Robert Green wrote:

Another site says: "All three complaints allege that in the mid-1980s
Carrier stopped using stainless steel secondary heat exchangers in favor of
cheaper polypropylene-laminated mild steel. Carrier switched to the cheaper
product despite the fact that the industry standard was (and still is) to
use stainless steel parts to prevent corrosion. Plaintiffs allege that the
polypropylene separates from the steel and degrades due to the high
temperatures in the furnace, exposing the underlying mild steel to acidic
condensate. In some cases the corrosion proceeds to the point of actually
perforating the outside wall of the heat exchanger."

http://www.tousley.com/press/20061010.htm

The Carrier cock-up reminds me of an article about Dell computers trying to
foist off their purchase of millions of bad capacitors on consumers, telling
them that "they were doing too many complex calculations" and that's what
caused their machines to fail.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/projectfai...f-deceit/10165

Dell employees went out of their way to conceal these problems. In one
e-mail exchange between Dell customer support employees concerning computers
at the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm, a Dell worker states, "We need
to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had 'issues' per our
discussion this morning." In other documents about how to handle questions
around the faulty OptiPlex systems, Dell salespeople were told, "Don't bring
this to customer's attention proactively" and "Emphasize uncertainty."

But one big difference between the Dell and Carrier incidents is that
Carrier switched to cheaper materials while Dell used what were
supposed to be the highest quality parts, only the Japanese maker of
those parts, Nichicon, happened to really foul up their production for
a few years, around 2001-2004.