history
Walt Lipski founded Engineered Air Balance Co., Inc. in 1956 as the nation's first provider of independent testing, adjusting and balancing services. Jim Reid joined him the next year and together this pathfinding duo embarked upon a series of firsts:
- 1956 — coined the term Total System Balancing, which Associated Air Balance Council (AABC) holds forth as the benchmark for the profession.
- 1960s — pioneered the methods to pressurize Titan II nuclear missile silos and performed testing and balancing on 34 of the 50 sites located across the nation.
- 1965 — with a small group of testing and balancing agents, co-founded AABC, the industry’s first certifying agency.
We continue to forge the trail that others follow, continuously researching new techniques to maintain precision and consistency across all testing procedures:
- 1970s — developed procedures to test and balance laboratories.
- 1980s — findings from our testing smoke control systems for jails were used to develop ASHRAE’s standards for commissioning these systems.
- 1993 — our results from testing a 10 megawatt fire at San Antonio’s Alamodome changed the mathematical formula in ASHRAE’s Smoke and Fire System Design Guide.
- 2002 — staff members wrote AABC’s 2002 National Standards for Total System Balancing.
- 2008 — copyrighted our in-house Testing, Adjusting and Balancing Procedures Manual 2007.
Walt Lipski
Jim Reid
“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
