Fine questions Todd.
I actually haven't addressed these items in the thread, surprisingly enough. I think I've talked a bit about the dumb waiter, but we are just now having more work done on it.
My neighbor is a welder. He is currently adding some rails from the top of the dumb-waiter to the bottom where some particularly safety-conscious fellows removed the rails long-ago to make the dumb-waiter inoperable. Today that work will be finished. We have already attached a 2000 lb winch and welded a mounting bracket that the winch connects to at the top of the dumb waiter.
Now, admittedly, if the dumb waiter fails, we're in a bit of a pickle. Currently we don't have a backup plan other than using a "stair-climber" dolly to move kegs up the two flights of stairs we need. We have had a couple of engineers look at our winch system and confirm that it is sound so we feel pretty good about it and we plan on getting a back up winch for our current one. However, I admit this IS a point of failure that is probably a fairly critical path for us.
The good news is that we have a pretty big storage room upstairs and we can currently store as many as 30 or 40 bbls of beer in our cooler if we had to. Furthermore, we could purchase some additional 2.5 bbl brite tanks that would fit in our cooler and some pumps that could move beer up the headspace if absolutely necessary so if disaster DID strike I suppose we could figure out a way to pump beer up to some brite tanks into the cooling room for direct serving. Ideally we'd be up and running for a bit so we could afford those brite tanks though. ;-)
As for the snow, well - we've already been through a winter here and we've had to deal with the melting snow. Our sidewalks are vaulted, meaning the rooms extend underneath the sidewalks. Since the building is CRAZY old, the cement is less than spectacular and there is in fact quite a bit of leaking when we have either melting or heavy rain. And the sidewalks are directly over our fermenting and lagering rooms. (Which are heavily insulated and don't like to get wet!)
So we had to cover the tops of the rooms with an angled lid which allowed melt and rain water to drain toward a drain vent which naturally leads toward the floor drains cut into the room.
Good times!
And now for something completely different! Our Graphics Guy has Entered the Building! The logo has been added to what we call "The Tower." Enjoy a bit more eye candy.