Rest in peace…

One of my giant platform boots broke apart after probably about two years of me wearing them to work every day. For them being boots more intended to be worn for stompy dancing at a goth club, they put up with that amazingly well.

Duck tape held them through their last day.

My boss saw this and said it actually looked pretty neat – he envisioned a pair where one boot is black and one silver being pretty awesome. I agree.

Mystery boots at the top of TransTower. They must have been left when the tower was painted.

A Payne in the butt

Do you ever look at something and wonder, “why in the actual hell?!”

This is one of the RTU (Roof Top Unit) air conditioners at one of the transmitter sites. It looks like a total pile of garbage but still works for some inexplicable reason. It was made by Payne – their logo still survives on one side but all other identifying marks are gone.

Bizarre condenser fan setup

Just look at that glorious weird ductwork. It’s next to the roof kerb where the ducts pass into the building, and then the ducts do a giant whirl around it. There might be an inline heater in the duct at the very end but who the heck knows.

Every now and then, it’ll yeet the evaporator fan belt. Last time, it yeeted the motor pulley too!

It looks like someone replaced the motor in this thing’s history and when they installed the new one, they found the shaft key didn’t fit and left it lying in the bottom of the cabinet and just tightened the set screw against the shaft. This worked until it eventually started slipping and the pulley spun on the shaft. I found it with the belt off and the pulley dancing around on the shaft. When I turned the power off, the pulley fell onto the roof. The shaft bore now measured 5/8″ on one side, 3/4″ on the other — it had become conical!

I got a new pulley and shaft key from McMaster and put it all back together, it works, but sounds a tiny bit more like a lawnmower. I don’t think it’s all that much longer for this world, honestly.

So on another note, Carrier got away from belt drive fans on their newer RTUs! Look at this monster that just went in at the other site..

Please ignore the terrible wire management. I’m trying to….

The evaporator fan, which moves the air to be cooled from indoors, is now a big vaneaxial type. It’s amazingly quiet too. Smaller vaneaxial fans can be found in 1 rack unit servers where they are most definitely NOT quiet, and larger ones are used in tunnel and parking garage ventilation.

I dunno, it seems like replacement of the Payne at the aux site is low on the priority list but I’m a little concerned that we’ll find it should have been higher on the list if we have to broadcast from there for a while over the summer. I can only imagine how many kilowatt-hours are being wasted via that pile of rusty crap. Somehow I’m imagining it being 10 SEER or less…