Anyone in business will tell you that running an Air Conditioner isn’t cheap, but it’s essential for the comfort of your employees. Work through a hot summer or a cool winter without temperature regulation, and you can bet you’ll be replacing your staff seasonally. So when you’ve taken the plunge and installed air conditioners (or more likely, four air-conditioning as standard in your new office), protecting that investment is important.
The current climate (no pun intended) is that copper has a very high value as a commodity. Unfortunately, air conditioner units have a lot of copper inside them, for piping, heat conductivity even down to their smaller electrical components. This makes air con units an attractive prize for thieves, particularly in places where theft is easy: industrial estates, suburbia, anywhere unpatrolled and off the beaten track outside of business hours. Air conditioners aren’t the most exciting of subjects. But it’s still revealing that a Google news search for the term will always turn up a high proportion of thefts reported on local news sites. It’s not just businesses either: churches and schools aren’t safe from the copper thieves.
Protecting Your Investment
So, how to beat the thieves? I’m not saying that ‘no expenses should be spared’, but you have to accept that buying security accessories for your units is essential. The most obvious thing to do (since you see them everywhere) is buy an Air Conditioner cage. Unless your units are on the top of a very tall building, you should never leave it open to prying crowbars and violent removal from site.
A good cage will be bolted to a permanent fixture (e.g. Concrete) in the ground. It should be made of strong steel that cannot be rammed, cut or otherwise removed from the site without significant effort. Such units will often have high quality locks on removable rails or swing doors to allow access for maintenance. You can even get filter meshes cut to the dimensions of the cage, allowing you to cut down on expensive internal maintenance.
Double protect your investment with an Air Conditioner alarm. You may need a specialist to install these, since they connect directly to the Air Conditioner’s internals to detect whether they’ve been tampered with.
Tracing a Theft
All the above will act as a significant deterrent, ensuring that thieves target your neighbours before you (or maybe they’ll even just give up and stop living a life of crime). But sometimes, opportunistic criminals find a weakness or just use brute force to steal your air conditioning system. In these situations, it’s important to have ways of tracking your investment. Security cameras are an obvious investment, but you or your landlord almost certainly have such a system in place already (though existing security cameras should obviously be pointed at your units).
Less obvious is the use of any form of tracking or marking gel (or smart liquid), usually visible only under UV light. This stuff is incredibly difficult to wash off once touched, and permissible as evidence when catching your thief. UV pen and tagging solutions can also be used to mark stolen goods.
image: Willem van Bergen
Steph Wood is a copywriter and blogger current working on projects for Air Options air conditioning, an Air conditioning service based in the UK
Steph is a copywriter and internet marketer from South East England. Their principle passions are videogames, comedy shows and animated film, but if it can be researched, it's usually interesting!
