Thursday, 29 October 2009
Inspector Frost. Nice. Very Nice.
Good on you Malcolm for providing a method for checking if fans are breaching the District plan. The attached scans are from the Blenheim Sun Newspaper, who ran a story on his efforts which he also posted here recently.
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4 comments:
What a refreshingly, honest assessment of the situation. The noise limits have been here since the start of all this, so c'mon all you growers, run your fans at the noise level you are consented to. If the fan doesn't perform all that well because it's a high speed yank tank, then just swap your fan over for one of the quieter ones which are on the market.
I can only imagine the grief that the wine industry could have avoided if the operators / installers had just played by the rules and used the fans responsibly. Now they have the district baying for blood. It really is a shame, because a lot of responsible growers will be copping flack as well.
Good on Inspector frost, I hope he has helpers. While some vineyard owners may be compliant (are you sure there any?) it seems by their attitudes, it has become them and us. They are only interested in frost protection, not being good neighbours at all.
From his data, there are compliant operators. Frost Boss machines seem to be ok (one was measured over the limit). There were also some that have been the subject of scrutiny by the Council after long standing complaints have finally been actioned. Ironically, it appears that Malcolm's tests show one set of Amarillos next to Waihopai Holdings should be compliant according to the 2004 Marshal Day report, but in recent acoustic testing, (that is the subject of a legal debate) the noise level was found to exceed the District Plan limit.
Let's also not forget that in many cases, the owner operators will genuinely have no idea what a compliant level is. They will be reliant on the installers / maintainers to set the machines correctly. The simple fact of the matter is, Amarillo and Orchard Rite fans are almost universally being run at speeds that cause excessive noise and no-one will take responsibility. For crying out loud, up until this testing, everyone assumed that it was just a few bad apples causing the problems. It's not! It's a barrel full of rotting fruit with a few good-uns tossed in.
These machines CAN be run compliantly. They're just not. If they cant run effectively / efficiently, then this is an opportunity to get a resource consent to do so or to tell the supplier to take their shoddy piece of hardware back and put in a modern device that will do the job. Defender or Frost Boss four bladed.
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