Marco Cincotta from ACFixr has put out a challenge to you. If you are a fridgie and use manifolds for your refrigeration service work, check how old is your oldest manifold unit in your instrument kit? Only recently purchased? Close to 10 years old? Well, Marco just brought into Testo's Melbourne office a fully functional testo 560-2 - one of the first digital manifolds in the local market - that was purchased 18 years ago ... the whole kit with even the original caps and temperature probes.

Marco's interest for the refrigeration trade began in his father's butcher shop when he was a teenager, fascinated by the tools and tecniques used for the regular maintenance and servicing of the shop's fridges. He was soon influenced by an A Grade tech to get into the trade.

His first testo product was a testo 175H2 temperature and humidity data logger, which also still works, but his manifold kit was purchased at the time as it was the only manifold on the market capable of calculating both superheat and subcool and it also did commissioning reports and allowed downloading of data with ease. "Funny story, is that I had to bring in the software back to Testo on the first day as the installation instructions were only available in German", says Marco with a smile.

The instrument was used in numerous jobs over the years, including for checking unloaders at the Ford production plant and its last service job was setting up super heat and reference Carel electronic valves for open deck fridges in a fruit shop called Viviano Direct.

When asked about the secret of preserving the condition of this manifold for so long, Marco simply reminded us all "if you look after your tool, your tool will look after you". Regular service, calibration and care in using the 560 manifold has certainly paid off.

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