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PLUMBING CONNECTION
SUMMER 2015
A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE CURTAIN
A
s I have mentioned in previous articles, I run a
website that supplies a broad range of parts for all
sorts of repairs and installations of solar hot water
products. One of the more popular brands on the website
is RESOL who manufactures a wide range of system
controllers in the fields of solar hot water, swimming pools,
heating systems etc.
Due to my involvement with RESOL and supplying the
brand to plumbers all over Australia, I was fortunate
enough to be invited to a tour of the RESOL headquarters
based in the small and rather idyllic German town
of Hattingen. I had expected Germany
to be very neat and proper, but wasn’t
prepared to find this tidiness and efficiency
permeating the whole production plant.
We were lucky enough to be able to see the
entire production line in action and once we
saw how efficiently the quality controller
was produced it became easy to see why
RESOL is becoming such a sought after
product for the replacement market here in
Australia. The facts and figures speak for
themselves: RESOL products optimise the efficiency of more
than 3 million systems in over 60 countries.
The DeltaSol® BS/4 and BS plus (one of RESOL’s most
popular products) were being produced while we visited and
we followed the production from start to finish. Everything
starts in the circuit board assembly, where the SMD
components are mounted. SMD stands for Surface-Mounted
Device, which means the parts used here are so tiny that
a machine is needed to place them correctly. In RESOL’s
state-of-the-art production plant, the SMD machine is by
far the largest. It places tens of thousands of tiny little parts
per minute, precise to the fraction of a millimetre. This all
happens inside the machine, just like the soldering process
that is directly attached to it.
The next step of the assembly line sees a number of
people with incredibly fine motor skills assembling the
Through-Hole Technology (THT) parts. These are larger
parts set onto their places on the circuit board by hand –
“larger” being a very relative term in this context. Then the
circuit boards run through a soldering machine again. By
the way, the exhaust thermal energy produced during the
automatic soldering is recovered in order to save energy.
SINCE 1977, RESOL GERMANY HAS BEEN A SUCCESSFUL BRAND MANUFACTURER IN THE FIELD OF SOLAR
THERMAL AND HEATING CONTROL TECHNOLOGY. MAT BRIGGS TOOK A TRIP TO THEIR HEADQUARTERS TO SEE
WHAT GOES ON BEHIND THE SCENES.
SOLAR FIX