2023 RETA Breeze March-April

SERVICE

The Shade Tree Mechanic volume LI

Fans

guy who treats people like children, but I don’t wanna be that guy like “just do it” with no directions. I don’t want to treat people like they are stupid and can’t tie their shoes, and I don’t want to treat them like they know everything and don’t give them direction. Well, I should have given Dale a lot more instruction. So’s I call him on the mo-bile phone and asked him to come down “and bring some Visqueen”. So, when Dale got there we did a little fan train’n. First off, air in air out. There are times when we want to pressurize a room and there are times when we want to draw the room into a negative, but if we’re looking to move air across a damp floor, we need maximum air quantity. Just like an engine room we need to replace all the air we are exhausting. If you have super big fans designed for the job, you can use a static louver to pull the air in. But if you’re using smaller industrial fans, you may need to push air in as well as draw air out. In this situation we were just trying to remove a little moisture, so we set one fan on the inlet and one on the outlet. Since no one was entering the room, we put the fan in the center of the doorway pointing in. The fan was a little wider than the doorway, but that’s ok. What wasn’t ok was the 3-foot gap at the top. Goodness, I love me some Visqueen. We taped it across the opening above the fan to make sure the air couldn’t short circuit and come right back out. We went to the other side and set the other fan in the middle of the doorway blowing out. No Visqueen this time. The outlet fan is

just there to make sure the room isn’t at positive pressure. Positive pressure will reduce the amount of air moving through the room. There are so many things that need to be considered when placing fans. Positive pressure negative pressure? How fast do I want to exhaust. If you’re exhausting a cold area, do you need to maintain tempera ture? If so, maybe you need to exhaust slow. Can the material that I’m exhausting be drawn through a fan? That is an awesome question. I heard a story about that. It seems this old boy, Sammy, ran a car repair shop. It was pretty cold outside. So, before he closed for the night, he brought a car in and put it on the lift. That way the shop could warm back up overnight. Well the car developed a leak and fuel drained out all night. The next day the old boy was darn near overwhelmed by all the gas fumes. So as the story goes, he plugged in a fan and started sucking the fumes out the back door. A neighbor came over and said, “Sammy what are all ‘em fireworks out back.” So’s, they walked around back and there were little bits of fire comin out of the fan. It seems the gas was so strong and the fan motor so hot, that fumes was catching fire, but immediately burn’n up. It’s probably one of them mito urbanos, but a good lesson. There’s more to using fans than plugging them in. Though come to think of it, maybe I need a fan under my shade tree? The shade tree grows outside of the little town of Broughton, Ohio. Where everyone is always welcome, the beer is always cold, and something is always needin fixin.

You know there are times that I’m plum amazed by what people don’t know. I guess I’m lucky, I was born poor, raised poor, and if god is willing, die middle class. But I was taught stuff. My brothers and sisters tried really hard to make sure I wasn’t too stupid. My sister said it was so I wouldn’t embarrass them. So I sent one of the boys down to setup some fans. I never really gave it much thought. I figured hey anyone can setup a fan. I was wrong, plum wrong! Who hasn’t used a fan? Now don’t get me wrong. Dale is a pretty smart boy. Heck his grandma named him after Dale Inman, NASCAR’s greatest crew chief. (I know that Knauss kid is pretty good. But he’s a couple championships and about 100 wins behind Inman.) Dale is better at troubleshooting electrical issues than darn near anyone at the plant. But I found out fans aren’t his thing. I was walking through the area and happened to glance at the fans. Oh my. There was a fan at both doors to the room. All blowing into the room. Nothing blowing out. The fans were not directly in the door but off to the side. 90% of the air wasn’t going in the room. Partially because the fan was in the incorrect position and partly because the room was pressurized, and air couldn’t get in. This was 100% my fault. I’m Dale’s supervi sor. It’s my job to set him up to win. I should have told him exactly what to do. It’s hard sometimes, I don’t wanna be that

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