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| Ready for Winter?Birds hitting the birdfeeder, snow blanketing everything, warming the car up for the trip to work, change the batteries in the smoke detectors: all these gentle reminders that Winter is here. Let us not forget that economizers need to seal when they are supposed to be closed. Yes, the heating season is here. These things are worth mention; Since the lunar eclipse on the autumnal equinox and thereby the first official day of Winter, EPM has already received over 1,200 alarms related to economizers not sealing closed and heat failures in customer facilities. In fact, at its peak the automated alarm response computers received up to 13 alarms in a minute, slowing occasionally to 1 alarm every two minutes. Each alarm has to be reviewed and handled by an EPM technician The need for is here and EPM is here to help. As always, the best advice we can offer once a particular season has arrived is to monitor the alarms. Set the alarms up to notify you as well as us. When you receive an alarm, take the happy box and go see what is wrong. In just a few minutes, running a unit on a happy box will tell you what, if anything, is likely wrong with a furnace. Fire-eye clean? Gas pressure constant? Dirty pilot orifice? 24 Volts present? If the problem can be fixed right there, you may have saved yourself several hours of work later on. If it cannot be fixed right away, decontrol the unit and/or disable the alarm back at the computer so we do not continue to notify you. This will save you even more time. The Computerized Temperature Control system is in place to intelligently operate the building, but it is also there to assist you. If you have a laptop or a smartphone for SBD-3200 systems, you can access the computer from right there at the unit. I was talking to a High School friend of mine last year. The building he works in has a Direct Digital Control (DDC) system in it. They were having trouble with a sensor that was reporting the temperature in a room to be "13 linear feet". Since they opted out of the $32,000 per year maintenance contract for their system, the company was going to charge them $7,000 to reprogram the sensor, and an untold amount more to sweep the system for virus programs. Had that been an EPM system, and they called us, we would have reprogrammed the sensor as we were talking to him on the phone, and without charge. And the virus claim? At attempt to hide the fact that building control systems is not their entire dedication and to artificially inflate the service visit. The moral of the story is simply "Don't be afraid to call us if something you are looking at doesn't make sense". This is what we do. This is ALL we do. So use the tools available to you, and feel free to call us, if not just to say Hello. I enjoy talking about BBQ competitions as much as building controls. You see, EPM employees are people too.
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