We are happy to announce the launch of HVAC wiki. The aim of this wiki is to accumulate and make available information about everything related to HVAC.

HVAC wiki will be a place for documentations, manuals, debugging techniques, installation instructions, rules of thumb… in short, everything that could help professionnals in their day-to-day job.

It must be made abundantly clear this wiki is not intended to replace Wikipedia. Instead, what we hope to accomplish with your help is a place for everyone to share information that might otherwise be considered ‘noise’ in other places.

Why?

Because the status quo sucks.

Most of the knowledge in HVAC is oral tradition.

Besides the basic mathematical equations, you can’t easily find anything you are looking for. It’s all slowly learned by meeting senior professionals who can give you tips they learned the hard way.

Documentations from vendors are often minimal, or even purposely lacking in critical information:

For the MetasysSysAgent default password, contact your local Johnson Controls® representative.

The small portion of knowledge available online is scattered all over the place in articles, PDFs, and remote forums, making sure that they will never be updated.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s up to us to change the situation.

How to Know What to Contribute

It’s really simple: would that have helped you in one of your task? If the answer is yes, then you should add it!

It can be anything:

• Typical pipe dimension for a given task;
• Preferred type of glue;
• Controls tricks to deal with those pesky electric heaters;
• How to use Wireshark when the BACnet port is NOT 47808;

We mean it: anything somewhat related to HVAC is welcome.

Leave Notes for Yourself!

I personally can’t remember how many times I’ve gone through the pain of debugging a system, and say to myself “Bah, I’ll never encounter this type of system again”… WRONG! If only I had some notes from my previous adventures.

Let’s say you encounter a problem with a software on a particular version of Windows. Hopefully you’ll find to a way to fix this. Well, this ‘fix’ is the kind of info HVAC wiki is for.

Feels familiar?

Don’t worry about formatting. You, or anyone else, can always come back later and fix that. If you are in the heat of the moment, just leave some quick notes.

The cherry on top: the wiki’s URL is super easy to remember! wiki.hvac.io

Documentation as Living Documents

We, at HVAC.IO, are going to move all our documentation into the wiki. This way, if some users think there’s some missing info, they are free to add it. (As a bonus, it’s also very easy to modify documents in a jiffy if we forgot something.)

We invite everyone to do the same thing.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to change the HVAC landscape.