My three worst jobs sites. What are yours?
In my forty years in the field, this is a list of the three absolute worst places I worked. I would love to hear about yours.
Pet Manufacturer Rendering Plant Boiler – The entire inside of this plant was covered with a clear gel that was really slippery. I fell twice covering my clothes with the goo and the stench. It was like walking on ice. While reaching up to adjust the steam pressure control, my feet would slide into almost a split. I was so glad they found another boiler company.
Drug House - We serviced the boilers for an apartment building. The owner called us one Friday evening and asked if we could look at the furnace for one of his rental homes, explaining his normal guy was injured. I informed him we didn’t stock parts for furnaces as we only worked on boilers. He asked if I could still go as they had no heat. When I arrived, I was greeted at the door by a sinister looking man pointing a pistol at me.
“What you want?’ the man demanded
“Furnace,” I said meekly, and he smiled widely and informed me they were all freezing.
Inside the house was about a half dozen men; guns and drugs littered the coffee table and couch. I was shown the door to the basement. My heart was pounding; I was sure they could hear it. On the way down, I prayed that it would be an easy fix. In the basement was more guns. A pistol was on the washing machine next to the furnace, another on the shelf next to the laundry detergent. The problem was just a dirty flame sensor and after cleaning it, the furnace fired right up. Upstairs, the man in charge asked me for my card and I lied, saying I didn’t have one. I explained I wasn’t the regular furnace guy. There was no way I wanted them to have my contact info.
Funeral home incinerator – I was hired to help a contractor wire and start a burner at a funeral home. They neglected to tell me the burner was attached to an incinerator. The maintenance man regaled me with stories about what happens inside the incinerator. I was having a hard time keeping down the Cheerios I had for breakfast. The floor was covered in ashes that were previously people. I kept apologizing to the ashes for stepping and kneeling on them.
Ok, your turn.
Boiler Lessons
Comments
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Heh. The only job worse than the one I'm at today is the one I'm going to tomorrow. The one I was at yesterday wasn't too bad, though.
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Sewage treatment plant.
I have worked in a few. The first one I spent 3 weeks there in the tunnels running 1000'ft of 3/4" threaded aluminum conduit and pulling control wires. Most sewage plants use Aluminum conduit.
The last one I just looked at the job which was replacing 30' of 3" welded steam condensate.
The two guys I sent to the job were pissed at me for a week or so.
Old apartment with a rotted-out steam condensate line. You went in the crawl space, and it was probably 18" dirt to joist. They had dug trenches to crawl in for more clearance. This was built around 1900. Climing over old BX cable, broken glass, no lights. I usually rail against Mega Press & Propress but I was happy to have it that day. But the worst part of what I saw was it looked like the wood in the crawl space was rotten. I was afraid it would come down when I was in there.
Hard to pick the 3d one there are so many.
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Your 3rd one reminds me of pulling cable in the trays in the unfinished ceiling of the gross anatomy labs. this is where med students dissect corpses to learn anatomy. It was about 50 years old and I was knocking probably 30 years of um…"dust" off of the trays.
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@ratio Hope you get some nice places soon
@EBEBRATT-Ed Sewage treatment plants are pretty disgusting
@mattmia2 Yech!!!
Ray Wohlfarth
Boiler Lessons0 -
Apartment building crawlspace with 6” of floating sewage to fix a broken pipe.
Fraternity house. Their mothers would have been disgusted.
8.33 lbs./gal. x 60 min./hr. x 20°ΔT = 10,000 BTU's/hour
Two btu per sq ft for degree difference for a slab0 -
Went into a crawlspace to fix a floor furnace. After I got in there and was laying in some wet muddy crawlspace floor, someone flushed the toilet and I found out quickly that the sewage piping was broken, got out fast and went home to shower and change clothes. Never went back to that house.
Edward Young Retired
After you make that expensive repair and you still have the same problem, What will you check next?
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This post makes me smile. Vacuum pumps are used in rendering plants, so yes, been in lots of those. Edible oil and shortening plants are slippery too. Really had to be careful climbing the stairs.
Sewage treatment plants too. They're not that bad, really.
Poultry processing plants use vacuum pumps for evisceration. Really nice when we'd get one in for repair that had been baking in a hot enclosed semi trailer for a day or 2.
Dennis Pataki. Former Service Manager and Heating Pump Product Manager for Nash Engineering Company. Phone: 1-888 853 9963
Website: www.nashjenningspumps.com
The first step in solving any problem is TO IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM.
