Commercial Case Study · Guthrie, Logan County

They cut the ribbon at three o’clock.
I had a man on the roof at three o’clock.

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Guthrie’s new McDonald’s set a world record getting to opening day: an empty
lot to a fully operational restaurant in 55 days, according to the
Guthrie News Leader
and the company officials it quoted.

The grand opening was a Friday in September, ribbon cutting at three in the
afternoon, cars backed up out of the lot and people lined up to get in the door.

The building had no air conditioning.

They called me at one o’clock. I had a man on that roof at three, while the ribbon was
being cut out front. It was 105 degrees on that roof and the kitchen was as hot as you can
imagine with a full house and a full grill.

What I walked into

Brand new equipment. Somebody else had installed it, somebody else had already been in
it before me, and it would not run. I found burnt parts on a building that had been open
for a matter of hours.

We replaced a control transformer Friday afternoon and the unit still would not stay up.
It kept throwing a phase monitoring fault. I checked the voltage balance and the voltage
was fine, which told me whatever had burnt that transformer was feeding a bad signal to the
phase monitor. I went to the manual and found the transformer lands on the same connection
as the phase monitor. That was the thread to pull.

By the end of Friday I had four of the six condenser fans and two compressors running.
Two of those fans are variable speed, pulse width modulated, and the control board was gone,
so there was no way to drive them. That is as far as anybody was getting that night.

Saturday

I went back Saturday with the crew. We pulled the two variable speed motors, put in
standard motors, and tied them into the contactors on the compressors so they would run with
the machine instead of waiting on a dead board. We bypassed the drive on the indoor blower.
By Saturday evening the whole system was cooling and the restaurant stayed open all weekend.

Why I am telling you this

Most commercial contractors around here will not take a call at one o’clock on a Friday
and be on a roof by three. Most will not come back Saturday. I did both, on a system I did
not install, with someone else’s problem in front of me, in September heat.

If you run a restaurant, a store, a clinic or a shop, that is the thing worth knowing about
whoever you call. Not the brochure. Whether they show up on the worst possible day.

For commercial pricing, response times and what I service across central Oklahoma, see my commercial HVAC page. If you run a restaurant, my restaurant HVAC page covers makeup air, grease and walk-in questions, and my rooftop unit repair page explains how rooftop package units fail and how I diagnose them.

What a commercial call costs

My commercial diagnostic is $389 flat on light commercial equipment up to
15 tons, and it is the same number day or night. No after hours uplift, no surprise. You can
book it online. Anything bigger than 15 tons gets sized by my tech on site, because you should
not have to know your rooftop’s tonnage to book a service call.

Questions I get about commercial work