I've spent twenty-five years in HVAC, most of it as a design engineer and ten of those years were as a contractor learning to hate design engineers. I'm currently a Senior Associate at an MEP consulting firm.
My focus is the building automation and controls (BATC) design, the part of the building that makes the rest of it work together: the integrations to HVAC, plumbing and fire protection, electrical, and IT. If a building is a body, I consider the BMS to be the brain.
While I love MEP/HVAC, it has always been a fairly traditional discipline with small changes in approach. There isn't a wave of new technology every year. That's because most of what we do is still air, water, and power, and all that operates on well understood physical properties. However, I find that the understanding of these properties is what makes my job so interesting.
I've done that work in labs, healthcare, commercial buildings, and data centers. And early on I helped build one of the first automated demand-response systems in New York City. I've been interested ever since in how far you can actually take building controls rather than just maintaining a temperature.
I currently work from New York/New Jersey area.
Topics
The things I spend most of my working time on, and the subjects this site keeps coming back to:
- Building automation systems and HVAC controls design. Application of ASHRAE standards, including Guideline 36.
- Fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) and BAS commissioning: finding what a building is actually doing from its trend data (the BMS Trend Analyzer grew out of this)
- Psychrometrics, both the calculator and where it came from
- Hydronic systems and the equipment in them
- Weather and climate data: where it comes from, how to check it, and what you can do with it
- AI agents and AI applications in HVAC, starting from how language models work and what AI agents might become
Outside HVAC, I'm also into cryptanalysis and classical ciphers (there's a one-time pad tool) and robotics.
The tools on this site are for exploration and learning and are not a substitute for licensed professional engineering. However, I'm always happy to discuss anything you might want to know more about, or learn something that I can do better.
If you want to talk controls, email me at john.carioto@gmail.com or find me on LinkedIn.