It’s Just Not the Same!

Our primary long-term storage unit died with a failed blower motor. The replacement part was backordered, and finally, after several months I was excited to no longer worry about moving material to a third-party location if our backup chamber failed. Our HVAC group jumped on the replacement right away, but the quick task took a day longer than expected. The new motor was a “like-for-like” replacement, so they should’ve just needed to slip it in and press “Go”. Well, the next day they did press go, and all seemed fine, until one of our techs noticed that the service door had been modified to fit the new motor. Clearly something wasn’t like-for-like.

Upon inspection, we learned that the new motor had the same critical specs—amps, RPMs, torque, shaft diameter, etc.—but clearly the housing was larger, and the anchor bolts were not quite in the same place. The motor is actually from a completely different manufacturer funneled through the same chamber vendor who insists that this meets all of their like-for-like criteria. Unfortunately our procedure does not get into enough detail about what “like-for-like” means or doesn’t mean. It just seems that when you have to cut a hole in the door and drill two new bolt holes in the frame you’ve really crossed a line.

Here are four options we thought of:

1. Just go with it and keep a letter from the vendor attesting like-for-like status in the very small chance that an audit probes that deeply. 2. Re-commission the air-handler to show that it is in working order and use that documentation to note the equivalent critical specs of the new motor. 3. Requalify the chamber with a much shorter protocol, just to show that critical functionality has not changed. 4. Fully qualify the chamber—24 hours empty and full, open door and power outage tests and all.

What do you think we should do? Join the discussion!