Thursday, March 23, 2017

HVAC Failure: That's Why They Call It Practice

Full Disclosure:  I will not use any real names so as not to embarrass anyone.  Instead I will address my fellow HVAC students as Harry Potter character's names.

I, Adrian, nay.... Albus Brian Wulfric Percival Dumbledore was working on an outdoor A/C unit in our HVAC lab.



I had "Mad-Eye" Moody and Dedalus Diggle with me working on changing out a bad compressor for a newer one.




Our Instructor (Ron Weasley) was working with our group as well as others.  It was then we heard a giant "Woosh!" 



I look fifteen yards away to where our walk-in cooler/chiller was, and out came running George and Charlie Weasley.



P.S.  You can tell it's George since he has the hole in his ear.



Also, Charlie likes dragons. 

Anyway, I see George and Charlie run like bats out of Hell out of the walk-in cooler/chiller.  Behind them comes Fred Weasley completely soaked.



It seemed like Fred was using a turbo torch to braze copper piping inside the walk-in.  He placed the torch too close to the fire sensor, and the sprinklers went off inside the walk-in. 

I then smelled an awful smell.  It was something like a chemical or oil of some sort.  I didn't wait around for the smell of it to fill our lab area.  I went over and opened up our bay door to let some fresh air in. 

It was about that time the school's fire alarm went off.  It was about 10 seconds after that our Vice Principal came through the doors and yelled for everyone to get out, and that this wasn't a drill. 

So the whole school had to go out to our assigned safety areas.  We waited about 10 minutes out there.  I later found out they had to shut down the water for the whole school to stop the sprinkler system from continuing to pour water everywhere. 

Since the water was turned off for the entire school they told the students to grab their stuff and leave.  I had to pick my tools up out off the newly flooded HVAC lab floor.  I managed to account for all of them, so that was good.  I, along with all my other students left campus.  So it ended up being a short day for the entire school.  I'm not sure if they had everything fixed in time for the nighttime classes.

The one thing I can predict?  We are going to rib the heck out of Fred until we graduate.  I do feel bad for him.  I mean, the least I could have done is offer him an extra shirt I had in my backpack.  But in all fairness, we were told to leave immediately.  So tomorrow I'm going to tell Fred that he needs to work on his, "Aquamenti" spell.  Of course, I hope he gets the Harry Potter reference.

No comments:

Post a Comment