It’s been a busy last few weeks completing a project we only do every four years. We call this our Battery Change Blitz. As with every big project, at first it can seem overwhelming. Dividing up the tasks and tackling them one chunk at a time makes it seem more manageable. This is a good philosophy for many things in life I think.
Our big project is testing medical and fire signals and changing batteries in hand-held medical alarms in every home in the neighborhood. We do this every four years (the life of a 9-volt battery) and it takes us a couple months to get this completed and all the troubleshooting done. Safety in our homes is critically important and as neighborhood we need to be assured our alarms are working.
We also tested smoke alarms to see if the sound was functioning and found this to be worthwhile as well. We found a couple old (really old) smoke alarms that we malfunctioning and this gave us the opportunity to get that corrected right away.
Improved Automation
This time around automation was our friend. In the past we had to put the whole neighborhood in “Test Mode” and try to get as many tests done as possible while in this mode. This meant telling all residents that we would be visiting “sometime that week”. Inconvenient for residents and frustrating for those doing the tests and battery changes.
Therefore, this time around when we were able to put just the homes in test we were planning to visit that day this was more convenient for residents. We were able to tell residents which particular streets we would be visiting on a certain day. It went well and we were able to test about 85% of our homes in that first week.
This was a much improved process from previous years and we so appreciated that. As we finish up this process we have a few left to test, some to troubleshoot and some that need repairs or replacements. This is an important safety project for the neighborhood. A great bi-product was all the residents we were able to chat with as we went through the neighborhood. We all agreed that this was the most fun of the week -chatting with residents.
We still have some work to do but we wanted to send a big thank you from all of us here in the office on your patience during this project!
Quote of the Week:
