The director in a hairnet, the nurses, and the sweet old lady. A certain “cooler” broke down. The local engineer, looking all businesslike, says, “Oil has leaked.” Sure… if half a liter of oil is spilled around the compressor pipes, then that’s what it is. Not oil, but refrigerant. Anyway, the broken unit was on the roof of the building, and the access to the roof was through the attic on the third floor. The attic had a pull-down ladder hatch. The layout of the nursing home was designed so that no one with an IQ below 120 could escape. So, it looked like I was going to have to do a bit of “logistics management.” More like “me” than “us,” since I was the junior one.
At first, we thought we could get away with just a little effort. But given how much “oil had leaked,” it became clear that the roof would see a lot of heavy items besides us, including cylinders of freon, nitrogen, propane, and oxygen. The vacuum pump, a toolbox, and a heavy-duty extension cord were already just minor details.
In general, someone’s crafty hands managed to solder the pipes at the compressor outlet in such a way that they, being copper, corroded and the appearance of a leak was just a matter of time, which has now come. When we found out that we didn’t have any pipes of the right diameter in our van, we also joined the same club of crafty hands and made a new connection using the available adapters, pliers, pipe stretchers, and whatever else we could find. But we did it more carefully.
What amused me even more was that the documentation for the cooler didn’t specify which refrigerant to use. It kept mentioning two types of refrigerant—basically, it was up to us to choose. With some clever calculations, we figured out the refrigerant. We noted the brand of refrigerant in all visible places so that our descendants wouldn’t curse us the way we curse our ancestors. We filled it up. Fortunately, there was a window to check the level, so we didn’t have to measure the overheating temperature. Almost five kilos of refrigerant went into the system, which made us a bit uneasy. But we finished everything, turned on the equipment, and only then went to see what exactly we had repaired and where that kilo of refrigerant had gone.
It turned out they were indeed coolers. There were six of them—two on each floor—a fairly substantial system in terms of refrigerant consumption. They resembled, let’s say, the back part of a refrigerator, separate from the fridge itself. The refrigerator, or rather the thermally insulated casing, was wheeled up to the cooler and connected. Inside the fridge, there were several shelves for food, and it looked like a larger, insulated version of a lunchbox from an airplane.
The essence of it is that the ice cream, desserts, and salads prepared in the kitchen for the grandparents were placed in a cooler to chill, and only after that, after storage, they were delivered directly in the cooler to the designated locations. Meanwhile, the entire electromechanical part of the cooler remained in place and could be connected to a new freezer.
Neither I nor my elder have ever seen such a marvel of hostile technology, so we left the building discussing how far progress has come in a particular nursing home.