Innovation in the everyday

This afternoon about 5pm my air conditioner decided that outputting cold air was not enough, but that it should start spitting out massive amounts of water. Great that's all I need!!! After calling at least twenty different service men, I finally got on to a company called Aircon Astiquer, run by a guy called Kevin Tan. I was just appreciative that I managed to get a hold of someone that was not going to charge me an arm or a leg for a Sunday evening service. When he arrived, he dragged in this tower of metal that had all sorts of tubes and connections coming out of it... it was truly amazing, a bit like a transformer. This is the apparatus fully unfolded...

I'm not too sure how much of this you can see, but what this thing does, is it raises from its casing and then unfolds around the air-conditioning unit itself, once this happens, any of the chemicals or water that is used during the cleaning process run into the unfolding tray and gets washed in to its own storage unit for safe disposal later on.

When I asked Kevin did he design it himself, he said yes, in fact the one pictured here in my house this afternoon was one of the older models, the tray made of canvas, the newer one is actually fiberglass and much better. I was truly in awe at this, and have not been more impressed with an air-conditioning service in my life in Singapore. Also you may notice that the unit itself is a shiny silver, this is after the clean, before the clean it was black, and quite disgusting, and yet I had thought I was getting it cleaned regularly. So a quick shout out to Kevin Tan and his amazing machine from Aircon Astiquer, a truly awesome experience.

The other innovation I had experience this weekend was from another company called Aardwolf Pestkare. It appeared that I had a visitation from a rodent called a Shrew. This Shrew was taking great delight in coming in to the house, pooping everywhere and then leaves, of course Princess and Pandora our two cats took little or no notice of the pest. So I called in the guys from Aardwolf, where they set up a few traps, those that are friendly enough to catch the animal and then have it removed without killing it. So what made me get excited about Aardwolf with regards to innovation was their billing mechanism. In the days where as a society we need to be using ways of reducing paper, these guys have reduced the normal A4 piece of paper to 1/2 that size. the way its all done is through Pocket PC and Windows Mobile, these guys process their reports all on their devices, get the customers signature, mine, and then pull out from their folder a tiny printer, from which comes a 1/2 page report. Sure this is not probably new, but the fact it came across in my day to day activities, got me really excited.

Anyway, enough for now, Monday morning back at work, a whole new week of innovation to get on to :-).

Thanks,

Matty H