Never seen that before

I thought that nothing could surprise me with TM's any more, but I was wrong. I was in the middle of cleaning the convention room when the wand went dry...no water flow. I was expecting to run out of water in my fresh tank withing the hour, so I expected that had happened earlier than expected.

I rushed out to the truck and re-set the auto fill expecting to be back on the wand in a couple of minutes as it filled up enough to re-start the pump, except there was no pump action...it was not engaging the clutch at all.

After some initial panic, I checked it over. Breaker didn't trip, water flowing to the pump, pump rotates freely, nothing burning.

I had to crawl into the van and get behind the TM control panel to start tracing wires with nothing except a Gerber tool and a flashlight. Then I saw it...and was stunned. One of the 4 bolts that holds the pump down had broken and fell to the ground beneath the TM carriage. This bolt was also the grounding point for the pump clutch with that wire just laying there out in the open now.

All of the other studs were tight as a drum, but somehow this one failed and took the pump's ground circuit with it. I had to run the grounds to a different point and then it was probably just finger tight since I could not get a tool onto the nut to do better.

Fingers were crossed for the next 2 hours, but it held up and the job got done. I can't imagine what would have caused that bolt to fail as it was not rusted and the remaining bolts were very tight? If I hadn't seen it, I would not have believed it, but there it was in front of me.

I guess I have something to repair in the morning before the next large job, but then we also have a winter storm on the way tonight. Forecast says either rain changing to about an inch of snow by morning or 15 inches of snow. I am not leaving the house with 15 inches of snow.

There so much stuff that fail on a TM I'm seriously thinking about going primarily VLM.

Things can certainly go wrong with a TM as they are running for hours at a time...in my case 5-7 hours at a time. With that much run time under psi and heat, something is bound to gp awry. I just can't convince myself that VLM is a comparable service compared to extraction, but it really comes down to what the customer believes in the end and if that market is there for the cleaner.

If the customer base accepts VLM Mo, no reason not to become a full-time VLM cleaner. Far cheaper business to operate and maintain, that is for certain. Of course that also means that it will be a lot cheaper for competition to start-up in your area as well. We had a couple of large franchise VLM cleaners reach this area a couple of years ago. They made a big splash at first, but don't exist any more when the market just didn't embrace it.