At a busy, large seafood restaurant — one that specializes in southern-fried dishes — kitchen grease was moving faster than customers’ forks. But the restaurant’s concrete interceptor couldn’t handle the flow, causing lotchen grease to be discharged directly into the sanitary sewer system. The discharge created a blockage at a nearby municipal pumping station used to pump effluent to the local sewage treatment plant. The blockage clogged the station’s pumps, reducing its ability to transfer wastewater.

PM Engineer Chief Editor Nicole Krawcke sat down with longtime Plumbing & Mechanical and PM Engineer Columnist Ray Wohlfarth.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, U.S. legislators allocated more than $200 billion to school districts to improve safety and student achievement. The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) legislation specifically permits using these funds for the “testing, repairing and upgrading projects to improve air quality in school buildings.”

“Bếp” in Vietnamese means “kitchen,” which made it the perfect word for Adam Gilpatrick and his wife to use when naming their first restaurant, Bếp Vietnamese Kitchen, in downtown Holly Springs, North Carolina, a suburb of the state’s bustling capital of Raleigh.

Heat pump technology is becoming increasingly recognized as the way forward to achieve decarbonization goals. According to a 2022 report by the International Energy Agency, while 190 million heat pump units were in operation in buildings worldwide in 2021, heat pumps still only meet about 10% of the global heating need in buildings — below the deployment level required to get on track with Net Zero emissions by 2050. Which leaves lots of opportunity for growth in this market.

Plumbing & Mechanical Chief Editor Nicole Krawcke had the chance to discuss the new products and how they meet market needs with Curtis Maderios, lead key account manager for Grundfos Domestic Building Services, and Adam Schwarz, global product manager, program circulators small for Grundfos Domestic Building Services, in an exclusive interview before the products were announced.

Dubbed the largest HVACR event of the year, the 2023 AHR Expo returns to Atlanta Feb. 6-8, while the co-located 2023 ASHRAE Winter Conference will take place Feb. 4-8 at the Omni Hotel at CNN Center and Building A of the Georgia World Congress Center.

As the United States moves to decarbonize commercial and residential building structures, all eyes turn to heat pumps as a way to increase energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions for not only space heating but domestic hot water as well.

Two apartment buildings in the Bronx will soon get their heating, cooling and hot water from wastewater and geothermal energy. No more money down the drain, literally!

Previously only common in high-performance computing (HPC), a growing number of data centers are adopting liquid cooling. The driver — an increasing number of high-density racks being deployed to support artificial intelligence and other latency-sensitive and processing-intensive business applications.