What Maintenance Does Your Equipment Require, and How Do You Find Out?
From the Hydronix Preventive Maintenance series
I am not known for having a green thumb.
I once managed to nearly kill the office Christmas cactus. That should tell you everything you need to know.
That does not mean we do not have plants in our house. We do. They are alive. Since I am not watering them, the only reasonable explanation is that a fairy shows up and handles it.
While writing this final blog, I discovered that the same fairy has also been handling the daily requirements for our mechanical equipment.
Apparently, there is an entire category of household responsibilities I did not know existed.
And yes, I said daily.
While gathering information from several of the manufacturers we see most often, I discovered that the manual for our own boiler calls for daily owner checks.
Daily.
As in yesterday, today, and rudely again tomorrow.
Our boiler is almost as high maintenance as an office gossip with perfect hair, nails, makeup, and a husband who tells her when an outfit looks bad and to go change. (Which she thought was a compliment. Nobody had the heart to tell her.)
When I brought the daily boiler checks up to Kevin, he was nowhere near as surprised as I was. In fact, he told me that, depending on the equipment and application, some readings and findings are supposed to be recorded in a daily log.
I was starting to realize who the mechanical-room fairy was
I have seen those logs before. They are usually on clipboards hanging in commercial mechanical rooms, where maintenance staff take readings every day and document what they find.
Those buildings have maintenance staff. We do not have maintenance staff.
Still convinced something had been mixed up, I went back and looked more closely at the source of the information.
What I found was that daily owner checks are not limited to large commercial equipment. Not every residential boiler requires them, obviously, but they appear in residential manuals more often than I realized.
The maintenance schedule for our own boiler includes tasks listed as daily, monthly, periodic, semiannual, and end of season.
That is all in addition to the annual maintenance assigned to a professional service technician.
And that was only the boiler.
There is still the sidearm water heater, heat exchanger, circulator pumps, Y-strainers, valves, expansion tanks, and everything else in the mechanical room. Those components may have inspection or maintenance requirements of their own.
At that point, it became clear that I was not going to answer this question in one blog:
Are you receiving the maintenance that actually fits your equipment, or are you getting a quick generic check?
There was no way.
Every mechanical room is different. The equipment, manufacturers, models, components, and maintenance schedules are different. One generic checklist cannot accurately cover all of them.
I also was not going to write an owner’s manual explaining how to find your owner’s manual. That seemed like an unnecessarily aggressive way to prove my own point.
The most accurate way I could think to share this information was to help people get directly to the source for their specific equipment.
So we created an Equipment Manual Finder.
Enter the name of the manufacturer, select the correct company, and the finder will take you to that manufacturer’s official website, specifically where you can search for the manual using your model number.
If you do not know the manufacturer or model number, the page also explains where to look and how to identify the information without already speaking fluent mechanical room.
Once you find the correct manual, ask your service technician which items are safe for you to observe, what normal looks like, and what should trigger a call.
If you do not have a fairy showing up every day to water the plants and check the mechanical equipment, give us a call.
We can perform the annual professional maintenance, help you locate the correct owner’s manual, and explain what your equipment may require between visits.
The plant watering, however, is between you and your fairy.
Click below to request service or maintenance.
or you can call or text us at (970) 930-1488 or email info@hydronixmechanical.com.
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