[Nhcoll-l] Compactors in collections

[rapp at inpa.gov.br]

I can't resist to add my comments after Douglas.

Yes, you have "literally to breathe down the necks of the people from the compactor company "! This expression is great and it was exactly my experience. Although I received the visitation of an engineer in compactors, the project assembled by them made me order for half extra budget of complements! The shelves came with an internal "channel" designed to keep the rigidity of the shelf, however, for alcohol collections the jars could turn!!! So, I had to order extra covers for these channels. I also had to order extra steel bars for protection to avoid the jars to fall from the shelves. The initial project reduced the number of shelves from 6 to 5 despite of all my observations. I had to order extra shelves and connections. Maybe it was just local incompetence, but compactor companies may be not familiar with our kind of storaged material.

I ended up gaining approx. 40% of space, what was great. I also order for holes, small openings, on the top shelves, to avoid excessive heat during fires. One of our Brazilian collections (Butantan) lost all the material inside compactors during a fire because the material "cooked" inside and the cabinets would not role with the heat. I hope I will never have to test if this idea will work or not...

cheers

Lucia Rapp Py-Daniel
Fish Colelction - INPA
Manaus, AM, Brazil
14 de dezembro de 2021 14:14, "Douglas Yanega" <dyanega at gmail.com (mailto:dyanega at gmail.com?to=%22Douglas%20Yanega%22%20<dyanega at gmail.com>)> escreveu:
On 12/14/21 7:58 AM, Ann Bogaerts wrote: Hello everybody,
We wish to renovate our herbarium with 4 milj. specimens and we want to get some feedback from other institutions who already renovated or renewed their collection buildings. 
One of our main questions is the use of compactors yes or no? So what is your opinion about this? How much space do you save using a compactor and how is it working with this kind of system? For which collections do you use it? 
We are really interested in the do's and don'ts and it would also be nice if you could send us a picture of the compactors you use. 
	Briefly: our insect collection went from regular static insect cabinets to a compactor system in 2002. It almost doubled our storage capacity (instead of 7 aisles and 8 rows of cabinets, we now have 2 aisles and 13 rows of cabinets). That bought us a few decades' worth of expansion. 

	Liquid storage cabinets are in the static units to either side, and and microscope slides are in a narrow shelving unit in the middle; the 11 movable compactor units are only for cabinets of pinned specimens, and operated manually. In 18 years we have not needed any repairs, which is a far better track record than electric-powered compactor systems. Insects on pins are fragile but not as bad as people might think; we routinely ship specimens using postal delivery and only rarely experience significant damage. 

	The MAJOR caveat for compactors has to do with design and execution: we had to literally breathe down the necks of the people from the compactor company because they kept screwing up the blueprints and specs for the hardware dimensions in very minor ways, and there were also issues with pouring a layer of concrete on top of an existing floor. To illustrate how subtle but devastating a mistake can be, one of the things they didn't account for was that both sides of each moving unit had a knob that could be pulled out to engage the brake on that side. Those knobs stuck out an inch when fully retracted. We have two aisles, and each was calculated on the blueprints to be about 36 inches wide, and there are 6 moving compactor units on one side and 5 on the other. They failed to realize that their calculations had excluded the knobs, which subtracted 2 inches of space per unit. Had they proceeded with the installation as planned, the aisle on one side would have been only 24 inches, and only 26 inches on the other, which isn't even enough space to open the cabinet doors. I caught this mistake and had them machine the knobs an inch shorter so they retract almost flush with the side, instead of projecting; they are a little tricky to pull out, but at least we can work in the aisles. They similarly failed to account for the three inches in height that were added by the wheels of the undercarriage on the compactor units, but I didn't catch that mistake, so the tops of some cabinets would have run into some low-hanging ceiling ductwork that we had expected to be clear. We had to rebuild the ductwork before all the cabinets could be installed. 

	I advise anyone planning compactors to stay very actively engaged during the design process, and don't trust the contractors to get every little detail right. Be very wary in particular about the precision of dimensions, and maybe plan a few extra inches here and there if you can. 

	Peace, 

	-- Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research Museum Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 skype: dyanega phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's) https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html (https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html) "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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