Full system retrofit and new duct work with 2 guys on a summer day in an attic that well...didn't really fit to say the least and had to be bent and forced into place and reshaped after the fact as well as cutting the attic access hole bigger and removing trim so get the air handler shell up
The 2nd job I had when I did residential changeouts, every day was like that, mostly. 15 hour days from May to September, and 6 days a week for June-August and even if you get done early, I still would go help the other crew so that their 15 hour day wouldn’t be 20+
Definitely a learning curve but holy shit there’s no way I could still do that.
Holy shit lol. 15hr days doing installs....
I'd be fried after a month.
1 install for me a day and I'm ready to call it lmfao.
I could never. But I understand I used to run a moving company and most days were 9-17hrs not including drive to and from work.
I could never do that again. My back never been the same lmao
I was about 35 at the time, I was just starting out in hvac from a completely different career. The amount of guys age 19-25 that we had that summer was at least a dozen, most couldn’t hack the heat & work and I just kept my mouth shut and suffered through it.
My lead installer was about 12 years younger than me and had been doing hvac since he was 17. I wasn’t gonna drop out in front of this kid, ever.
Oh I feel that, very similar for me. Spite and pride got me through my helper/installer stage lmfao
Honestly most people drop out of this trade from the heat.
I'd rather be on a roof than in an attic though I'll tell ya that rn.
Dude you're giving me hope. I'm 34, and looking to get into the trade. I don't want to look like an idiot, or be old and slow compared to the 20 year olds, but I think I can do the job.
Lmfao nah this was last year in August or September.
Shit fucking sucked.
And ofc lead tech Mc fucking I know everything, was the one who underquoted the job leaving us to suffer under time constraints.
Istg my duct knife would've been a murder weapon if she showed up lol
Been there, same for me coming back from an on call job about 200 miles from home near the end of a week that turned out to be about 75 hours.
My wife was worried because I was acting so weird, I wasn’t even acting like myself, but I was just worn out and sleep deprived.
Yea same for my 25hr day. 4hr drive home...shit was scary as fuck.
I was seeing elephants and trains on the other side of the highway.
Had to call the owner at 4am so he could convince me that it would be safer to not stop (sarcasm)
Left that company due to hazardous and mentally toxic work environment lol
Before I started HVAC , I had a commercial driving job. One time I got stopped at an inspection station. I left there with a written citation for driving while fatigued.
Lmao ya I did commercial truck driving non-CDL but still.
Wished I had gotten stopped for some shit like that the owner was always having us cook the log books and break DOT laws I wanted him to get fined sooooo bad lol
Yea my cut off is 16hrs. Idc what the incentive or punishment is. At 16 I'm fucking done
I've done enough 15-20hr days as a young buck to know my limits as well as safety for myself and others.
We ain't robots
I mean it doss feel illegal for an employee to be legally allowed to threaten your job if u don't meet their absurd hour criteria.
Almost sounds like...slavery. lmao
Commercial projects can be weeks of 12 hr days when it’s crunch time.
I’ve had rough ones when commissioning a hospital. Started at 6 AM. Left the site at 9 PM.
We did paint line maintenance at a manufacturer. One burner was shot on the paint drying oven, totally unplanned. We were there 16 hours straight, no breaks. The plant was shut down until we got it fixed. Plant brass was riding us hard. I remember telling one that it wasn't getting done any faster with them interrupting us all the time.
Worked residential service for 6 months a couple years ago and got stuck with the on call phone for the first real freeze of the winter and at -45 celcius it was a 4 day streak of 21 hour days. Probably the hardest I've ever had to work in my life.
Some of the more senior techs at my shop had to do something similar for Christmas last year; over 400 calls over the weekend because of the hard freeze, so 2 techs and the service manager pulled (3) 20-hour shifts.
They got paid good and were given a bonus, but man, I could only imagine that wasn't near worth it.
Holy shit, I thought I was a beast at a 16 hour shift. Came home after midnight and my wife thought I was fucking around. Your on another level. Nice work!
I worked 23 hours straight last year, but I did stop to grab a bite to eat around 10 hours in.
Without a break of any kind, I've done numerous 12-14 hour days where I piss in a roof drain and go back to work.
