No one cares what the outer jacket temperature is able to achieve. What matters is what is the injection temperature of your solvent, and can you maintain those temperatures while cycling. If the Behemoth or manticore can achieve that, neat…but can the smaller systems with the smaller paired ancillaries hit it? We didn’t see it. Yeah we got some halfway decent product out at times, It was a constant struggle to get the system to perform, to wait for things to rechill, etc…Hell I spent months running it with dry-ice coiled buckets to make up for the issues we were having.
We wanted so badly for this thing to work and spent months and months really trying, really fucking trying to get this thing to work. For a long time we were convinced that we were the issue, that all we needed was more training and it would finally click and start working. Hell even when Mo came out on the third visit the goal was to figure out if it was a skill issue or a system issue and an hour into running the system he’s on the phone w/ JD saying yeah mate this thing is not performing correctly. All we wanted from day 1 was a working system. We spent so much money with you guys and got left out to dry.
You’re still on about the chiller lines being backwards but again…they weren’t. Why is that something that was only brought up on the FOURTH visit out? Wasn’t noticed during commissioning as we fought the chilling issues. Wasn’t noticed when you came out and we were still fighting chilliing issues. Or when Mo came out and we were still fighting chilling issues. On the last one, it’s something Jacob mentioned but then dropped as a cause after they again verified the lines were run correctly, then spent the last day messing with the MTA thinking it wasn’t hitting temp.
You posted pics of a temp gun reads like it’s some kind of smoking gun, but dude, those were temp reads from an IR thermometer of reflective tape over the top of insulation…how accurate of a read was that? Jacobs last visit wasn’t an honest attempt to fix the system, it was an attempt to try to CYA over the issues that were not being fixed.
We ran the lines to verify (by run the lines I mean physically getting hands on the line and following it from start to finish), re-ran the lines to verify again MULTIPLE TIMES we verified orientation, even had the goddamn plumbers come out and certify that they were hooked up correctly. When we ripped that piece of shit apart, guess what connection port I used to drain out the loop? Hint: It wasn’t the fucking top one. closed the return valves and pumped it out from the drain valves we put in at the bottom of the loop. Man if the only thing causing the issues is what you claim, that we hooked it up backwards (ie supply into the top, return on the bottom) then swapping it would have been the first thing to do before we ripped that shit apart and rebuilt it as an actual functional machine. You even said "It did appear in one of your videos that you had it connected correctly at one point." Mate…at no point from the week before we commissioned the system to the day we ripped this thing apart did we change the orientation, hookup, or setup on those lines. If they were correctly connected at one point they were correctly connected at all points. What would be the reason for us to have them correctly hooked up…and then go flip them? When it already was having issues, why would changing it to hooked up backwards help?Why would we do that? We wanted the thing working, we did not want to spend another 150k changing it to make it work. But that was the only option left to us.
For the personal stuff you’re getting bogged down on man it seems like it’s hitting a nerve since it’s coming from multiple people but you need to take that as a wakeup call. I know this is the cannabis industry but you’re selling industrial equipment to a maturing industry, and this stuff matters. It matters because it’s who you are and how you represent yourself. Getting drunk and high on the job is not a good look and I am kicking myself for even allowing you into the facility in the first place. I caved on safety and compliance out of a desire to actually figure out how to run the damn thing and figured it would be ok but that was compromising my safety procedures in a way I shouldn’t have. Do you think it’s safe for you to consume alcohol and do dabs before/during an install and training? Is that how an actual professional conducts themself?
I should have sent you back home and taken it up with JD then and there back in December.
This is a huge blackeye for you and your company publicly because people are calling you out for the claims you make and they way you conduct yourself. You can flood the zone all you want but the truth is hard to fight.
I see a lot of folks coming on here and sharing their frustrations, but haven’t heard shit from the happy customers yet. Let’s see it folks! Anyone seeing great results on stock systems? Anyone seeing lower than -5c Injection temps (or anyone actually modify the system to see injection temps)? Anyone seeing amazing customer service or training from someone that isn’t doing dabs in the car before coming in for the job or pounding doubles during lunch break?
Zack, I said it before, but I do really hope you get your head on straight and get the help you clearly need. Alcoholism is a hell of a way to go. You have some innovative ideas and though they’re poorly executed and bogged down by shit build quality, the potential for what this system could and should have been is something that I’m still deeply disappointed in.
Instead of owning it and making things right you point fingers left and right and insist it’s not your fault it’s the customers who what…spent all that money and then don’t want it to work? I know you mention the ‘relationship getting untenable’ but you don’t stop and ask yourself why it got to that point? man we spent MONTHS trying to get things fixed.
What a reputable company that stands behind their products would have done is get their engineering team on a plane and out at the job site to overhaul the damn thing and not leave until it’s working. It’s what I asked for, multiple times, and was told repeatedly that you didn’t have the bandwidth because yall had these installs and commissions for bigger clients on bigger systems, that unit down in Florida. And yeah I get it, 1mm is > 400k. But that doesn’t make the 400k guy feel like a valued customer. If someone has a major failure in your new system from day 1 you’d think that would be top priority, new orders be damned, you need to get the old ones working. Instead it was this dragged out slapdash process of video calls with jeff, US rebuilding the corkens and swapping out part after part trying to make it work. And yeah it got hostile towards the end, but we tried so hard to be patient to be understanding to be cool with you through the process and we got hosed anyway. Lessons were learned.
We lost clients, market share, and money. Illuminated caused deep financial damage to a small company, and it cost us dearly. It was a shitshow of a process from day 1 and while I know you don’t want to hear it, the truth hurts. Buying an Illuminated system was the single largest professional mistake I’ve made in my 16 years in the industry.
