Flood Power at Work

 

Friday - Coraggio meeting in town - rained all day.
Saturday - Moved centenary boats out.  Lunch at Jill's
Saturday night - Steve's party
Sunday - Helped Peter at Anne-Maree's place
Monday - could not get into work.  Chelmer to Oxley gridlock.
Tuesday - Could not get to work.  Helped Peter.  Kim organised generator.
Wednesday - In early - got generator going.
Thursday - In early, Started gen & testing, Moved Grammarian boats back in.

MONDAY 28-FEB-2022 

Tried to get into work but the traffic is insane.  Gridlock.  This was a recurring theme.  Tried 3 times and each time thwarted.  Sherwood Rd and Pamphlet Bridge both closed.  That leaves only Indooroopilly bridge and exiting south.  Ipswich rd flooded at Bunnings Oxley.  I thought that the major roadworks a few years ago were suppost to have moved the road up to keep it open during floods.

Spent some time trying to organise a generator.  No one answering phones.  Filled in some web forms.

Sommerville / river city women were fantastic giving me updates in Syndetic.

TUESDAY 1-MAR-2022

 Kim and Sumesh (via Phil) have both been trying to locate generators.  One of the web forms resulted in a fellow calling me.  He said the best he could do was 7.5KVA.  He called back later and said he could not locate it.  Kim found and ordered 20kVA.  This was delievered late Tuesday.  The courier, unfortunately, forgot to leave the keys.  He dropped them at Ross's house.

WEDNESDAY 2-MAR-2022
4am rise and shine.
4:50 depart Genrich st
5:15am Pick up keys
5;20am stuck in traffic on Inala ave. 
(Ipswich Rd under water at Bunnings Oxley and I think Centenary bridge also closed so all the Ipswich traffic comming this way)
Bought a coffee at Maccas Toohey Rd
6:10am at work.
Looked over the generator which has a set of starting instructions printed on it.  Took a while to locate the battery isolator switch.  Never did work out how to check the water level. 
Started it and that all seemed good.  

Next problem: discovered our thermal chamber had a 20A 3PH plug. 
Scrounged a 32A plug off the (broken) Orange chamber.  Swapped plugs.

Peter arrived and we carried the oven across from the other building.
Pluged it in so the Generator had some base load albeit only on one phase.

Ran a 3ph lead from the generator to the distribution box (which looks like the bottom half of a Darlek)
Plugged the Blue chamber onto the Darlek.
Tried starting the chamber but the circuit breaker on the Darlek kept tripping.  Surmised inrush current.

Disconnected the Darlek.
Ran a dedicated 3ph lead from the generator to the blue chamber.  That worked.

The generator has three single phase outlets.  Ran three extension leads.  One to Oven, one to Gasbot and one for Syndetic.

Decided a few more outlets would be handy and make it easier to balance the phase currents.  The generaor control unit can display the phase currents as well as voltages.  The problem was no more single phase outlets.  It did have a unused 20A outlet.  So we used the disguarded 20A plug from the blue chamber to connect single phase extension leads.  It's a bit naughty because of circuit breakers but we put those 10A power boards at the end of each lead and kept an eye on the currents so as not to overload the extension leads.  

Calculated what the maximum current per phase could be:-

P = VI *0.8 and VA = VI

20KVA = 3 x A x 240 -> A = 20 000 / (3 x 240) =
Firstly 20 000 / 240 = 83 Amps total.
divide by 3 = 27 A / phase
then multiply by 0.8 to de rate to account for power factor.  (cos(θ)) 

= 22 A / phase.   <-- This is the number to keep an eye on.

Had problems with the blue chamber.  It would go cold very very slowly and seemed to get stuck.  It displayed no errors.  Somehow related to puttinghot stuff in as part of  thermal shock testing.

THURSDAY 3-MAR-2022

Yesterday I received a text asking if I could help at 6:30 at West End to return the grammarian boats to their shed.
5:00am left home
5:30am at work get generator going.
Had hoped that a good rest would give the blue chamber renewed life.  It seemed to be going well going down toward the set point of -20 so at -7 I changed the set point to -40 and that stuffed it and the temperature went up to -3.  It fiddled about a bit and eventually started getting cold again.
6:10am arrived west end.  Moved 2 eights, a four and scull rack back inside.  Richard had a trailer load of stuff and oars on his roof.  Moved them.  Neil and I carried the tinnie motor down and reattached it.  Needed a playwood spacer because the trasnom is too thin.

Note the kettle on the bench.  Had to keep an eye on the phase currents and we especially chose this phase as the oven was on another.

Learning

Next time

Take VNA and critical equipment as soon as it looks like a flood.  ALthough I have to say, it felt like the message from the government last week was "Nothing to worry about, just some minor local flooding".

Try for 45kVA.

Optus 4G backup blocks the VPN and they don't even know this.  F'&^*n hopeless.

We need a UPS system for the critical stuff

Some LED lights.