, you know, 15-20 amp circuits. So that's all going to change here in the future. Anybody that's been involved with installations and trying to navigate around gas appliances knows venting is their number one obstacle, how do you move that vent around, get it through the mechanical space? It's always difficult. As we move to electrical products, that problem's gone, which I think is kind of good for a lot of us. That's going to be a positive, but we will have other issues, like mechanical rooms running smaller in size, bringing in new electrical infrastructure to the building.