Protection for outdoor equipment

John R. Hall

I got a question from a reader that I need help with. I posted it below. Can any Wallie recommend a source? Thanks.

"We have experienced a large number of cannibalized HVAC units over the past summer. Coils are being cut from the cabinets for their copper value, or technicians from other contractors will take parts off to fix their own customers. Is there a product on the market that you are aware of that can be placed over the equipment (be it a condenser or a package unit) to keep them from being cannibalized by vagrants and even other contractors, without effecting efficiency?"

Constantin

I've seen home-grown stuff.

Placing condensers behind chain-link fencing, for example. In NYC, it is not unusal to see window-shaker units being protected from theft and/or break in via gorilla bars over the windows. Over at HVAC-Talk, I have seen several condensers that had been gutted despite countermeasures.

Truth is, I doubt that this problem will go away until the folk doing the metal recycling are going to be held to a higher standard and face the kinds of real, predictable penalties that make pawn shops "honest". If someone walks in with something to recycle, they ought to be forced to register and show the same kind of ID, etc. as folk bringing a watch into the pawn shop. That would still allow criminals to "recycle" stuff via proxy but it makes it that much harder for a drug addict to score a quick hit.

And it's not just condensers being gutted. A friend of mine caught a homeless man in the process of ripping off her homes' copper downspouts. He was walking through the neighborhood with a shopping cart and the downspout sections he had already ripped off. The police caught him.

Several ladders were stolen from our job-site, as have 3 sets of water hose. Some tools I had outside also wandered off. I imagine that some of this will go away when we live there and the risks are higher. However, I found one guy stalking me on my property at 9PM in a driving rain storm, and that was not fun.