Fridge cops in the U.S are actual cops!

You know the economy is bad when recently an Ohio man was arrested for stealing air conditioning units to be parted out for their copper. The man was charged with theft of the 49 units he stole and for cutting the copper lines and releasing refrigerant into the air. He violated the United States Clean Air Act which breaks both state and federal laws and has landed him a jail sentence for both acts as well as community service once he is released. R-22 Venting.

While we as Canadians may laugh at how silly this sounds, we are not immune to this type of theft. I used to work for a large manufacturer and we kept all of our roof top units(RTU) stored behind our warehouse in a fenced in storage compound. We were open Monday to Friday and continually had picker trucks coming and going picking up and dropping off RTU shipments. One Monday we showed up for work and our warehouse manager told me we had been robbed over the weekend. It turns out that one of the delivery drivers with a picker truck decided to lift the RTU units sitting inside of the compound fence up and out area with his crane. He knew how often we had security drive through the area and that our cameras at the time were in a bad area to be able to identify the truck or the licence plates properly.

Kawasaki’s Water Chiller

Global warming and ozone depletion have become synonymous with our trade. I think most people in the trade want to defend the trade and are excited for new technologies that make our industry look more appealing to the general public. Kawasaki, yes the same company that make motorcycles and jet-ski’s also make chillers. Their newest chiller will revolutionize the industry as we know it. Gone are the days of machines that run on HFC refrigerants. Kawasaki has come up with a completely green machine that utilizes the natural refrigerant, R-718, or as most people know it as, water.

The company has eliminated the need for HFC refrigerants by completely redesigning the centrifugal chiller and designing a unique compressor and some special components to operate with water. Kawasaki Water Chiller

Refrigerant loss to a roof top unit or (RTU) will usually be 5-10 lbs or an HFC, refrigerant losses to a centrifugal chiller can be 1000-2000 lbs. This technology reduces manufacture of HFC refrigerants and will reduce the loss of those same refrigerants. This is the type of technology that the industry had been waiting for since Willis Carrier first invented air conditioning in 1902.