Safety first.

I do heating and air conditioning for a living and one of the primary objectives of my job is customer safety. In my opinion this comes before customer comfort. If we find equipment that is unsafe, we're required to inform the customer of the situation and then, if they want to leave the equipment operational, they are required to sign a release form saying that they know it's not safe to operate but are willing to do it anyway.

Last week one of the technicians I work with went to a commercial property and found a furnace with a bad high temperature safety cutout and two large holes in the heat exchanger. The high temp cutout is designed to turn of a furnace if the temperature gets too high. As he was supposed to, he informed the manager and turned off power and gas to the unit until the owner could decide what he was going to do. Today we get a call from the owner saying that another company came out and said that the heat exchanger was fine and the unit only needed a new temperature switch.

So I just got back from the frigid roof - 35 degrees and high winds - trying to confirm a hole in the heat exchanger. The two holes were pretty hard to miss if you actually took out three screws, removed a cover and looked. When I looked at the burner section I was rather surprised to find this:

If you can't read small yellow text: Left arrow - "Hole where high temp limit should be" Right Arrow - "Wires that are spliced together to bypass safety." Sorry, camera phone.

The company who came out to give a second opinion bypassed one of the most important safeties on this furnace. If, for some reason, either the blower fails or the gas valve sticks open there is now nothing to keep this unit from overheating and possibly causing a fire. It makes me wonder how this guy sleeps at night.

Next came the joy of telling the store manager what was going on and giving him the option of shutting it off or signing the release form I had in my hand. His main concern was for his customers, but when the release form came out he did the smart thing.

I know this one is particularly long, but I have to just say that I take great pride in what I do and stuff like this just really pisses me off. Someone was willing to take a dangerous shortcut with other people's safety to either gain a customer or prove another company wrong. Looking like the good guy isn't worth all that to me.