Three hundred sixty miles on the odometer today. That’s round trip from home to Cypress, Texas.

The task calling for this shuttle was the scheduled function testing of the controls for our new power equipment. We got half of that done. Function testing? You check to see if the handle that opens and closes the breaker actually opens and closes the breaker. You check to see if whatever’s supposed to trip the breaker actually trips the breaker. You check to see if devices that close the breaker from remote locations actually do so. We have a contractor to do that. I used to do it. Today I watched somebody else do it.

We had three breakers to test. We got one completed. The other two are on hold pending some modifications to their control circuit. The engineer who specified the design of that equipment states that he told the manufacturer what **I** said should be included in the control function, but they did something else. Now I’m going to pay another company $85 an hour to let their technician make it right, and then the electrical contractor is going to back-charge the manufacturer. Would’ve been a lot cheaper to have done it correctly in the first place. What they actually did makes no sense to anyone who is conversant in the conventions of power distribution.

That means that the job I should have been finished with today is going to require yet another trip.

I took some pictures.

Here’s the new main substation, not quite finished, as you can see from the two concrete finishers in the picture. 34,500 volts comes in at the upper left at those three tall things on top of that “T”-shaped thingy. That’s a circuit switcher, kind of like a circuit breaker, except not quite as robust (and expensive). From the circuit switcher it hits the transformer, the big square jobby with all the stuff on top of it. The transformer takes the voltage down from 34.5 kV to 13,800 volts. The 13,800 volts goes into the building with the door on it. That holds a circuit breaker, and that circuit breaker sends the electricity into the station.

Pretty isn’t it? Except it’s got a few problems that have to be corrected before we tie it to the 34.5 kV. But we’ll get there. It’s all part of the process, and I will make sure it’s right before we turn it on.

Here’s a picture of the low-voltage end of another transformer on the project. This’un’s a booger. You’re looking inside the low voltage compartment of a 13,800:2200 volt transformer, and what makes this one such fun is that the 2200 volts is TWELVE-phase. Normal power systems are either single phase or three-phase, but we’re doing something different here.

Those cables aren’t yet connected because the transformer has to have a battery of tests performed on it first. Looks like fun, doesn’t it?

Next week we have the expert from another manufacturer coming in from Germany to take on the commissioning of this big cabinet full of electronics that is supposed to allow us to run a 7000-horsepower electric motor at various speeds.

I love this job!