On 9/26/2014 11:34 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
It's really funny how the simplest easiest things, if they solve a common
nuisance problem, are treated like amazing inventions. We have a similar
situation for one product in our company. We make walk-in cooler controls. After
installing our controls, we started getting calls that the coolers were iced up.
The problem usually turned out to be that a person who was loading the cooler
shut off the evaporator fans (the fans that blow air across the refrigerant
coils), and forgot to turn them back on. This results in refrigerant running
through the coils, but since air is a great insulator, it did not consume any
heat from the cooler. Condensation builds up on the coils and turns into ice,
which is an even better insulator :)
Now, the people doing this had been doing this long before we installed our
controls. If you want to know why, just look up wind chill :)
The solution we came up with was simple and stupid: add a button that shut off
the fans for 10 minutes.
That one feature is raved about time and again by all our customers. It's the
dumbest thing, but it makes things so much more pleasant that people now
complain if the controller needs service because they "can't live without the
shutdown button!"
And to think we put it in to save service calls :)
It's really fun when us engineers can make improvements like that!
