Friday, September 17, 2004

You want me to do WHAT?!

Clime: A man for the job.

One of the three main AC units for the facility went hard down yesterday, effectively making a third of the office space in the building unfit to work in. (My area of influence, material storage, fabrication, and transportation, is not conditioned, no problem for me and my guys.)

Instead of doing something crazy like getting the property owner to set up a work ticket with an AC repair company, or even calling one ourselves, the plant manager finds out that one of his sales guys has 15 years experience in AC, so he sends this guy 30 feet up on the roof to trouble shoot it. We find out that the AC unit's compressor, fan, and fan motor are shot. The plant manager then goes out to an AC company and buys the replacement parts. Guess who gets to go up there and install them?

Yep, he sends me, my counterpart the Ops Manager, and one of my guys up onto the roof. Sheesh. The roof is ledgless, 30 feet up, and over a hundred degrees. Yikes. Why did I say 'sure' to this?

So we go up, find the unit, tear it apart, and bolt the replacement stuff on ourselves, along with wiring in a new capacitor. The 'AC guy' took the rest of the day off, before the parts arrived. We accomplish this while cracking up the whole time. Now comes the fun part. Wiring.

It looked straight forward from the wiring schematic riveted to the cover panel, but here was the kibosh on the master plan to Do-It-Ourselves: the motor and compressor had wire harnesses containing ground, yellow, black and white stripe, and brown wires. The unit had brown, purple, orange, and pink. Uh-oh.

Now we are really cracking up. OK guys, we freestyle it using three marginal degrees of commonsense put together, then when it blows after we turn the power back on and sets the whole facility ablaze sending toxic plastic fumes rising over the entire city, we race back down the ladder, keep running and say we were never up there.

Fire Inspector: "Gee, the entire site is one big lump of concrete, steel, and fuzed melted plastic. Look at this AC unit on the ground. It's a disaster, but the compressor and fan motor look brand new!"

Josh, Jeff, and Clime: "Uh, they aged rather gracefully?"

OK, Pink to Yellow. It looked like the 3-phase one. Brown to Orange. Black to Purple. I think. There was a general consensus on this. We called the AC guy at home and he said it sounded about right. 'About'? Gee, great! We bolted everything back down and screwed all the covers back on. Fingers crossed, we flipped the power lever. Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Hot air out of the fan port, cool air off the condensers.

We are all that is 'Man'.


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