This past Fourth of July my family made a stop at the Hoover Dam on route to Las Vegas. The Hoover Dam is an engineering marvel on a massive scale. For more than 70 years the damn has stood with almost no structural and decorative changes taken place. You can still see the surveying notes along the tunnel walls and the original tiling is a work of art. I felt like a lot more care and craftsmanship went into building the damn and all structures before the days of commodity construction. Take old sheet metal ductwork for example, only a tin knocker had the knowledge and skill to install a home’s duct system. These days flex duct is used and can be installed by almost anyone, which has lead to excessive conditioned air wasted to the outside and huge inefficiencies. How long have these careless installations been doing on? One indicator is that it is not hard to find an HVAC contractor who has been “doing this for 20 years” and has never sealed a duct system. I’m not saying we need to go back to the days of painfully slow production and growth, but perhaps a little more common sense and a sense of pride in ones work will go a long way and have positive impacts for generations to come.
