Grrr, bloody cowboys

[JulianC]

Recently got a foot in with a big managing agent for the servicing and maintenance of centralised extract systems at a local luxury apartment development. Potentially plenty of work, since the systems haven't been touched in the 10 years they've been running. Got called out to one yesterday - landlady says it's totally kaput. A local, established and respected contracting company charged her nearly 400 quid a year ago to fix a part and it's not been right since, making odd noises until finally packing up completely. They want to charge her over a grand now for a complete new unit, saying the problem is unrelated to what they did previously (might be, might not - hard to prove either way).

I dropped the cover off and the problem was immediately evident - the centrifugal fan's bearing had collapsed and the fan had made a bid for freedom, taking some of its housing with it. Not a problem - easy fix with a new blower assembly and considerably cheaper than a new unit.

The tenant then pointed out the fan control unit and said that's what the last lot took away to fix and the system hadn't been right since. We were both curious to see what £400's worth of repair to this module looked like (a brand new one is less than £200 I've since found out) so I popped the cover off to find the only bit of non-factory flow soldering revealed a replacement 1uF cap! I'm in the wrong game. How do these buggers sleep at night!

 

[oldtimer]

Worked with a company for 3 months where their "Top" man could not figure how to wire and set a single phase roof fan on a contactor and overload so I asked him what he did and he said he pushed the contactor in with a screwdriver to test the fan but no joy so went to the fan and there was that burnt smell so I said you did take the transit brackets off the reply was whats tranisit brackets so I took that as a no

 

[Farmelectrics]

there all at it

 

[Geordie Spark]

Howdy!! :cowboy::indian_chief:

 

[sedgy34]

Howdey
The cowboys do help keep proper sparks in work

 

[Geordie Spark]

Howdey
The cowboys do help keep proper sparks in work

I'll tell you what bonny lad .... there's been many a time when THIS cowboy found and rectified the so-called "proper" sparks cock-ups. :wink_smile:

 

[sedgy34]

Get off your horse and drink your milk

 

[ackbarthestar]

At least now we know where all the bloody horses have gone to.....So now on this site there's no quick get away.

My advice is encourage customers to dump the maintainance contracts with large companies.

Imagine this:

A major player in the alarms industry encourage customers to take out maintainance contracts. My client has had one of these 'pay us all your money on a regular basis for the security of knowing that nothing will work' contract for five years.
My client has some electrical knowledge and got some advice.

He then called me in to verify what he had been given.

Sure enough, none of the sounders (sirens) had been connected up, even though they were inspected and tested on a regular basis.

The client was magnanimus to smile and call him a liar.

I very much doubt if this 'engineer' is still working for that particular company.

So very 21st century and so very shoddy......................... Trigger's revenge !

 

[trev]

I was once responsible for the maintenance on a hotel in Newcastle, one of the things in the weekly records was a test of the fire alarm every Monday at 11 AM, I was never allowed to do this but was expected to fill in the book as if I'd done it. When the fire brigade came out to spot check the place (because someone had sent them an email about the state of the place and what was going on) (wonder who that was hehe) the manager of the place produced monitoring records with what purported to be my signature on them. After telling the senior fire gadgie it wasn't my signature and giving him a sample of the real thing I walked out.