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Written by William Villanueva
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Monday, 10 March 2008 |
Early last 2007, we ordered from Grepac Technologies their Tundra brand of evaporative airconditioner to replace the airconditioners in the store.
From the start, we had problems with their installers who do not exactly know what are the standards for installing the units. When they initially installed the big unit which weighs 152kg plus another 60kg of water, they used 8 pieces of threaded bars bolted to the ceiling using expansion bolts. Even without any load, the whole structure is already swinging given just a slight push. We had doubts if it will this hold up for the weight of the unit. And what will happen when you add the constant vibration when the 2200watt motor of the fan is turned on? The contractor said that the threaded bars can hold up to 50kg each! Maybe true but how about the capacity of the expansion bolts?
Yesterday, we just saw another failure in the unit. This time its with the cable wiring which they used to power the unit. We are not your regular engineer so we trusted Grepac to know what should be the minimum requirments are. But apparently it was a mis-guided trust. Yesterday afternoon, our power fluctuated which we thought was caused by Meralco but then immediately noticed the smell of burning wires. Tracing the smell lead to the cable of the Tundra evaporative aircon which is smoking. Apparently the power fluctuation was caused by the unit. We believe the cable they used may be undersized for the capacity of the system. Also they installed a unit we thought to be a circuit breaker but apparently it did not work. We had to manually turn off the switch on the supposed breaker.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 13 March 2008 )
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