Nik Doukas - hvac/acc

Commercial HVAC enthusiast / aspiring LP. All views are my own. Let’s get this bread💰🇺🇸

[Nik Doukas - hvac/acc @DoukasNik]

Allow me to introduce myself - I'm Nik, and I'm from the Chicagoland area. I work in the commercial HVAC space and over the course of my career I've sold commercial service agreements, equipment and turnkey projects. In my career, I've gotten to sell and service a variety of HVAC systems from the largest commercial chillers to single furnaces for a small house.

I look at these from the lens of not only the sales engineer but also the lens of property ownership. I grew up in a small family owned real estate business where HVAC was a big source of maintenance calls and tenant disputes - not something a homeowner or landlord should take lightly.

In my career, I took a brief hiatus from HVAC where I worked for a large Commercial Real Estate data provider and then briefly a boutique digital consulting firm. I have and hope to provide a unique perspective on the intersection of HVAC as it relates to operating costs in Real Estate ownership as well as how data can inform your purchase decisions.

In addition to my own thoughts on things I have a pretty comprehensive grasp on the HVAC world, and can lend practical advice on different topics. Looking to acquire a large piece of RE? Send me the model numbers, I'll give you an opinion. Got a huge maintenance bill? Let's talk about it, I could weigh in on it, give you my 2c on it.

If you buy, own or manage real estate, let's chop it up here. If you have a business and have a big expense, or even just have your first apartment - I'll try to answer your questions.

"Nik, what's in it for you?" I've learned so much on X dot com, I feel like the time spent scrolling here has been more effective than some of my full length semesters of college. If I can lend some useful information to those that know a thing about business ownership and RE/ investing, I just hope I can keep learning and absorbing info from you guys too.

Oh and I like sarcasm too, so go ahead

[Nik Doukas - hvac/acc @DoukasNik]

Grandma Doukas must’ve studied at Guantanamo Bay

[Washingtons ghost @washghost1]

This is exactly how I remember it

[Nik Doukas - hvac/acc @DoukasNik]

Just a sales rep waiting for software to load

[HVAC Barclay @BigDickBarclay]

"Do you know anything about Willis Carrier?"

"No... "

"His early experimental work was a little too industrial for my taste, purely focused on print shop humidity. But when he co-founded the Carrier Engineering Corporation in 1915, I think he really came into his own—commercially, and artistically. The whole concept of 'Manufactured Weather' has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the idea of human comfort a big boost. He’s been compared to other inventors like Benjamin Franklin, but I think Willis had a far more pragmatic, commercial sense of utility."

"Is that a raincoat?"

"Yes, it is! In '22, Carrier released this; the low-pressure centrifugal refrigeration machine, his most accomplished technological masterpiece. I think their undisputed triumph was the 1925 installation at the Rivoli Theatre on Broadway. A breakthrough so complete, most people probably didn’t look at the screen. But they should, because it’s not just about the pleasures of cooling and the importance of escaping the summer heat. It’s also a personal statement about the total control of our environment!"
"HEY, PAUL!"

"Try getting a window unit from Dorsia now, you stupid bastard!"

[Nik Doukas - hvac/acc @DoukasNik]

@Jason_Wagner_RE Alexi saw the combine bench video and couldn’t help himself

[doomer @uncledoomer]

its the weekend

[certain planes @happier_isles]

costco has adidas track suits for $30 and now my whole family looks like eastern european gangsters

[Nik Doukas - hvac/acc @DoukasNik]

Typical night at our house

[Nik Doukas - hvac/acc @DoukasNik]

40 pages in and no mention of gabagool yet

[Nik Doukas - hvac/acc @DoukasNik]

@grok edit my family pictures put mom and dad together like we are a happy family and I’m their special boy who they love so much and would never make cry

[phx 💥 @phxstrikesback]

hot summer nights, mid-july

[Nik Doukas - hvac/acc @DoukasNik]

Since when is it corny to love your bros???

[Mattfleck Updates @mattfleckupdate]

No because this is just the tip of the iceberg

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world's press.

Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.

It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.

Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life's work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.

So he called it a health programme.

The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat's milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.

The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.

Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.

The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.

Walford's verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.

He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.

He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.

Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.

Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.

The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.

[Nik Doukas - hvac/acc @DoukasNik]

@vrexec Lil BB gun lol

[Nik Doukas - hvac/acc @DoukasNik]

I look like I sell tanks lol

[Degen CPA @DrewVento]

Congratulations on earning $125,000. Your reward is you now qualify for a starter home 53 minutes from work.

[trish @TrisH0x2A]

it’s kind of funny that Chrome accidentally became the PDF viewer most people use

while Adobe spent decades making Acrobat heavier slower and somehow more frustrating

[delty @DeltyThe73rd]

ngl I've been saying this for years