We all should be taking our breaks and lunches and avoid the habit of killing ourselves for a company's benefit, but sometimes it's just easier to suffer for a while and get the job done instead of breaking up the workflow.
18 hours on a Friday making sure a heat pump install was finished so the customer had heat for the weekend. It was during the middle of one of our worse snow storms. The helper I had that day called in. I had to drive back home in the middle of the night in a blizzard for a commute that usually takes about an hour.
Longest single work day was 33h including travel between like 6 jobs. I’ve done countless 20h+ single jobs during big installs, repairs, changeovers and even clearing drains.
Working 10s on new construction means working on the same job for 10 hours at a time at minimum, the other day the startup guy was running into problems so I did 13 hours but then I just worked less hours the next day. When I did residential service I worked through the night and a full day the next day once but it was on lots of different sites.
Stayed 15 hours for duct work one time, add on that it was almost a 2 hour drive home so 17 hours in total.
Some rich asshole had a 32 run house and demanded we stayed when it was scheduled for 2 days. We got it done and the boss gave me and my partner a paid day off as a sorry
DDC controls job at a Kaiser Hospital. I had to program all the thermostats, hot water coils, VAV boxes, exhaust and supply fans, chillers, boilers, and everything that went with it. There were over 10,000 points I had to program and I had 2 days to do programming, troubleshoot, and commission, so I ended up working 37 hours straight, 5 hours sleep, then 6 more hours. Got it done because the electrical contractor kicked ass and got all the prints tagged with stickers on the blueprint.
I once worked 30 hrs straight. We had an unofficial contest when I was young and dumber. Seeing who could work the most hours. I won, but boy did I get an ass chewing! 😂
Using "breaks" kinda loosely, but I got sent to a gold mine in Alaska to overhaul a bunch of 70 ton AHUs. Two weeks of 12 on 12 off shifts, had to stay on site in barracks, no booze, only the cafeteria and a shitty little general store for food. Paid really fucking well, though.
19 hours. Had to recover a dozen systems, cut the lines back to below roof line, take units off rotting outdoor shelter, let roofers do their thing, carpenters had a new shelter ready to drop in place, electricians ran new up-to-code wiring, then we reinstalled all the systems in 1 day. Just me and another apprentice for most of the day. Everything worked, left at 1am
Just did 16.5 this Monday. On call right when the heatwave hit our state and my backup had a family emergency. Service tech. Still recovering from the week.
24 hours straight. I did 40 4” pipe welds. It’s was a Thursday 6am to Friday 6am. I drank water and ate pizza in between welds as my fitter was getting the next weld ready. I could barely move until Monday lol.
38 hours straight. Was doing putting in a bunch of split system furnaces in different new construction homes by myself. When I went to the shop in the morning to grab more equipment they was surprised I woke up so early to get to the shop when it opened, I told them I never stopped working yet. My supervisor was like wtf is wrong with you go home lol. I told him after I finish a few more homes I would. HR was apparently pissed at me for doing all that.
Many life time's ago in another world by now a customer at a golf club needed a new evaporator and condenser unit and line set and walk-inn box.
The customer wanted me and my partner to do it in 24 hrs.
We did complete the job early in the morning, but the last few hours was the worst.
26 hours. Full retro fit in a super market. 6 techs. Replaced every solenoid, txv, and replaced all service/ball valves. At the same time boss man was with a helper replaced the rack air cooled condenser. Nice ass paycheck. Then I a few 16 hour shift just watching a leak detection screen at a ammonia plant because the alarms were not working.
Well we did an overnight install at a bank, replaced like 7 RTU’s and a god damn cassette. Well we worked the normal 8-5 that day, met up at the bank at 530 and started breaking the units down, ran into a few unforeseen issues. We didn’t get off the roof till 930am the next morning, got home around 11-11:15am. I wasn’t the nicest person to be around that day 😂
Been in hvac since 06. Did residential retrofit for 12yrs. ALWAYS called it after 15hrs no matter what. 7am-10pm is long enough. Even now as a oncall tech I stick to my guns. Fuck them people its cool at my house
16 hours. 2 full systems, 1 existing and adding one to the third floor attic with duct work 3 hours away from our shop. There were 4 of us. Lineset was a bitch as we needed a lift. Downstairs ac was 3 ton and upstairs was 2. Apprentice fucked up and reversed them so I had to recover, repipe it, and recharge. With drive time the total hours was 22 and I called in the next day.
