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.
BARRY'S HVAC BLOG 