Congratulation’s to December’s NCI Contractor of the Month: Brice Johnson, President of Brice’s Refrigeration, Torrington, Wyoming.
Brice Johnson roams the high prairies of Wyoming searching for CO problems as he drives 4 hours from one corner of his service area to the other. Brice’s Refrigeration, Inc. provides primarily commercial heating, air conditioning and refrigeration services with a half-dozen employees, and does nearly a million dollars per year in business. The company also specializes in higher-end homes.
Brice’s Refrigeration has implemented CO and combustion testing into their service department and has enjoyed some solid success and some personal good luck. All service techs carry Low Level CO Monitors on service calls and take time to explain the benefits of them to their customers. They compare their Monitors to retail store CO alarms and emphasize the differences, especially the graduated alarm system and the ability to monitor CO events to assure complete safety.
The company’s convictions about CO safety stem from a potentially fatal event. Brice’s daughter had a water heater that had previously been tested safe and had no symptoms of defects. New CO Monitors were installed, and the alarm went off at 10 ppm one night. Using the Low Level CO Experts Monitor, they traced the CO back to the water heater. The water heater was shut off and the windows were opened to ventilate the basement. Then they were then able to use the monitor to find a safe location in the house. Later, by taking the monitor with them they were able to test the CO level in the basement to find that the threat had passed.
Testing the following morning revealed scaling formed in the water heater had dropped onto the burner and taken operating condition from safe to deadly in an instant . Further testing with a combustion analyzer found CO levels of over 2500 ppm were produced in less than 5 seconds of run time. Surely a fatal condition would have been created within an hour unless the monitor had detected the problem.
When asked where the strength of Brice’s Refrigeration was, Brice immediately responded with: “Diversity and full service because of our experiences, combustion testing and CO monitoring will continue to be part of the service we have to offer to our customers.”