Latest / The Refrigeration Mentor Podcast / Episode 351. Shifting from Mechanical to Electronic Systems with Frank Croak of Climate Pros

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Episode 351. Shifting from Mechanical to Electronic Systems with Frank Croak of Climate Pros · The Refrigeration Mentor Podcast

• 0:00
  Trevor: Welcome to the Refrigeration Mentor Podcast. I'm super excited that you're all here once again, learning, growing, getting better every day, and, and I really appreciate all of you for taking the time to do this today.
• 0:01
  You know, we're all involved in CO2 all the time and supermarket refrigeration, it doesn't matter if it's CO2, even regular HFC is more and more controls. And I wanted to invite Frank on you have a conversation. Let's, I want to dive into more of what he sees out there as an EMS manager, because this is, this is.
• 0:02
  Trevor: I think so too. It's not, honestly, it's not for all the different types of technicians, not really a technical event for technician to learn like controls or troubleshooting and things like that. It's more of a networking event. So if you want to, you know, network with managers, directors, retailers, that's kind of the event that it is.
• 0:03
  Frank: Okay, sure. Yeah. I got into the trade when I was 18, right outta high school. My dad and my grandfather were refrigeration technicians before me. Wow. I sat on a lot of refrigerant jugs in the machine room with my dad when I was a kid. And I was firmly not probably wanting to get into the trade when I was a teenager, but I ended up getting in and I ended up loving it.
• 0:04
  And once the controls started going in the, the first Alltech versions, the comm draw. Dan Foss 50 fives. I could see, hey, this, this is going this way, the industry is moving this way. And I switched gears over to Aztec Energy Partners and got into retrofitting and learning about all the control systems that we were doing at the time, which is pretty, at the time it was Comptrol primarily Comptrol, Danfoss, and Emerson.
• 0:05
  You know, there's no, ? There's no, no, there's no playbook where you start here and you end up here. You can end up wherever you want. But it's us focusing on that and, and like you, you've seen that decades ago. You've seen it's gonna go controls. Mm-hmm. You know, and then you start to wean your way into getting into more controls and into the evolution Today, even in the last, I would say in the last.
• 0:06
  As you mentioned earlier, you really need a laptop. You know, I think that the histories now, especially like with a laptop, you can pull so much stuff to figure out. All kinds of complex problems on racks that we certainly couldn't do with Comptrol, right. Or the RMCC days, you know? Yeah. You had to just kind of make some educated guesses to get from point A to point B, whereas now, I think there's a lot more hard data to get there.
• 0:07
  You know, where you buy a set of gauges and they're a thousand dollars or something, ? Or so. And computer I think is a huge, like, we're, we're having a conversation right now, ? And I think it's I think it's a huge tool that is being missed by some technicians and some people are hesitant on it.
• 0:08
  I could see what's going on from home. That was 17 years ago. ? Like, I was able to look at what's going on, the evolution of that. That has come so far. So that's a tool in the bank, and we can dive into that later. So now we're into the new world of CO2. You know, this is the supermarket world.
• 0:09
  Frank: I think the, the CO2 is definitely more complex from a control standpoint. It's all electronic, and that does, I think that's the, probably the biggest fear. I mean, the mechanics of CO2 versus an HFC is similar. Refrigeration systems, refrigeration system how you control, it's a little bit different, but all that complexity, 'cause everything's electronic.
• 0:10
  And so you didn't have that ability to learn the mechanics, the mechanical part before you're kind of having to learn them both together. And that's. Certainly making it a little more difficult.
• 0:11
  'cause you've done a ton of startups in your day, you know, and you've been involved with lots of them and you have a team out teams out there doing this all the time. Now, is there, do you feel there's a huge amount of value for a service technician to take some time to go and do some startups and commissioning?
• 0:12
  You might work on 10 or 12 HFC systems and then you get this one CO2 system service call. Right? And that makes it really tough if you're not consistently, you know, just like anything else with the, the EMS controls, if you don't use it, you kind of lose it. Yeah. So if you're not staying sharp on the CO2 and it's not part of your, your regular, progress or regular workload every day. It gets tough to be proficient at it.
• 0:13
  There's no way you're not gonna be able to learn this without touching it, playing around with it just like we've done. ? That's how we've learned how we got better. How do you think the evolution has shifted focus for technicians today? Do you see, 'cause you deal with a lot of, you deal with construction guys, service guys, con startup guys.