Longest HVAC job was around 15 hours. Shortly after I started, was just a helper. Doing a high efficiency gas boiler for a house with in floor radiant in the middle of the winter. Boss had the wrong pumps, then the new pumps didn’t fit, then we were short fittings, it was a nightmare. I’m the lead now and sometimes he comes to help me when I need another set of hands, but I’ve figured out he just slows everything wayyy down.
Try 3 days up, a few hours of sleep, and repeat while our users bringing us food 3 times a day to keep us onsite, eating at the console which was a big no no, only 2 people who were out of California for the Russian flu running 3 mainframes in a busy government computer site.
I did 3 full 4 ton installs including replacing copper started at 7a finished just after 2a never left the job site but did pack 5 sandwich’s and a bunch of water and Gatorade
In HVAC? 14 hrs Other job? 25hrs
What was the HVAC job, if you don't mind me asking? I've only ever done refridgeration, so I'm curious what exactly could be so bad.
Full system retrofit and new duct work with 2 guys on a summer day in an attic that well...didn't really fit to say the least and had to be bent and forced into place and reshaped after the fact as well as cutting the attic access hole bigger and removing trim so get the air handler shell up
The 2nd job I had when I did residential changeouts, every day was like that, mostly. 15 hour days from May to September, and 6 days a week for June-August and even if you get done early, I still would go help the other crew so that their 15 hour day wouldn’t be 20+ Definitely a learning curve but holy shit there’s no way I could still do that.
Holy shit lol. 15hr days doing installs.... I'd be fried after a month. 1 install for me a day and I'm ready to call it lmfao. I could never. But I understand I used to run a moving company and most days were 9-17hrs not including drive to and from work. I could never do that again. My back never been the same lmao
I was about 35 at the time, I was just starting out in hvac from a completely different career. The amount of guys age 19-25 that we had that summer was at least a dozen, most couldn’t hack the heat & work and I just kept my mouth shut and suffered through it. My lead installer was about 12 years younger than me and had been doing hvac since he was 17. I wasn’t gonna drop out in front of this kid, ever.
Oh I feel that, very similar for me. Spite and pride got me through my helper/installer stage lmfao Honestly most people drop out of this trade from the heat. I'd rather be on a roof than in an attic though I'll tell ya that rn.
The occasional breeze on the roof makes a world of difference from the stale stuffy heat in the attic
And then you can’t wipe sweat away because the insulation is stuck to your arms.
Nothing like wiping sweat away with a sleeve covered in insulation fiberglass lmao
Dude you're giving me hope. I'm 34, and looking to get into the trade. I don't want to look like an idiot, or be old and slow compared to the 20 year olds, but I think I can do the job.
Holy shit are you my coworker because I just did one that took 14 hours for those exact reasons a few weeks ago 😂
Lmfao nah this was last year in August or September. Shit fucking sucked. And ofc lead tech Mc fucking I know everything, was the one who underquoted the job leaving us to suffer under time constraints. Istg my duct knife would've been a murder weapon if she showed up lol
30 hrs. I did stop to eat. I’m counting leaving home till returning, never stopped to sleep
Ur a beast. 25hrs and I was full on hallucinating on the drive home at 4am lmao
Been there, same for me coming back from an on call job about 200 miles from home near the end of a week that turned out to be about 75 hours. My wife was worried because I was acting so weird, I wasn’t even acting like myself, but I was just worn out and sleep deprived.
Yea same for my 25hr day. 4hr drive home...shit was scary as fuck. I was seeing elephants and trains on the other side of the highway. Had to call the owner at 4am so he could convince me that it would be safer to not stop (sarcasm) Left that company due to hazardous and mentally toxic work environment lol
Before I started HVAC , I had a commercial driving job. One time I got stopped at an inspection station. I left there with a written citation for driving while fatigued.
