AI for HVAC equipment manufacturers, tested on schedules your applications engineers already quoted.

The request comes through a rep, and the rules come from someone else. Your rep agency forwards a marked-up schedule, a specification section and a bid date, written by an engineer who may never speak to your factory. Old Dominion University's Division 23 standard shows the owner's side of that: each scheduled unit names a basis of design plus two approved alternates in the schedule notes, and a table in the same standard lists the allowed makes by equipment type, custom air handlers and dedicated outdoor air units among them. Every request your applications engineers have closed already shows how such a document got answered, and that is what the proof of concept is scored against.

AHRI's programs are narrower than the phrase on the spec. Its air-handling unit program certifies supply fan ratings, meaning fan speed, fan electrical power and, under one rating method, brake horsepower. It applies to factory-made assemblies with a maximum design external static above 1.0 inch of water and leaves out units whose plenum fans come only with top or bottom discharge. Casings sit in a separate program under AHRI 1350, with five rated classes covering deflection, air leakage, thermal transmittance with and without leakage, and thermal bridging, and it stops at 150 square feet of exterior air tunnel cross section. A sentence that just says AHRI certified doesn't say which of these it means.

Fan certification has a catalog in mind. AMCA's Certified Ratings Program covers series-produced products. Custom products such as many industrial-process fans cannot be certified, though they can be tested to an AMCA standard in an accredited laboratory. A certified line comes up for a check test every three years, then every five and every seven after consecutive passes, and AMCA's review reaches a maker's electronic selection software along with its printed catalogs. That is one reason selection stays inside your program and with your engineer, in the test and after it.

Each product family answers to a different efficiency rule. DOE's standards for direct expansion dedicated outdoor air systems apply from May 1, 2024, rated by ISMRE2 in dehumidification and by ISCOP2 for heat pump heating, across eight equipment classes, half of them with ventilation energy recovery. Fans went another way: starting with the 2019 edition of ASHRAE 90.1, the fan provisions moved from fan efficiency grade to fan energy index, and the International Code Council's summary says a fan in a packaged rooftop air conditioner falls outside them because the unit is already listed equipment. One job can hold all three, each with its own efficiency line. We describe these rules only to show the work; nothing here is legal or engineering advice.

The second job runs on records made far from your plant. The University of Georgia's standards want a start-up report from a factory authorized technician no later than two weeks after start-up, air handlers included. Los Angeles World Airports' guide specification for packaged rooftop units asks for a start-up report on each unit and a five-year manufacturer's warranty on compressors, heat exchangers and condenser coils. When a part fails two summers later, your warranty desk goes looking for that report along with the serial number and the ship date, and each closed claim shows what it found.

One limit covers both jobs. Nothing in the proof of concept touches your ERP, your selection program, a live quote or a live claim. It selects no equipment, decides no claim and sends no decision to a rep, a contractor or an owner. An applications engineer approves every quote and a warranty administrator decides every claim. Defense and aerospace work stays out.