Back With A Bang
When im normally away from work we managed to have a power cut, and not wanting to break with tradition it all went down and took down the whole place, causing untold issues.
Monday morning comes and I really don’t want to go to work, get in to find the place still standing, rather hoping one day im going to ride around the corner and see a sea of fire engines damping down the ashes of what was the building, but oh no it was still there.
A normal day of emails, emails and oh emails, budgets, meetings, then I find we need to look at the bloody power fault
Now the unusual point here is we have two switches a teriyaki 660 Amp Switch and a 440 Amp switch, the problem here is that the 660 Amp switch keeps tripping and not the other, so it was decided that we would power down the whole system again and basically drill a whole into the main intake bus and check it out with a endoscope.
So Tuesday morning comes nice and dark and cold , as ever the office had not set everything up so a heated 10 min conversation with the security until they finally got the point we are the key anchor tenants and they will cooperate.
A building with 6 floors is great with power but crap with no lifts or escalators at one stage I nearly coughed up a lung.
Id guess the most important thing when working on a massive intake bus with be being able to see, so with no lights its was going to be interesting , with the power off and gas tilly camping lamps next to the switch we pull it apart,
As you can see from the picture those mains cables are 10cm thick each and there is 3 per phase, It would really ruin your day if you touched one of these when live, when we took the covers off you could smell the static electricity running in the air. The Electrician was stood there with his test probes touching each Phase, not for me am afraid.
Well after much debating and talking to engineers we opted to just turn the main switch off and open the main intake cabinet, oh how disappointed I was when we found nothing, its seem the issues are being caused by a magnetic field, with 660amps that’s going to be a big magnetic field, so the main switch trip relay has been adjusted from 10ms to 30ms, the adjustment is supposed to cure it, I wont hold my breath.
Then its back to the normal routine, Email, and Budgets, and meetings, Have to say the last two weeks off have been very enjoyable, with my new side kick permanently in his role he has taken a lot of weight off my shoulders, and seeing that we still had a full contingent of staff and a building still standing I guess he had a pretty successful week.
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