Bill Coad's Writings |
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My first job in this industry was at McClure Engineering, a company that Chuck McClure founded in 1953. While the specifics elude me, Bill Coad became Chuck's partner and the vice president of the firm fairly early on in its history. I was fortunate enough to be mentored by both Bill and Chuck along with quite a few of the other senior staff what worked there at the time, and they all had a profound influence on my life and career.
Bill in particular spent a lot of time writing, authoring numerous ASHRAE papers, a text book, and magazine articles, including a regular column that ran in Heating, Piping, and AIr Conditioning for a long time. Because what he wrote was founded on fundamental principles, it is generally timeless, meaning the concepts he conveyed to myself and others in his articles in the 70's. 80's, and 90's are still valid and useful. Bill passed on several years ago and the things he authored are becoming harder to find out there on the web. Since I have electronic copies of a lot of them on my computer, I thought i would post them here as a general resource. If you want to get a sense of Bill, you may find the article Jerry Williams wrote about him (its the link below Bill's Picture) and/or the blog post I wrote in his memory to provide you with that. He really did have an important impact on our industry. |
Bill in his Office at McClure Engineering
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I believe all of what follows is in the public domain at this point, so I don't think I am violating any copyright laws by posting it here. Certainly that is not my intention; all I am trying to do is make what I consider to be valuable resources easily accessible to people who might have an interest in them and a need for them. If someone objects to any of these items being here, please let me know and I will take them off line or work out a mutually agreeable solution to keep them available.
Energy Conservation is an Ethic
This paper had a very significant influence on myself and others I know that work in the energy conservation field. In it Bill proposes that we have an obligation to practice our profession with an emphasis upon our responsibility to protect the long-range interests of the society we serve and, specifically, to incorporate the ethics of energy conservation and environmental preservation in everything we do. I very much agree with that. If you are working in the energy conservation field, I really think you will appreciate the content of this paper and will perhaps find it to be inspiring to you, just as I did.
| Energy Conservation is an Ethic - ASHRAE Journal, vol. 42, no. 7, p. 16-21 (energy_conservation_is_an_ethic.pdf) |
Fundamentals to Frontiers Columns
The first file link below is a zip file with all of the Fundamentals to Frontier's columns in it. The list below is a table of contents for what is in the zip file. Notice that in addition to the name of the article, the list includes the month when the article was written.
The reason that matter is that back when the article were scanned to make the .pdf files, computers would not support long file names. So the file names are in the form of YYYYMM where YYYY is the year the article was written in and MM is the month.
For me, the easiest way to find an article is to do a search for a key word in the list below, note the month and date, and then find the article in the zip file that way. For instance, A Dissertation on Loads, which was published in September 1985 is called 198509.pdf in the zip file.
You can search for key words directly on this web page, If you are not comfortable doing that or are having trouble doing that, I have also included links to a ,pdf file with the articles sorted alphabetically by title and another ,pdf file with the articles sorted by date of publication.
The reason that matter is that back when the article were scanned to make the .pdf files, computers would not support long file names. So the file names are in the form of YYYYMM where YYYY is the year the article was written in and MM is the month.
For me, the easiest way to find an article is to do a search for a key word in the list below, note the month and date, and then find the article in the zip file that way. For instance, A Dissertation on Loads, which was published in September 1985 is called 198509.pdf in the zip file.
You can search for key words directly on this web page, If you are not comfortable doing that or are having trouble doing that, I have also included links to a ,pdf file with the articles sorted alphabetically by title and another ,pdf file with the articles sorted by date of publication.
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Fundamentals of Steam Heating
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Steam was one of the most common ways to heat a building back in the very olden days. But in more modern times, hot water has supplanted it for many if not most comfort heating applications.
Unfortunately, knowledge of how to pipe hot water seems to have supplanted knowledge of how to pipe steam and condensate. They are not the same and if you go about it improperly, like in the picture to the right, you end up with a number of problems including water hammer, condensation induced water hammer, and poor comfort control. |
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I was fortunate enough to be sent out to look at an old steam heating system in a church very early in my career and was thus exposed to characteristics of steam and how to apply it from early on. This included having the benefit of mentors like Bill to keep me from messing things up to horribly. The article below is one Bill wrote for Heating, Piping, and Air Conditioning that is a really good primer on steam system basics; its kind of like a written version of what he and others shared with me.
| Fundamentals of Steam Heating (hpac_11-95_steam.pdf) |
The second file is a photocopy of a chapter from one of Bill's text books that he lent to me when I was learning about all of this. I didn't copy the title page, but in hindsight, I think the chapter might have been from a copy of Willis Carrier's book Modern Air Conditioning, Heating, and Ventilating because it is very similar to the Steam Heating Systems chapter in my 1950 vintage copy of the book. You can still find copies around, but I suspect you can find one for a better price than the one this link takes you to (who knows, maybe it has Mr. Carrier's autograph).
In any case, in my experience, the information in the chapter in Bill's text book (and the information in Mr. Carrier's book) is really hard to find these days. So I am risking a copyright violation to share it in the fond hope that doing so will help prevent the sort of thing you see in the picture. There is also a post on my blog that will link you up with some additional resources on steam. Most of them are also included in the resource list.
In any case, in my experience, the information in the chapter in Bill's text book (and the information in Mr. Carrier's book) is really hard to find these days. So I am risking a copyright violation to share it in the fond hope that doing so will help prevent the sort of thing you see in the picture. There is also a post on my blog that will link you up with some additional resources on steam. Most of them are also included in the resource list.
| Principles of Steam Heating (bill_coads_steam_text_book.pdf) |
Engineering Discussions
When Bill had is website up and running, he would occasionally write what he called an "Engineering Discussion"; now we would probably call it a blog post. Among the discussions he posted were the ones about how to make your own psych chart, which are the inspiration behind my blog posts showing how to do that trick in Excel (still a work in progress as I write this). In any case, the zip file below contains all of the Engineering Discussion articles from Bill's site which include discussions of psychrometrics, loads, the design process, and design parameters.
| Bill Coad's Engineering Discussions (engineering_discussions.zip) |
Energy Engineering and Management for Building Systems
This is a book Bill published in the early 1980's. It contains a lot of the content from his Fundamentals to Frontier's columns and then builds from that to provide a pretty comprehensive discussion of the engineering principles and concepts that you need to embrace if you are interested in good design practice and energy efficiency for building systems. At some point, he made the book available as a .pdf on his website, and this is a link to a copy of that file.
As with Bill's other writings, this was written in the 1980's, and thus, to some extent reflects some of the thinking and financial metrics of that time. But the underlying principles are based on fundamental physics. As a result, I feel that you can still gain a lot from studying what he had to say on the topic and then applying it to your current projects.
As with Bill's other writings, this was written in the 1980's, and thus, to some extent reflects some of the thinking and financial metrics of that time. But the underlying principles are based on fundamental physics. As a result, I feel that you can still gain a lot from studying what he had to say on the topic and then applying it to your current projects.
| Energy Engineering and Management for Building Systems (energyengineering.pdf) |
