The Office of Erik Dahl

HVAC Hack – pens to the rescue

Sometimes designs break, and sometimes there is an easy fix. We arrived to the office the other morning to discover a very nasty rattling noise coming from the hvac system near the ceiling. I forgot to grab an audio sample for your listening pleasure.

Building maintenance is notoriously unresponsive and unproductive, so we took matters into our own hands. After a few pokes with the tripod pictured in the lower left of figure 1, which resulted in nothing more than momentary solutions.

So, we escalated the situation to stage two and got the ladder out of the shop for a closer look. There seemed to be a metal plate on the bottom of the box that was rattling. The easiest solution was to place something between the two rattling plates. The tool we had at hand: a nice black pen. It fit between the louvers and between the plates.

The pen has been there for about a week now, without the slightest hint of a rattle. Its also a nice visual reminder that infrastructural systems degrade over time and we should not take these systems for granted.

View the images below for a closer look:

Figure 1. The Scene of the Crime (click the image for a larger version)

Figure 2. Close-up view of the hack (click the image for a larger version)