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Definitely been some gross places and encountered some odd things, like that time I found a severed hand under a 60 year old VA hospital steam boiler that was either pinched off when setting the boiler or tossed in there by a funny employee on their way to the morgue down the hall (same job site, rode the elevator down to the basement AKA morgue with a guy we called Dr Kevorkian who was eager to show us the freshly amputated leg on his cart), but I worked in a R&D facility for a world renowned college about 6-7 years ago and although I was not working in this particular area, another worker brought me over to the area where they were working on an artificial human nervous system. There were cadaver parts, ranging from just a hand to a full corpse, on various tables doing various maneuvers. The one that still haunts me to this day is a pair of legs severed at the waist, with the toes on one foot twiddling around while the other leg was bending at the knee up and down while the foot remained flat on the table. I could deal with the hands and fingers since I have seen enough Addams Family in my day, but the vision of that leg kicking around without an upper body attached will be burned in my mind forever.
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Didn't Kevorkian work for one of the Detroit hospitals? His class med school graduation picture is in our hall with all of the other class pictures.
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@GroundUp not for me I would have run out of their like my A— was on fire.
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I wanted to, but my legs were jelly. The older I get, the more I'm phased by gore. The smell in that room, though I'd never noticed it before, lingered throughout the entire campus after that and I told my boss a few days later that I was not going back. I had mostly forgotten about it finally, but this thread opened up a relapse :-D
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Crawl spaces seem to be popular.
I had a no heat call on a gas fired furnace. Dirt crawl space about 40 inches high. Horizontal furnace of course. I'm working on it while the owner is near the entrance about 15 ft away. Its dark everywhere but where I am. I'm doing my thing, wondering why my old man couldn't be rich, when I hear a toilet flush from the living space above. The next thing I hear is spashing on the other side of the furnace. I wedge my head over the top of the furnace, shine my light, and see a cracked PVC waste line with a terrible attempt at repair. And lots of other cool stuff. I turned and shined my light at the owner and said "Are you f***ing kidding me?" There was no odor. I guess the dirt absorbed most of it, but I packed up and told him I'll be back when its fixed and de-grossed.
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any home or building that need a sewer ejector pump service or replacement
Bob "hot rod" Rohr
trainer for Caleffi NA
Living the hydronic dream
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apparently people not giving a **** the toilet is just dumping directly under the house is also popular.
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The one the gangbanger is beating his girlfriend.
The construction site job where the guys are fighting and throwing hands.
The one on the roof in a rain/ice/snowstorm in high winds.
That's all I can think of at the moment and would prefer to forget.
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OMG I thought I had all the bad jobs. The idea of sewage is so gross. Nope not me Im outta there. Thanks
Ray Wohlfarth
Boiler Lessons0 -
Installed the first central heating system in a 1728 American Chestnut-framed Colonial with ells back in 1970. No basement excepting a small potato cellar and virtually no to 18" clearance otherwise. It is still the oldest occupied building in this N.H. Town.
You cannot appreciate the environment beneath of critter carcasses, dens, droppings and current multi-legged crawlers of all descriptions. Had to trench-shovel access paths to route hydronic piping beneath, dropped the oil tank into the potato cellar and found a place behind the fireplace hearth to place the boiler.
Have you ever drilled pipe routing through 250 year aged American Chestnut? It challenges lignum vitae!
The punch line. I recently replaced my old Weil-McLain install with a new triple-pass UO. I guess we have both aged well …..
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They would have been too had they know that was what it was before they crawled in to it. Maybe a corollary to never step in any unexplained liquids on the sidewalk when it hasn't rained recently.
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Scariest was a slumlord apartment building with a big ol Scotch Boiler, 100-200hp range don't recall specifics. Single boiler was the only heat and hot water for the building. Running the pressure way too high and half the pipes connected to the thing were so corroded that it felt looking at them the wrong way might make them burst while I was next to them. Was happy to snap a couple photos and get outta there. You bet that bid was obnoxiously high and I was very pleased that mr slumlord decided not to go with our bid.
Had another building where the super was totally unhinged and was making viscous underhanded threats on my life while literally talking about how unhinged he knows he is. Wanted to get out of there right away, but it felt safer to let him monolog. Ended up standing around for like an hour letting him blather away until he was appeased and then I noped outta there asap.
Honorable mentions are getting baptized by sewage or when you find yourself in a decrepit basement and find it's absolutely teeming with roaches, rodents, or both.
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