Lmao ya I did commercial truck driving non-CDL but still. Wished I had gotten stopped for some shit like that the owner was always having us cook the log books and break DOT laws I wanted him to get fined sooooo bad lol
I highly recommend never doing it. It was not a pleasant experience
Yea my cut off is 16hrs. Idc what the incentive or punishment is. At 16 I'm fucking done I've done enough 15-20hr days as a young buck to know my limits as well as safety for myself and others. We ain't robots
I try to call it after 12.
Ideally 12 for sure. 16 would be my leave home and get back home time. So yea 12 hours of actual work is my cut off lmao
I think we need to just make that a universal law 😂
I mean it doss feel illegal for an employee to be legally allowed to threaten your job if u don't meet their absurd hour criteria. Almost sounds like...slavery. lmao
Commercial projects can be weeks of 12 hr days when it’s crunch time. I’ve had rough ones when commissioning a hospital. Started at 6 AM. Left the site at 9 PM.
What do you mean no breaks? No lunch, snack time, water breaks? If you mean longest day, yeah like 20hrs
No dedicated time for rest or lunch. I eat snacks on the job all the time
When I do change outs I get paid by the job. We really don't take breaks except for safety. It's hot in south texas
I also work for myself, so there's that
We did paint line maintenance at a manufacturer. One burner was shot on the paint drying oven, totally unplanned. We were there 16 hours straight, no breaks. The plant was shut down until we got it fixed. Plant brass was riding us hard. I remember telling one that it wasn't getting done any faster with them interrupting us all the time.
Worked residential service for 6 months a couple years ago and got stuck with the on call phone for the first real freeze of the winter and at -45 celcius it was a 4 day streak of 21 hour days. Probably the hardest I've ever had to work in my life.
Good God Almighty - and you survived???
Needed some assistance by day 3 but yeah. Truck stop bennies for the win!
Some of the more senior techs at my shop had to do something similar for Christmas last year; over 400 calls over the weekend because of the hard freeze, so 2 techs and the service manager pulled (3) 20-hour shifts. They got paid good and were given a bonus, but man, I could only imagine that wasn't near worth it.
Yeah sad part is I had 2 other techs helping me and they were doing 12-14 hour days themselves.
Holy shit, I thought I was a beast at a 16 hour shift. Came home after midnight and my wife thought I was fucking around. Your on another level. Nice work!
I worked 23 hours straight last year, but I did stop to grab a bite to eat around 10 hours in. Without a break of any kind, I've done numerous 12-14 hour days where I piss in a roof drain and go back to work. We all should be taking our breaks and lunches and avoid the habit of killing ourselves for a company's benefit, but sometimes it's just easier to suffer for a while and get the job done instead of breaking up the workflow.
18 hours on a Friday making sure a heat pump install was finished so the customer had heat for the weekend. It was during the middle of one of our worse snow storms. The helper I had that day called in. I had to drive back home in the middle of the night in a blizzard for a commute that usually takes about an hour.
Do you mean working 40 hours straight since I had no relief during a storm ( power plant engineer) ? Then …40 hours 😁
Longest single work day was 33h including travel between like 6 jobs. I’ve done countless 20h+ single jobs during big installs, repairs, changeovers and even clearing drains.
Working 10s on new construction means working on the same job for 10 hours at a time at minimum, the other day the startup guy was running into problems so I did 13 hours but then I just worked less hours the next day. When I did residential service I worked through the night and a full day the next day once but it was on lots of different sites.
Stayed 15 hours for duct work one time, add on that it was almost a 2 hour drive home so 17 hours in total. Some rich asshole had a 32 run house and demanded we stayed when it was scheduled for 2 days. We got it done and the boss gave me and my partner a paid day off as a sorry
DDC controls job at a Kaiser Hospital. I had to program all the thermostats, hot water coils, VAV boxes, exhaust and supply fans, chillers, boilers, and everything that went with it. There were over 10,000 points I had to program and I had 2 days to do programming, troubleshoot, and commission, so I ended up working 37 hours straight, 5 hours sleep, then 6 more hours. Got it done because the electrical contractor kicked ass and got all the prints tagged with stickers on the blueprint.
I once worked 30 hrs straight. We had an unofficial contest when I was young and dumber. Seeing who could work the most hours. I won, but boy did I get an ass chewing! 😂
32 hours. I slept for ten straight at the end of it. Worked over 100 hours that week.
