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Premises
Retail, restaurants, offices, clinics and light industrial along the Beach and Orangethorpe corridors. Mostly packaged rooftop units, mostly undocumented.
The record is the product
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 moves, the filter size it really takes, the state of the electrical connections and what the gas section looks like.
Readings go against the unit rather than against the building. That is the difference between a maintenance record and a pile of invoices, and it is what makes a drifting machine visible before it stops on a Friday afternoon.
Twice a year
Before the cooling load
- 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
Before the first cold night
- Combustion tested on gas sections, figures recorded
- Heat exchangers inspected
- Flue and combustion air checked as installed
- Defrost proved on heat pumps
- Filters replaced with ones that fit the rack
- Readings compared against spring and the drift noted
Three things we find in almost every kitchen
No make-up air
A hood extracting hard with nothing bringing air back holds the whole building at negative pressure. The front door pulls, the dining room is never warm, and every degree of conditioning you buy goes out through the roof.
Grease everywhere it should not be
Hood cleaning is a separate trade and a legal requirement in its own right. What we see is the consequence — fouled make-up air units and rooftop coils that have been breathing kitchen exhaust because of where somebody put them.
The unit sized for a shell
Rooftop units are often specified before anybody knows what the space will be. A unit chosen for open retail and occupied by a restaurant is not faulty, it is mismatched, and it wants a survey rather than a repair.
What we turn down
Chiller plant, building management systems on proprietary protocols, hood cleaning, and anything that genuinely wants a controls engineer rather than a mechanical contractor. We say so at the survey rather than after the second visit, and where we can we will tell you who does take it on.
We also turn down a maintenance contract on a building we have not surveyed. Signing a schedule for equipment nobody has looked at is how you end up paying to maintain the two units that were fine.