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Light industrial, warehousing, small manufacturing, trade counters, offices and clinics across south-east Los Angeles County.
Nothing else happens until this exists
Every unit gets an entry: what it is, where it sits, roughly what age, the condition of the curb and the roof penetration, whether the economiser actually travels, the filter size it really takes, the state of the electrical connections, the gas section, and where the condensate goes.
On an industrial building we also record the things that decide a future job rather than today’s: roof access and load routes, where a crane could stand, whether the curb is a standard size, and which units share a gas run or a panel. That is the difference between a change-out that is planned and one that is improvised.
Twice a year, recorded against the machine
- Condenser coils cleaned properly rather than rinsed
- Charge verified by superheat and subcooling
- Belts, bearings and drive alignment
- Economiser dampers opened and proved to travel
- Drains cleared and float switches tested
- Electrical connections torqued, contactors inspected
- Roof condition around each curb noted and photographed
- Combustion tested on gas sections and unit heaters, figures recorded
- Heat exchangers inspected
- Flues checked as installed, including the high ones
- Defrost proved on heat pumps
- Filters replaced with ones that fit the rack
- Destratification fans checked where fitted
- Readings compared against spring and the drift noted
Four things about a warehouse
The heat is at the roof
A tall building with unit heaters can be holding a comfortable figure at a thermostat on a wall while the roof space is warm and the floor, where the people and the pipework are, is not. Destratification fans are cheap next to the heating they save.
The inspection nobody does
Suspended unit heaters are high up and reaching them needs a lift, so they get serviced from the ground or not at all. A partially separated flue is both a heating failure and a carbon monoxide problem in a building where nobody is standing near it.
Dock doors decide everything
An open dock door turns a heated building into an unheated one in about ten minutes. We will measure it and say so, and the answer is usually operational rather than mechanical — which is a cheaper answer than more heating.
What the work itself puts in the air
Welding, spraying, cutting and solvents all want extract designed for them, and that is a different exercise from comfort ventilation. Where it crosses into occupational exposure we will say so and tell you it needs somebody who does that assessment.
What we turn down
Chiller plant, building management systems on proprietary protocols, commercial refrigeration and cold rooms, hood cleaning, process exhaust where it becomes an occupational exposure question, and anything that genuinely wants a controls engineer rather than a mechanical contractor.
We also turn down a maintenance contract on a building we have not surveyed, and we will not take responsibility for what a temperature excursion does to anything a building is storing.