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Frostycold
06-10-2006, 04:51 PM
Hi guys
Is it common practice to carry out routine maintenance to Thermo King over cab units in driving rain? I accept that we cant allways choose our conditions for the repair of wagons full of perishable cargo and emergency breakdowns are an entirely different matter. I have never refused a call-out in my life. However I think it unreasonable to expect an engineer to work in the Driving Rain just to keep a mentally impaired service manager happy especially when the engineer has never been issued with wet weather gear or tents or covers of any kind.

all the best
Frostycold

Latte
06-10-2006, 07:48 PM
By the book you shouldnt, This would definatly come under working at heights HOWEVER we all will have done it at some point.
Rain never used to bother me, it was when it was icey on the cab roofs and there wasnt a walkway fitted that used to worry me.
Something you should bring up with youre H&S guy
Reefer Jon ot MRW will give you TK's procedure, they are normally hot on H & S

Regards

Fatboy

reefermadness
07-10-2006, 02:36 AM
Did it today for 10 hours. It is a crappy part of the job. Changed a rear eng seal in the snow/rain... in the end its just not a quality job. i 100% agree with you. The heights thing is ok, but how do you change some belts without accessing the top of the reefer (20 feet in the air). Somethings just never change, but they should.

Another thing is doing refrigeration work in the winter out side. Its ridiculous, but i have had to do it.

Reefer Madness

Tycho
07-10-2006, 08:13 AM
Take it up with your boss, dont exaggerate, give him the straight facts.
If my boss sends me out to a joband I find out on site I'm not geared for, I do the job as best I can if I'm able to. when I get back to the office, I'll till him that unless I get this or that equipment so I can do the job and leave the site feeling that I did a proper job, he can forget about sending me on a job like that...

I dont want to show up on site and go "oh uuuuh... yeah... I need to go get some tools"

as I said in another post, I work on large industrial plants, and just last week I was sent to recharge a "freezing truck" <-- at the lack of a better word :)
I told my boss straight out "I have no idea what any of those plants look like, neither have any of our other engineers, why the "flickety flack" didnt you call one of the three companies around her that work on these kinda things daily to take the job"
he gave me some foggy answer on how we should take any job we could get our hands on... yeah, like every single one of our engineers didnt work 16 hour days for the last year...

so I go there and tell the russian driver to disconnect the trailer from the cab so I can get inbetween and actually open the doors to the compressor. I open the door and stare into the most compact unit I have ever seen, I see a compressor and some diesel driven thing driving the compressor. I give a half smile, put my hand on the top of the compressor to feel the temperature and nod knowingly... I have no idea what I'm doing...

I open the side panel and find the reciever, "great" I think to myself there should be a fiilling valve here somewhere (thats what I was to do, recharge it).
Nope, not a filling valve in sight.
touch the pipes and go "hmmm yeah... good good" not knowing what the heck to do.

Luckily the driver had to move his car and I had time to call the Norwegian service department. it was a 404A unit, and I was leaning towards filling liquid through the suction line to the compressor (only place to charge it).

but I called them and the guy said "blah blah blah, just connect to the compressor suction line and fill 0.5Kg, then wait a few seconds and keep going like that... that's 1 pound of *****. and you will never ever ever ever :) see me shooting 1 pound of liquid ***** into the suction port of a semihermetic compressor... ever.

So I spent three hours filling 50 grams (0.1) every 1 minutes.

When I got back to the office I went into my boss office, closed the dor and told him in no uncertain terms "Dont ever send me out on a job where I feel like a totlal idiot know nothing about what I'm doing! EVER! I understand that we want to help our customers, but sometimes we might help them more by handing them over to someone who know what they are doing. But my main point is dont ever EVER! put me in that situation again!"

and when it comes to equipment, I call my boss and say "I need this and that to do the job properly" (or to do the job at all) either I'll be told to go andbuy it, or I'll go and buy it anyways and tell him afterwards that I needed it.


If your boss cant see how his guys "hates" their job when they have to work outside without wet weather gear he needs a kick in the groin.
the next time it's pouring down and he wants to send you on an outside job, you should tell him you need wet weather gear, the worst thing he can say is "no" and then you can tell him "would you spend seven hours working outside in this weather? besides, how good of a job do you think I can do in this weather, opening up a refrig. plant in a frking rainstorm"

have your boss ever worked as an engineer?