Measurements and readings

The work this product serves is full of numbers somebody read off something: a supply air temperature, a static pressure, the voltage on each leg, the depth of a trench.

Today those live in a sentence in a note, and the note is the only place they exist — so what did this furnace read last time means opening three jobs and reading prose. A reading is that number with a home.

Say what your business measures

Under Tools → Measurements → Settings, define each thing you measure. A measurement carries:

• A name — Supply air temp, Static pressure.
• A quantity and a unit — temperature in °F, pressure in inches of water column. The units come from the product’s own table, so a quantity and a unit can never be mismatched.
• An expected range, where there is a sensible one — 68–76 °F, at least 5 MΩ.

You define these once. Everything that asks for a reading refers to one of them.

Archive a measurement you no longer take and it stops being asked for on new work: jobs created from then on leave it off, while jobs already booked keep it and can still record it. A kind of work that still lists it shows it on Organization → Job types, marked archived, so you can take it off there.

Take a reading

A reading names four things: the measurement, the subject it was taken on, the value, and the unit.

The subject is what makes it useful — a unit at a customer’s property, a piece of your own equipment, or the job itself. Recording it against the thing measured rather than against the paperwork is the whole design: a checklist removed from the job, its template archived or the measurement itself archived, and the reading still stands.

You can record one from the job’s own Measurements section, from a checklist step, or from the crew’s phone. All three write the same record.

Take a reading the job did not ask for

Every job has a Measurements section — including one whose kind of work measures nothing, where it says the job asks for no readings. On the job’s Work tab the office uses Add a reading; on the crew’s phone it is Take another reading, or Take a reading on a job that asks for none.

Pick one of your business’s measurements and it joins that job, marked Added on site with who added it and when. Then record it like any other: the same unit, the same expected range, the same last time figure, against the job, a unit at the property the job touched, or a machine on the job.

• It belongs to that job only. The kind of work is unchanged, so the next job of that kind does not ask for it.
• It is never required, and it never holds up finishing the job.
• Only a measurement you have defined can be picked, so a number found on site still has a unit and a history. Defining one is under Tools → Measurements → Settings, for an owner or manager; the crew is told to ask the office. An archived measurement is not offered.
• Anyone on the crew can add one to a job they are on, and only to that job.
• An archived job takes nothing more, from the office or the crew: no reading is added to it, and its page says so where Add a reading would be. The readings already taken stay on it.

Ask a reading on every job of that kind

When the same number keeps being worth taking, make it standard from the job where you saw it. Beside a reading added on site, whoever may edit your kinds of work — the owner, a manager — sees Ask this on every kind of work — Ask this on every Furnace tune-up. It adds the measurement to that kind of work, not required, exactly as adding it under Organization → Job types would, and the reading is marked now asked on every Furnace tune-up job.

A kind of work’s measurements reach the jobs already on your calendar, not only new ones: every open job of that kind offers the reading from then on, never required. Making a reading required is done on the Job types page. The crew is not offered this, and neither is a role that runs the jobs without editing kinds of work, such as a dispatcher: what every job of a kind asks is for whoever edits the kinds of work.

See what it read last time

Wherever you take a reading on a job — its Measurements section or a checklist step — the product shows what that subject read last time, and when, or says No reading before this visit. A reading taken against the job itself never has a last time: a unit or a machine reads again, a visit happens once.

That is the figure the new number means something against. A supply air temperature of 112 °F is just a number; 112 °F against 104 °F last winter is a finding.

A customer’s unit shows the same on its own page, under Readings, and one of your machines on its Readings tab, beside its meter: the latest reading per measurement, with what was expected, who took it and when, marked when it was outside. A unit or machine nobody has read shows nothing there.

Understand the range and the mark

On a job, a reading outside its expected range is marked as outside — Below what is expected or Above what is expected — and that is all it is. It is not an error and it does not hold anything up. An equipment inspection is the one place a number can fail something: see Ask for a number instead of pass or fail.

Whether a reading is in range is worked out from the range the reading was judged against, kept with the reading itself. So a report reprinted next year says what was true when the number was taken, even if you have since changed what you expect.

Two things that look the same and are not: what the crew sees while recording is the range now; what a report shows is the range it was judged against. Both are right — one is the instruction, the other is the record.

When a reading is taken again

Re-recording supersedes what it replaced on that subject, and the earlier one stays visible as history. One reading stands per measurement per subject per job.

A reading taken at a visit — from the visit on My Day, or through a step on that visit’s own checklist — carries the visit. It stands as the job’s latest, and the one it replaced stays in the history marked at the visit on its day. A visit’s own checklist is answered by the reading taken at that visit, so tomorrow’s reading never unanswers today’s list.

A job that touched two furnaces has two readings of one measurement, and both are real.

Ask for a number instead of pass or fail

Under Tools → Equipment → Inspections, a line of an inspection template can name one of your measurements instead of asking pass or fail — tire pressure in psi rather than a tick saying somebody looked. The crew types the number, or N/A where it could not be read. There is no Pass button: whether the number passed is judged against your expected range, so the same reading cannot pass on one van and fail on another.

• Within the range, or with no range set, the line passes. A measurement with no expected range can never fail; it is a number being written down.
• Outside it, the line fails and opens a defect saying what was read against what was expected — Read 18 psi, below the expected 30–35 psi. — with anything the crew adds after it. A note is optional, because the number already explains itself.
• A critical line read outside its range takes the machine out of service, exactly as a critical fail does.
• The number is kept against the machine with the readings jobs take, so a technician on a later job sees it as last time, and the next inspection shows it beside the line: 32–36 psi expected · last 34.5 psi on Oct 20.

The machine’s odometer or hour meter is not a measurement line: the inspection already records one meter reading, and the meter keeps its own record. On a machine whose meter counts in a line’s unit — miles on a van with an odometer — that line is answered N/A for you and says {machine} counts this on its own meter — read the meter below instead. A number sent on it anyway is refused, naming the meter. On a machine that counts something else it is an ordinary line, and tread depth in inches on that van is fine.

Where readings get asked for

• A checklist step can say take this reading, here, in this order — see Job checklists.
• A job type can name the measurements its work always takes.
• Somebody on the job can add one they found worth taking — see Take a reading the job did not ask for — and the office can then ask it on every job of that kind.
• An equipment inspection line can ask for a number — see Ask for a number instead of pass or fail, and for inspections themselves Equipment readings, service and cost.

In every case the reading itself lives against the thing measured, not against the form that asked.