RETA Breeze Sept/Oct 2025

SERVICE

The Shade Tree Mechanic Volume LVIIIa

It ‘probably’ ain't my fault Things in industrial refrigeration that’s out of my control.

was bad a week ago would have saved the blade and the fan shroud. Tell someone. “It smelled hot.” It smelled hot before it burst into flames? Maybe we shoulda shut it off and called someone. “I’ve been smelling a little ammonia lately.” Really! When you smell a little ammonia, you call my boys. When you smell a lotta ammonia, call my boys from the parking lot. But don’t ignore the little smells until they become big. Don’t get cute with the chemicals. We are a team, if you decide to use a new cleaner near my evaporators, let’s have a chat first. For the record anything that eats galvanize is probably on the ‘no way in heck list. Don’t wait until I find a bunch of pinholes to tell me you changed chemicals. By the way, let me know if you’re changing production schedules. Work’n over a few hours isn’t an issue, ……. if I know it before my evaporators start their automatic defrost cycle. Don’t mess with timers. If I had a dollar for every relief valve that blew over the years because someone adjusted the pumpdown timers to zero on the silos. Why? So’s they could start CIP quicker (and over pressure my silos). Slow down. If you think you’re running behind schedule now, you’ll be much farther behind after the ammonia release. This is a small list of what ain’t my fault. I might be guilty of one or two over the years. But, help me help you. Stay vigilant, we can do it if we work together. 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.

Leaving doors and windows open. I’ve got a top-notch cooling system, but I can’t cool the whole darn planet. Why in the world would someone plug in a space heater in an area we are trying to cool? I’ve seen it. Forklifts idling in the area, adding more heat. Water, I hate water. Water does more to screw up my refrigeration system than anything else. Them sanitation people spray down everything and then leave puddles on the floor. I fire up the refrigeration system and presto, the water disappears and reappears on my evaporator fins as frost. Then someone gets upset because I can’t maintain temperature throughout our run. It ain’t my fault. I’m not the one spraying water all over. I get they need to clean, but feel free to squeegee the floor when you’re done. Don’t wait till everything breaks before you tell someone. Now this one might be my fault. We do rounds and look for issues, and we have missed things on occasion. Help us out. If you see a fan motor out, call maintenance. Don’t wait till the last one fails before ya say some thing. I seen one that damn near got me to spittin’, all three fans were out. When I asked how long they had been out, the supervisor in the area said, “Well, the first one stopped a couple of weeks ago, then we lost one Monday and the last one died today.” I had two weeks to fix the first one, if someone had told me. Instead, I’m calling my buddies borrowing fan motors because we only had one in stock. Call us when the first one breaks. “It’s been makin' a funny noise.” Did you tell anyone? That funny noise may have been dangerous. Luckily, in this case, it just ground the tip off of the fan blade. But knowin’ the bearing

Ya know, them Brothers Osbourne seem to be pretty good fellas. I like their music. It gets me ta thinkin' and that’s always a good thing. They gotta song called, “It Ain’t My Fault.” I was listening to it the other day in the shop. And you know what….. It ‘probably’ ain't my fault. I get calls from them production people complaining about refrigeration. I always apologize and then call the boys to figure out what’s happening. Normally, it ain’t our fault. Not that that matters much, if production aint runnin, then we all have a problem. We just fix it and go on. That’s kinda our lot in life. We apologize, fix it and get on down the road. But sometimes it’s fun to quietly figure whose fault it is. Not so as I can start blaming people and raisin’ the roof. But so I can do a little coaching. Here is what I’ve found recently. First off, my refrigeration system is designed to do a job—a specific job, don’t be trying to make it so something else. Vern says it’s like trying to haul dirt in your Mercedes. You may have the greatest Mercedes sedan ever (Phantom 3 by the way), but if you're haulin' dirt, you need a truck, not a sedan. Use the right vehicle for the right job. Anyways, if them production people start trying to do things my system isn’t designed for, it ain't going work, and it ain't my fault. Here is some of the stuff they do. Increase the belt speed to the freezer, increase the product size, increase the temperature of the product coming out of the cooker, increase the pounds of product per foot of belt, pile the product up into big piles. All of these things change the heat load or dwell time needed to cool the product. If my system doesn’t have the capacity, then it won’t work.

RETA.com 25

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2025