Halco Portables of Welland, Ontario, builds a line of purpose-built portable restrooms, and owner Dino Collini has found that small design adjustments can significantly affect overall maintenance costs.
“I pick apart every little thing to make it better and more efficient so that we can reduce the number of service calls,” he says. For example, the company’s self-built units include recreational vehicle-style toilets featuring floor-mounted
flush pedals.
“The biggest source of service calls on these toilets is the little springs inside the floor pedal,” Collini says. “The typical RV toilet is flushed 200 times per year, but these units get flushed 200 times per week.”
When the manufacturer offered no options to provide flush pedals with a more robust spring, Collini approached
an engineer.
“If I can’t buy a better spring, I decided to make one myself,” Collini says. “The engineer is currently developing two prototypes. One is more flexible so the spring won’t break and the other will be strong enough to take thousands of pushes off the foot pedal. We’ll test them and whichever spring design works best will be installed in our foot-flush models, saving us dozens of service calls per year.”
As an electrician by trade, few things make Collini happier than troubleshooting an electrical problem in a
portable restroom.
“We had a unit out with a customer that tripped a breaker,” he recalls. “It’s something we’ve seen before and I wanted to get to the bottom of it, but the cause wasn’t easy to find.”
One of the company’s largest customers, Hydro One, is the province’s electricity transmission and distribution utility. Units used by the utility must be electrically certified by its inspectors before being placed on site.
“One day the inspector comes in with a Megger tester which can find any ground, no matter how small,” Collini says. “I asked him to hit the unit with 25,000 volts and it shorts out. I start unplugging equipment from the unit until I finally discover that the windings in the pump had become weak over time and they were shorting out on the metal casing.”
For any electrical service call involving a tripped breaker, Halco technicians are now taught to switch out the old pump first automatically.
“I love electrical troubleshooting, and it’s so satisfying when I can discover something on my own,” Collini says. “That's what I live for.”
To learn more about Halco Portables, see the October issue of PRO magazine.
