Last Tuesday was the day I stayed home because the roads iced up. Naturally, being all dedicated and everything, I had my phone by my side. So about 1400, it rings and and I’m not happy to see that it’s the tech who takes care of two of my stations deep in Cajun Country in south Louisiana. If it’s a disaster, I’m in trouble because they’ve closed the interstate and most secondary roads are impassable.
Him: I suppose you’re working from home today?”
Me: You got that right. Roads’re messed up. Please tell me you don’t have a disaster.
Him: Sort of. We keep tripping the breaker on the UPS. (Naming the station that just got a new inverter two years ago. A GOOD one.)
Me: How often?
Him: Couple of times right quick. Then it wouldn’t reset. Then it reset. Then it went all weekend. Yesterday it was doin’ it again.
Me: You need me out there TODAY?!?
Him: No. Roads’ll still be messed up tomorrow.
Me: I’ll be out there Thursday morning, around 0800. I’ll leave straight from the house.
Later he called back that there was to be a meeting at the station on Thursday morning, so I could come later. I told him I’d be out there at 0800. Sitting through the meeting wouldn’t hurt.
True to my word, I was at the station before 0800, having braved still icy roads. The meeting took place. At 1000, I headed over to the control room to look at the problem. The technician said he’d follow after he took care of a call of nature.
I walked into the control room. Noticed a couple of electric floor heaters plugged in. The building has a self-contained HVAC unit, but sometimes those things won’t keep up with the abnormally low temperatures.
I opened the door to the room where the UPS is located. It was working, humming its butt off, loaded to the max and then some. No wonder it was tripping. Since I personally installed and commissioned the thing, I knew its normal load was an amp. It’s rated for a thousand watts. At 120 volts, that’s 8.3 amps. Right now it’s pulling ten. Yeah, no wonder it’s tripping. So the question now is ‘Where’s the load coming from?”
Remember those electric heaters? 1200 watts. Ten amps. Hmmm. I wonder… I turned the nearest heater off. The meter dropped to almost zero, in other words, where it SHOULD be. Heater back on? Load’s back. And in the equipment room, there’s a receptacle that’s fed by the UPS , remains of some long-gone equipment. With the heater plugged into it.
About the time that I am having seriously deranged-sounding chuckles, the tech walks in. I pointed out the problem, laughed, told him that at least his heater would have ridden through a power failure. He changed it to another receptacle and promised to label the one from the UPS. I shook his hand and hauled off, headed back to the office.
At 1500 I’m getting ready to leave, having given sufficient effort for the day. Wrong. Phone rings. The boss.
Boss: Did I catch you at a bad time? Can you talk? (Boss is very safety-minded. If I was driving, he wants me to pull off the road to talk)
Me: Sure I can talk! I’m sitting here at my desk. What’s up? (I feel like the loser in the horror movie that’s going down into the dark basement)
Boss: The pipelines up north have lost two air compressors in a week, two separate stations. They’re identical units and it looks like the failed the same way. It may be electrical. I want you and the mechanical engineer to go up there and meet them in the morning to do a Root Cause Failure Analysis. (The nearest of the two stations is a mere four hour drive away.)
Me: You got it, boss. Lemme make a hotel reservation.
I made the reservation, walked over to the next hall, met my partner for the trip, then the two of us met with the assistant boss, looked at some pictures of the failed air compressor. Didn’t look like an electrical problem to me, but what the heck, I’m up for yet another adventure.
I got into the hotel room at 2000 hours. At 0600 I was up, and at 0630, on the road. At 0730 I was at the station. My compatriot was already there. With the station guys leading the way, we went to the air compressor building. No doubt about it, there’d been a fire. And no doubt about it, it wasn’t of electrical origin, that is, unless you point out that if it hadn’t been running on electricity, it probably wouldn’t have caught fire.
After carefully examining forensic evidence and traveling a hour to another station to look at the same model compressor to see one that hadn’t burnt to ashes, we came up with “Destroyed due to a fire of indeterminate origin, but not electrical in nature.” Somebody else can complete that investigation. I left at 1500. Got home at 1900.
And I’m tired.
Did your feline overlords at least give you an appropriate welcome home?
}:-]
no rules against plugging in unauthorised equipment?
Even most offices have them, many of them here you can’t even plug in your cellphone charger “because it might catch fire, leaving us liable”.
You got a call from WHO that takes care of two of your stations deep in Cajun Country in south Louisiana? I can assure you is wasn’t a technician. As soon as you said floor heaters, I KNEW what the issue was. Of course the users plugged the heaters into a UPS outlet. They don’t know the difference between a UPS and the Postal Service (cross pun intended). However, any onsite ‘technician’ that has a trouble ticket of “UPS tripping breaker” and has eyes that see temporary heaters, and doesn’t make a connection between the two is so green that he’s still growing things.
In fact, I just ran this scenario past my wife (who’s not technical) and she caught it within two minutes. I’m giving the evil eye to your ‘technician’.
Going down into a dark basement during a horror movie is a real bad idea – kind of like walking down a dark alley when you hear growling :)
Merle
Even though it’s T-shirt weather here today (31ºF, a nice change from the -16º we had a month ago), we cold Yankees appreciate what you do for us. I’m not one of those folks who’d laugh at the deep south shutting down over two inches of snow; the fact that much of the south just doesn’t have salt and plow trucks is obvious to me. It’s also why I don’t ooh and ahh at facts like “in 19xx, a gallon of gas was only 19 cents”. Inflation happens. Since I still hear smart people make incredulous noises at these kinds of things, I’m not surprised that nobody else figured out that little battery backups don’t like being asked to run spaceheaters.
Eric-
Actually, this UPS has a substantial set of batteries, several gallon-sized flooded cells, left over from a previous installation. The bottleneck is that when the old UPS died, it was only 1000 watts, so after examining the load that the thing was expected to supply, I replaced it with an identical rating in a much better unit. The batteries will carry rated load for DAYS.
MC
Ahhh, that makes more sense. I was picturing them trying to use something a little more… consumer, like the two small APC units I pulled out of the trash at my old company that worked well enough but would’ve squealed in pain trying to run anything with a heating element. At home, I use a 1000VA/900W Masterguard that backed up an MRI workstation at a hospital. 12 years later, 10 of them during the time when DTE Energy linemen accurately called my town “the moth farting zone”, it’ll still happily run my network for hours.
Keep the “wheels of industry” anecdotes coming… we get some weird ones up here, like when we lost our only phone link to the rest of the world a few years ago because a furry woodland critter got into a substation in a city 25 miles away with spectacular results. Guess those repeaters hadn’t been touched since GTE was here, two phone companies ago.
Been there done that on the more than once with consumer type UPS supplying power to point of sales computers, etc.people do love plugging in cube heaters where ever they can when their feet are cold. Worst one I ever had doing company in house tech support was getting called in early on a Saturday morning for a “broken” keyboard problem on a POS (point of sale) computer. The space bar would not move, reason a Frito corn chip stuck under it, solution, hit space bar hard, flip keyboard over shake out crumbs, walk out and drive 20 miles back home.
Didja show them how to parallel the units so they could safely run those heaters next time it gets cold?
}:-]