Sounds like last night’s AC leak – Danny was at the space for an hour and a half after midnight fixing – damaged the outfeed table behind the table saw. I’m not at the space, can someone report on how bad the damage is and what’s needed for repair?
If anyone reading would like to honor Danny’s heroics with a time contribution of their own, here are some things that could help:
1-2 volunteers to help repair the outfeed table and pick up the plywood
someone to draw a diagram of the space showing the locations of the breaker boxes, ac and light switches, and fire extinguishers. This can be n Corel or Illustrator or on paper and snap a pic.
Someone to print those (on paper or laser cut) and post them strategically. (The damage would have been less if this signage were there telling new members how to shut off the AC)
Start a list of maintenance and inspection schedules for the machines and systems in the space. This is best done by someone eager and looking to become more knowledgeable about the tooling in the shop, because the hard part is the organization not the knowing what needs maintained.
We need float switches installed on the AC drip pans. We should start with at the least an alarm float switch. The alarm would let us know if a tiny amount of water is dripping into the catch pan. We can look at ones that kill the ac if the float is activated.
At our house, after a similar AC leak, we made good use of small, battery operated leak sensors to also alert us of water in areas of concern. This is low tech. They only offer an alarm, and don’t take action on their own, but did alert us to a problem early in a few cases.
@stepho We are finally doing the smart thing and ordering a few of the water bug alarms. Some of the other thoughts are to improve the filter housing so it has more surface area. We are going to look into ac float switches that kill the ac unit when water is present in the catch pan. Also the condensate drain angle is pretty shallow. Basically we need to solve a few problems.
At one point, we installed a secondary drain pan under the primary, just for added piece of mind, as that AC unit sat above our cars But, yeah, it seems problems like what happened often involve an array of small issues.
I took a look at it, the out-feed table has a sag in it but nothing that would really mess up your cuts at this point, definitely something that should be addressed soon though.
there is a float switch that is installed and probably functioned properly, I tested it several times after resetting the unit and it functioned properlt. The issue was probably that the unit was icing up heavily due to a clogged filter and when the float switch was tripped and shut off the unit all that ice in the coils melted down and overfilled the pan.
Nothing anyone could of done that doesn’t have previous experience with the units.
Joe’s idea of the water bug alarms, the secondary drain valve for use when the pan fill will mitigated the issue in the very short term
longer term fixing the drain angles/ increasing return unit area will solve the issue completely.
Just to give you an idea of the amount of dust that unit filters, this is only since August 30th
The filters in the wood-shop are on a two week change schedule in the summer.
That stuff is already in the system. Don’t order more or add in hacks please, including more drains or secondary anythings. That tends to more or less just be digging a deeper hole.
The common rail drain system that the installers did is pretty terrible. It’s fairly straightforward to do it right, it just takes a decent chunk of hours to round up the parts, cut, glue, and hang. It is all that needs to be done on the drainage front and is a long-term reliable fix.
Icing and overflow are two wholly different problems. Melting ice cannot overflow the pan, it will just go into the drain and will always drain out, if the drain is working. When the drain isn’t working, then the unit is going to flood if run, iced or not. The drain problem generally won’t actually cause icing though, although there is technically a contributing factor if the filter gets wet due to the flooding. Wet filter is a big flow restriction.
So just to be clear, do not restart that unit without fixing that drain. It will initially seem to be ok but you’ll have a whole new repeat disaster in short order. Within hours.
We’re not talking about adjusting the angle of the drains. There’s nothing to adjust there. It needs new ports, openable PVC joint, p-trap with cleanout ports, and run as individual pipes to the building drains, not as a common rail. It does need to have a new (correct) slope of course but that’s just part of the install. What’s there is all glued together and runs the wrong way, but it’s all just cheap PVC, so the thing is to just rip it out and put in all new pieces. They’re not expensive pieces at all and glue together fairly quickly.
The only “???” part is the best way to hang the PVC drain pipes. The obvious placement is along the wall and you’d just anchor hangers in the drywall, except we have those columns sticking out along the wall before it reaches a drain. So, options are to add 4 elbows to go around it, or hang the entire pipe off away from the wall the same width as the columns (so no wall hangers, it would need to run off purlin z-hangers), or go with something flexible like the rolled PEX. I don’t think the flex solution is an answer, rolled PEX doesn’t really like to stay straight and adds new, unintended traps down the line.
But, yeah, it seems problems like what happened often involve an array of small issues.
