Around the Combotronics' lunch table
All companies have an area where people come together for lunch. It may be a picnic table outside or a break room or a kitchen. We at Combo have a full Kitchen with stove, microwave, fridge, freezer and dishwasher. We use it daily with some cooking something on the stove and some microwaving we have even had someone bring a Crockpot. We have several tables and the noise level can get quite high at times. We share jokes and stories of our exploits with each other and find some to be quite amusing. This is a tale that has a moral to it as you will see at the end. The tale of the backward Impeller.
John Kerr (our CEO) would go on service calls, mostly to Asphalt plants, around the nation to help solve problems that the plant manager could not resolve on his/her own or with telephone tech support. In most of these cases, they cannot run or are running badly and are in danger of the state shutting them down, so they are quite motivated to get the problem resolved as quickly as they can as down time is money lost.
John had received a call from just such a plant who needed Combotronics’ service and needed it yesterday.
John had his own small Airplane that he used to get to these plants as quickly as possible. However his plane was down for maintenance, so he rented one with a pilot. As they neared the plant location, John asked the pilot to fly low, over the plant, so that he could get a look. What he saw was a cloud of smoke coming from the burner area and he could see that the flame was a bright orange color. He told the pilot that he thought he knew what was happening with the plant from the color of the flame.
Upon landing and getting to the plant, John walked around the burner area and asked if they had replaced the impeller motor recently. He was told yes, they had replaced it just last week. He asked when the problem began with the smoke and low output and was told that it was around that same time. He walked to the control box which had the wires for the impeller motor in it and pointed to two of the wires. He told the foreman that they needed to switch those wires with each other. They switched the wires and fired the plant back up. There was no smoke and the fire was blue, not red. He then explained to the foreman that the impeller had been running backward and that is what the problem had been.
Combotronics was able to provide a service to that customer in record time and had them up and running within hours of the phone call. That is what we at Combotronics are all about; Helping the customer with any problem of a technical nature, in a timely manner, so they can be up and running quickly. We no longer have a plane at the ready, but we do have a pilot and technicians who can be there quickly to help get you up and running fast.
The moral: Be sure, when replacing equipment, to have the wiring correct.
Use a schematic, or other printed instruction for your equipment. Most of the time, your machine will not run at all if the wiring is not correct, but in some cases it will, but the equipment won’t run correctly, just like our story about the Asphalt plant.
Combotronics is an Industrial Electronics Repair facility. If you need electronic repair, re-manufacturing, or rebuilding, call us at 1-800-331-5941, or email us at tech@combotronicsinc.com.
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-CJ
