News
21 October 2011 Restructuring of Applied Research.
Like many companies, Applied Research has found the Global Financial Crisis tough. Over the last three years, the company has been suffering from cash-flow problems. While testing has continued over this period, trading, as for many businesses, has been difficult.
As a result tough decisions have had to be made to restructure the business to reduce costs. This has resulted in the need to shed valued staff. Decisions to let staff go are never easy, nor are they taken lightly. They were, however, necessary to secure the long term viability of the testing capability.
The slimmed down team will continue to offer all of the tests that it has been performing in the past: solid fuel heater safety, emissions and efficiency tests; testing of solar collectors to AS/NZS 2712; consumer products testing; as well as expanding the testing of gas appliances.
The remaining staff are being trained to have multi-disciplinary skills. Each team member will have a specialisation, but will also be able to carry out testing in a range of areas. Cross-skilling in this way has a further benefit, in that it will allow more staff to work on an area when it gets busy.
From November the testing team will be as follows:
- Wayne Webley
- George Looman
- Rob Kay
- Chris McLennan
12 December 2010 But Does It Leak ?
In the unlikely event that fuel or storage tanks fail regulations require that there is a "secondary containment system" or bund to contain the liquid. These must be tested periodically to make sure they don't leak appreciably. The test involves flooding the bund with water and calculating the loss rate after correcting for evaporation and rainfall (sometimes quite a tricky calculation).
We have specialised equipment to carry out these tests and our staff hold Site Safe passports and are familiar with working on hazardous sites.
30 September 2010 A Better Chicken with a Beer Can
A recent consumer product test involved a novel method of cooking that resulted in an excellent product. Our staff were happy to check the results when whole chickens were cooked on barbecues using the beer-can method.
This involves cooking a chicken by covering it in Cajun spices then inserting a half-full beer can into the chicken so that the meat stays moist and flavoursome.
23 June 2010 Boxing Champion
Recent testing of the thermal properties of shipping containers and their loads saw George Looman become a serious boxer. In order to test heat transfer within the load George had to fill a container with 278 cardboard boxes that he had previously filled with waste paper. We have put George up for selection for the next Commonwealth Games.
