Deal of the Day

With Christmas upon us, I decided to write about the deals we are bombarded with every day in emails, paper supplements and store billboards.  But is the “Deal of the Day” really a deal?  Having an interest in electronics, I decided to dig into the specifications of some deals on TV’s and laptop computers.  First of all, I am not saying there are no deals to be had, but what I found was interesting:

FLAT SCREEN TV DEALS

  • Refresh rate typically 60 hertz (HZ) on most deals instead of 120 HZ or 240 HZ
  • High Definition is typically 720P instead of 1080P or higher
  • LED TV is typically a LED backlit TV not an LED TV
  • Most of real cheap deals were not ‘Smart TV’s’

LAPTOP COMPUTERS

  • Drives were HDD not SSD
  • HDD drives were big, up to 1 TB but the drives were slow 5400 RPM instead of 7200 to 10000 RPM
  • Bus speeds were slow
  • RAM memory may be 4GB or 8GB but slow also
  • Displays are small and low resolution
  • Batteries are NICD not NMHD or Lithium Ion
  • Batteries don’t last long and recharge is long
  • USB drives are old versions not 3.0
  • Windows software is typically old version and other software included mostly junk taking up space.
  • And lots, lots more

Now that I burst your bubble relative to the typical deals out there, what does that have to do with remediation equipment I typically write about?

Recently, we got the opportunity to work on a competitor’s system who won a bid against us about a year ago.  We lost the bid by $3000 or more but upon entering the trailer it was easy to see why.  The system had dozens of flow meters on both the sparge and SVE manifolds.  The specs had requested 4” SVE manifolds and 1” sparge manifolds.  Interestingly enough the pipes into and out of the SVE and sparge manifolds were 4” and 1”. But on the sparge manifold the solenoids, regulators and flowmeters were 0.5 inch not 1” and on the SVE manifold the ball valves and flow meters were 2” not 4”.  The cost difference between these items alone were more than the amount we lost by.  So once again, the ‘ Deal of the Day’ again might not be that good of deal at all.  As a company that works on remediation projects requiring competitive bids, we see this stuff all the time and in this case the client got what they paid for.

Brian E Chew Sr, P.G.
Principal Hydrogeologist

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