36 hours straight replacing 3) 6 inch steel risers for condenser water in an 18 story building. We stopped for lunch and dinner. And that's about it.
13 hr hvac. 16 hour corrections
Using "breaks" kinda loosely, but I got sent to a gold mine in Alaska to overhaul a bunch of 70 ton AHUs. Two weeks of 12 on 12 off shifts, had to stay on site in barracks, no booze, only the cafeteria and a shitty little general store for food. Paid really fucking well, though.
19 hours. Had to recover a dozen systems, cut the lines back to below roof line, take units off rotting outdoor shelter, let roofers do their thing, carpenters had a new shelter ready to drop in place, electricians ran new up-to-code wiring, then we reinstalled all the systems in 1 day. Just me and another apprentice for most of the day. Everything worked, left at 1am
Just did 16.5 this Monday. On call right when the heatwave hit our state and my backup had a family emergency. Service tech. Still recovering from the week.
24 hours straight. I did 40 4” pipe welds. It’s was a Thursday 6am to Friday 6am. I drank water and ate pizza in between welds as my fitter was getting the next weld ready. I could barely move until Monday lol.
38 hours straight. Was doing putting in a bunch of split system furnaces in different new construction homes by myself. When I went to the shop in the morning to grab more equipment they was surprised I woke up so early to get to the shop when it opened, I told them I never stopped working yet. My supervisor was like wtf is wrong with you go home lol. I told him after I finish a few more homes I would. HR was apparently pissed at me for doing all that.
Many life time's ago in another world by now a customer at a golf club needed a new evaporator and condenser unit and line set and walk-inn box. The customer wanted me and my partner to do it in 24 hrs. We did complete the job early in the morning, but the last few hours was the worst.
26 hours on a steam shut down for repairs
36 hours
26 hours. Full retro fit in a super market. 6 techs. Replaced every solenoid, txv, and replaced all service/ball valves. At the same time boss man was with a helper replaced the rack air cooled condenser. Nice ass paycheck. Then I a few 16 hour shift just watching a leak detection screen at a ammonia plant because the alarms were not working.
24 hours was not uncommon but I did 36 two times. It makes you stupid.
Well we did an overnight install at a bank, replaced like 7 RTU’s and a god damn cassette. Well we worked the normal 8-5 that day, met up at the bank at 530 and started breaking the units down, ran into a few unforeseen issues. We didn’t get off the roof till 930am the next morning, got home around 11-11:15am. I wasn’t the nicest person to be around that day 😂
That job sounds like it was a fun one 💰⚡️🔥
16 hours if you include drive time. Started at 8am. Clocked out at midnight and started again at 8 the next day.
Been in hvac since 06. Did residential retrofit for 12yrs. ALWAYS called it after 15hrs no matter what. 7am-10pm is long enough. Even now as a oncall tech I stick to my guns. Fuck them people its cool at my house
Adderall. “Anything is Possible”
16 hours. 2 full systems, 1 existing and adding one to the third floor attic with duct work 3 hours away from our shop. There were 4 of us. Lineset was a bitch as we needed a lift. Downstairs ac was 3 ton and upstairs was 2. Apprentice fucked up and reversed them so I had to recover, repipe it, and recharge. With drive time the total hours was 22 and I called in the next day.
Longest HVAC job was around 15 hours. Shortly after I started, was just a helper. Doing a high efficiency gas boiler for a house with in floor radiant in the middle of the winter. Boss had the wrong pumps, then the new pumps didn’t fit, then we were short fittings, it was a nightmare. I’m the lead now and sometimes he comes to help me when I need another set of hands, but I’ve figured out he just slows everything wayyy down.
Try 3 days up, a few hours of sleep, and repeat while our users bringing us food 3 times a day to keep us onsite, eating at the console which was a big no no, only 2 people who were out of California for the Russian flu running 3 mainframes in a busy government computer site.
I did 3 full 4 ton installs including replacing copper started at 7a finished just after 2a never left the job site but did pack 5 sandwich’s and a bunch of water and Gatorade
You guys are crazy, I’m 25 and can’t imagine working more than 10 hours a day
I know lmao cringing reading half these comments
HVAC? 6-7 hours real life? 29 hours.