Daily Archives: 5/29/2012

Wheels of Industry

Well that wasn’t the way it was supposed to go…

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On the road at 0630, headed to my station in the midst of the crawfish farms and rice fields of deep Cajun country. My task for the day was to provide guidance and support while the station guys disconnected a standby generator rendered superfluous by an upgrade a few years ago. The generator’s big enough to provide electricity for a block of houses and one with many more hours of operation went for $14K on Ebay.

We got it disconnected. I had to clear up a little confusion about the identity of the power cables. When we disconnected them at the generator, I had the tech check for voltage, just in case. No voltage there. We disconnected. The other end was in an old automatic transfer switch. the tech pointed out the cables he was going to remove.

“Check for voltage,” I said. “Just in case.”

“Oh, I know these are hot,” he answered.

Now when I learned about electricity, one of the things I picked up on was that if ONE end of a wire had voltage, then the OTHER end of the wire is gonna be hot too. If you don’t find things that way, then you ain’t looking at the same wire. I advised my technician of this little idea, then helped him identify the proper cables. We got the generator disconnected.

I was packing up to leave when I got a call from ANOTHER station. You guessed it: “Help! We need you to look at something and tell us how to proceed.”

That station is north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a mere two and a half hour drive away. Oh well, hop in the Taurus, punch the address into the GPS, and off we go.

Got there just a tad before 1300 and looked at the problem. They’ve got a 70-amp breaker that’s tripping and killing some critical equipment at random times. We looked at the downstream equipment. There are definite issues, mostly violations of the National Electric Code, but nothing apparent that would account for the misoperation. We’re going to put a recorder on the offending breaker and see if we can identify an actual overload condition, then isolate on downstream.

All that took an hour and a half, including time catching up on gossip and innuendo concerning our new corporate structure and its effect on personnel.

At 1430 I was on the road again, headed home. Got in the door at 1700 and I’m tired.

History

Today in History – May 29

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1780 – At the Battle of Waxhaws, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton massacres Colonel Abraham Buford’s continentals allegedly after the continentals surrender. 113 Americans are killed. Nothing like a good massacre to show how you really feel.

1849 – Lincoln says “You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of people some of time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of time”. The dimmocrat party says “all you gotta do is fool enough to get yourself elected, then screw the rest…”

1864 – Emperor Maximilian of Mexico arrives in Mexico for the first time. He has the full backing of the French government which naturally means he’s a despot, later executed by his own rebellious people.

1886 – Chemist John Pemberton places his first advertisement for Coca-Cola, the ad appearing in the Atlanta Journal.

1942 – Bing Crosby, the Ken Darby Singers and the John Scott Trotter Orchestra record Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”, the best-selling Christmas album in history, for Decca Records in Los Angeles. It’s either this, or “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”.

1953 – Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay are the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on Tenzing Norgay’s (adopted) 39th birthday. Hillary Clinton, born in 1947, is, by her own words, named after Sir Edmund, who was completely unknown in 1947.

1977 – Janet Guthrie becomes first woman to drive in Indy 500, completes first ten laps while applying mascara.

1987 – Michael Jackson attempts to buy Elephant Man’s remains, offering a slightly used Cub Scout troop and an undisclosed amount of cash.