• 0:14
  I don't, I don't see that a lot, but there, there certainly are some. Yeah,
• 0:15
  Frank: Yeah, I definitely would say there's first a lot of, first generation a lot of younger guys that want to come and get in the trade, which is fantastic. You know, we need, we do need more techs because the, the situation of the, our older guys retiring.
• 0:16
  Frank: You know, maybe go into some, some shifts might be a good idea. Finding some ways to retain some of our, our talent instead of guys kind of moving around or just, you know, a handful of things that I think we could do as an industry to maybe help make things more appealing.
• 0:17
  And I think I keep, like, I talk to a lot of people about. Especially in the community, the younger guys, I'm like, put the work in now. Learn as much as you can now to make it easier down the road. 'cause I see a lot of, there's, there's a lot of people that have been in the industry for a long time that are, that still struggle quite a bit in the industry.
• 0:18
  Frank: Yeah. Cer certainly, I, I certainly don't want to advocate for not work. I, I agree with you. It, it, it's a journey. When I started out as a, a service technician, I didn't know I was gonna be an EMS manager climate pros one day, you know, but it's taken me, you know, almost three decades to get here, you know, and that's all that experience and is over time, you know, there are a lot of nights and weekends, holidays that I spent in a machine room or on a roof, you know, to get to where I'm at now.
• 0:19
  Trevor: Yeah. And I, and I, I agree with that too. I, and I know that we will get, continue to get more people to come into the industry. I think electronics and controls is really gonna help that out.
• 0:20
  There's, I, I'm not gonna outsmart a computer and here in a couple of years, they're gonna be able to diagnose, AI is gonna be able to diagnose a system better, more accurately than a, a person can. And I think that's gonna be a real advantage for the industry.
• 0:21
  So you and your team work together and solve a lot of problems. But when it comes to September to to that may. You know, you're, you're just getting regular hours. You know, a lot of, some people are upset about that. They're used to the 7 60, 70 hour paychecks and now they're going getting 45 an hour paychecks.
• 0:22
  'cause there's a lot of people that say they want work-life balance. I don't know what work-life balance is. 'cause it's different for everyone. For me, I do trainings in the morning, I do them at night. I sometimes do them in the middle of the night. It doesn't matter to me. I love doing this stuff. ?
• 0:23
  Trevor: Yeah. No, exactly. And I think it's, it's it's, it's, that's gonna help the industry. So let's talk a little bit more on the technical side.
• 0:24
  So I think, yeah, I mean, if, if you can get yourself a laptop and interface through a switch or direct connection that's a plus. Certainly the computer or the laptop offers you a lot more flexibility than just whatever most of the front ends are. So those are much more useful. But any of that that you can help yourself gain some knowledge on is gonna definitely be helpful.
• 0:25
  Trevor: and I, and I try to explain this too 'cause I have a lot of people that come in from like the commercial HVAC side who wanna start getting into more refrigeration or rack work and they're like, well I never, we never work with all these soul noise.
• 0:26
  A lot of people, when I do training Frank, I usually call up a lot of the technicians and I'll ask them like, what do you struggle with? You know, and, and what do you need help with? And a lot of them are electrical troubleshooting or controls. That's would say, I need some help with controls. And one of the questions I ask is like, do you have an electrical wire diagram in front of you right now?
• 0:27
  That will exponentially help you in identifying where components are where your switches are, what you're using, tracking down wires. If you don't know that, it's kind of like finding a needle in a haystack, right? You're just guessing about figuring out where to, you're pulling panduit off of everywhere and you have, don't really know where to start or where to look, but yeah, that's very important.
• 0:28
  But we don't spend a lot of time because I remember I didn't do a lot of that. The only time that I spend a lot of time like on the controls, when me and another, another apprentice who was de foreman. We had an E two and we had a, it was a protocol rack and neither one of us knew what an E two was even.
• 0:29
  Do you think that's a big struggle for them? Even though I'm doing EMS for many years and I'm doing controls, do you think all these different control platforms really holding some technician back or hindering, hindering their learning progress?
• 0:30
  You can type in the valve model. A lot of racks and cases now have QR codes. You can pop that in your phone. You can literally still reading, but the information is available 24 7 no matter what. So that's definitely very helpful and I would encourage technicians to utilize that. Use your phone to, to look up that specific information.
