Monday, October 20, 2008

Excitement at Work

Over the past couple of weeks my HVAC guy has been prepping our air conditioning systems for winter. Turning on the gas, firing up the heaters and making sure everything is working as it should.

This morning he turned the heat on in one of our 20 ton roof top units and it caught fire. Pretty much the whole unit was involved. He already had one of the side panels off to vent off the small amount of smoke smell that occurs the first time you fire up a heater for the season so we could use fire extinguishers to keep the flames down until the fire trucks arrived.

Now you would think that a fire starting within moments of turning on the burner may have been burner related, that is what I was explaining to upper management as the firemen put out the flames and cut into the roof curb to extinguish fire that had moved along the curb. It turns out that I was mistaken. The fire inspector found that the fire was started by an electrical short in the fresh air damper motor.

Just goes to show, you can't take anything for granted.

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