By Andrew Whyte
User posts in MedWrench.com’s forums have helped me greatly over the years. I often have simple, quick questions, and digging through user or service manuals can be time-consuming. Instead, I pull out my phone, visit the site, and usually discover that I’m not the first person to ask the same thing. What coin battery does this take? What is the passcode for service mode? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? OK, maybe not that last one. Still, there are plenty of useful nuggets of information buried throughout the forums.
I revisit a few forum posts every year while I’m working, and several have stuck with me because they’ve been particularly helpful. For example, the Covidien PM10N pulse oximeter will sometimes display an alarming “SYSTEM FAULT” message. Most of the time the issue is simply that the date and time are not set. How do you set the date and time? Well, you need a password, of course! In one forum thread, user Amscopolaris posted a list of possible passwords, and I’ve used several of them since discovering that thread. I end up referring back to that post multiple times a year.
I also find myself reading forum posts about equipment I’ll probably never even touch. A recent thread involving a MedRad Stellant injector caught my attention. User Ryan C shared a tip about running a single side of the injector to help with troubleshooting. It sounded like solid advice, although what do I know? My wife is the one who went to injector school, not me.
Then, there was the GE MAC 5000 coin battery thread. I actually participated in that discussion. The original question was simple: Where is the coin-cell/clock battery located? The conversation went back and forth about the existence of the battery. I even took pictures of the main board from a MAC 5000 I had in my shop to prove there was no battery. In the end, it wasn’t a battery but a capacitor. The discussion was educational, even if it was about an older out-of-date piece of equipment.
Signing up for a MedWrench.com account is straightforward. The registration fields are the usual username, email address and password. Do you want email updates or the newsletter? Yes or no. Once you’re signed up, you get instant access and the ability to download available service manuals. You can ask questions, post answers, share information about flaws you’ve discovered in a device, or give a piece of equipment some well-deserved praise or criticism. In fact, I stumbled across a button combination this week that isn’t covered in the service manual for a scale. I’ll be posting that as soon as I’m done writing this.
The real value of the forums isn’t just the information; it’s the people who are willing to share what they’ve learned. Every question, answer and piece of advice adds to a collective knowledge base that helps technicians like me save time and solve problems. Whether you’re looking for a service password, tracking down an obscure error message, chances are someone has already been there. And, if they haven’t, you can be the person who helps the next technician who comes looking for help.