• 0:31
  Zelda or Super Mario Brothers, but you know what? I put hundreds and hundreds of hours in, you know what? I was good. You know, so if you put hundreds and hundreds of hours in working on these controllers, you're gonna get better. You gotta put your hands on it. Just like Call of Duty if you're out there playing Call of Duty or whatever the new games are out there you gotta do that on the, on the control.
• 0:32
  Like all of us, you know, all of us are.
• 0:33
  Frank: I think I, I would encourage to show guys you know, as much as possible, especially when you, when you can identify that something's kind of wrong or that something's not getting done properly and not from a situation to call guys out or be like, Hey, this isn't right. You know, you're not doing a good job but to, to help show what's the problem?
• 0:34
  I'm not, not trying to make you look bad, I just wanna, what, what's the situation we can help fix it?
• 0:35
  Mm-hmm. 30 years in the industry. How would you talk to a tech or give advice to a technician that might have to bring that, that sort of stuff up? 'cause you're direct, you know, but you've been doing it for 30 years. Yeah. If I'm only been doing it for two years, how, how, what, what kind of approach or advice could you give them?
• 0:36
  Well, what was your thought process? You know, when you thought you were, you were working on this case, what was the what was the, did you put it in defrost? Maybe? What was the, the amps on the heater, you know, was the drain, like, figure out what, where they're coming from or what their thought process is.
• 0:37
  So you gotta bring this stuff up and maybe it's not gonna be the way you want it to turn out. 'cause this happens lots. It happened to me lots, ? But that's the learning. The more you do it just like you, where you want to get right to the point. Now, 25 years ago, that wasn't, maybe you were, but 25 years ago, you probably weren't trying to get right to the point.
• 0:38
  Trevor: Yeah. And it's, so one of the big things that I keep talking about, I didn't know when I was at Rita. I was the keynote speaker at Rita last week, and one of the thing I talked about is accountability and everyone, we all need to be accountability for our actions.
• 0:39
  Trevor: And that, and that's hard, you know, and so I, I really, it's, once again, it's the reps like going to the gym, doing the reps controls, doing the, doing the reps and the controls.
• 0:40
  We don't really have a score. If we had a, a technician score, and especially the, the longer you're with a, a, a company and you have more service calls under your belt, that score is gonna be reflective of, of your abilities to, to repair systems. You know, you're also gonna see maybe where you're, maybe you're good at fixing leaks, but you're not good with oil systems, you know, or vice versa, you know?
• 0:41
  You know, troubleshoot a little bit faster and reduce the, the call outs to those lead technicians. 'cause I do talk to a lot of technicians and they're like, Trevor, man, I'm just getting burnt because I took 25 calls from my team today. You know, and I still have a job to do. Like, I'm still the lead tech and I, I got calls and I got customers, but I'm taking all these calls and I want to help.
• 0:42
  Because you, have you taken other courses, have you taken other courses besides just technical courses to help your course? Yes. Yeah.
• 0:43
  It's not the same job. Once you get out of the field, it's kind of totally different. And it has a, not a totally different skillset, but there's a lot of different skills required when you're in the office versus when you're in the field.
• 0:44
  He was going in and taking these management courses and then the, the p and p courses and he is taking all these extra courses. And then I watched his career go from technician to working on a manufacturer, then working back as into office. Now he's a VP of a company within like six years. But all the whole time, 10 years ago he said, he's like, I know where I want to go.
• 0:45
  Start also networking toward that. You know, a lot of our industry, which is true for probably a lot of business, is about networking. You know, the more people you know, the more opportunities will open up in front of you. The more you'll be exposed to that. Maybe you didn't even know two years ago.
• 0:46
  Use technology to, to help you out. Make some good connections. Networking with other techs that are good techs. We all know who the good ones are. You know befriend those guys, those guys can be colleagues or friends for many years. I certainly wouldn't be where I was at, where I'm at now without the help of many other people.
• 0:47
  Finding coaches, finding mentors, finding people that can push you to that next level. Because that's, that's what it is. And, and Sharon Frank, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to do this. We'll do, we'll do another one for sure, because I wanna pick your brain. Oh, no,
• 0:48
  This is why we get stores continue to pop up. More systems happen, more people come on the planet. We need more food. So it's not gonna stop. Frank, I wanna thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah. And joining us.