More about what I do for a living.

Next week is going to be a good one for our little office. My employer has five technicians at our local office, if you count me. We have two of those five on a countract with a petrochemical plant where they’re almost permanent, five days a week, every week. That leaves three of us. And next week our workload is going to require almost twenty technicians. So we’re borrowing a few techs from our Baton Rouge office, and a bunch from our Houston office.

Two of our clients scheduled major outages for the same week. I’ll be running a crew on one, seven techs and me. Due to budget constraints, what had originally been a six-day effort is cut back to three days. We’ll do a good-sized transformer, an outdoor 69kV oil circuit breaker, a few indoor circuit breakers, 13,800 volt, and some 480 volt, and a bunch of protective relays.

The other two guys are going to be at another facility with another ten technicians at a client-owned generation facility, doing a lot of everything we do. Their project will involve considerable amounts of overtime. As of right now, mine won’t.

Trouble is, the overtime thing is subject to immediate and drastic change. One thing these people pay us (well) to do is look for problems. And sometimes we find them.

Last spring one of my clients asked me to test the cables which fed power to a 1250 horsepower pump motor. The cable had not yet failed. They were just curious. So I tested it. Based on my test results, I reported that the cable was badly deteriorated and further serviceability was questionable. Since the cable was identical in age and installation to the feeds to six other motors, we tested a second one, with similar results.

As a result of my findings, many thousands of dollars were spent changing out thousands of feet of cable. And all this without a single actual failure. But as I told my client, you don’t want to ask the question if you’re not ready toact on the answer. Our selling point is that it is far better to find a problem during scheduled maintenance than by having a critical piece of equipment trip off during a high priority production cycle.

This preventive maintenance testing service is a majority of our business. It’s not too hard a sell to knowledgeable electrical engineers and others. And it’s usually pretty good work, but these big shutdown maintenance periods can be quite intense as there is always a big rush to get a lot of work done in a small timeframe.

When the plant isn’t running, it’s not making money, so plant managers are interested in in maximizing time on-line. Maintenance people have to get as much done as possible in small windows. Worsening the situation is that it is not just our electrical testing going on, but also a lot of other work by other crafts.

Packing a bunch of active workers in tight areas makes for a lot of opportunity for accidents. Our company has an extraordinary safety record, especially considering the lethality of what we work with. We take great care in identifying and siolating electrical hazards, but that’s not to say that you can’t walk out of the door of the substation and get run over by a forktruck.