There's caution, and then there's caution

I'm really glad about all

I'm really glad about all the awesome stories on here. But why are all of you anonymous? We don't deal well with anonymity here.

Follow up

I had a guy follow me up. It was kinda creepy. He said that I should do exactly what I would do at home, so I grabbed a few wafers of soylent green and tuned my neurovid to the Babmbi channel. He left a few minutes after that.

ups's, transformers & diesel generators

This all happened right after Katrina hit New Orleans.

One of our transformers was leaking TCB's and needed to be replaced. Our technical staff decided that we would change over to a diesel generator 3 days before the change out of the transformer.

We tried several generators and even had one brought in from another city. During each change out the entire server room was running on the ups. One more thing, the new transformer was lost in the confusion following Katrina. (It was eventually located.)

Fast forward to Friday afternoon about 4:30. Our electricians realized that the ups did not like diesel generator power ((not the very clean power that was available through street power.) And we suddenly realized that the ups was not fully charged. Unfortunately, this realization occurred after we had been removed from the diesel generator and we were running completely on the ups.
(Remember, this is friday and everyone is saving their documents & finishing saving info to the databases.)
Suddenly, the server room was dead quiet, no power.

Four years later, all is fixed, right?

Nope, same problem, one more leaking transformer & the same ups's with more batteries.

When a Co-Gen Plant powers up...

...it needs cooling. Of course, when the cooling power is supplied by street power rather than itself, the co-gen plant shuts down rather quickly.
This happened when the Power Company had shut down our main power line to service it, and a local construction company building a new Convention Center hit the remaining one...
Our Facilities guys had to get creative to supply power to the cooling system by hot-wiring the output of a nearby diesel unit to the co-gen plant cooling system! In the meantime, we had four plus hours of very wacky power service as the Facilities guys attempted to patch through our other Diesels until they got the Co-Gen plant back up and running.

Ours was not so bad. We

Ours was not so bad. We were having our generator tested and the guy testing it went back to his truck to take a nap. The generator went wild and blew up. The company came in and told me they would have us a new one put back in place for about $12,000.00 or so. They came back 2 days later with a figure of $36,000.00+. Our board threw a fit because it was not something that we had done. Needless to say, we still do not have a generator but we have been very blessed not to need one. Thanks to back up plans and backup locations.

Then there was the Data

Then there was the Data Center with 3 Diesel Generators of which 2 could handle the load. A test was performed to see how well the cut-over worked.
The first generator started right up and took the computer load. The second started right up and took the cooling load. The first generator died. The third generator stated up to replace the first. The second generator died. The third generator could not power everything, but it died anyway.
Some observant person saw that each generator had run approximately 30 minutes. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that each generator had a small gravity feed fuel tank on top the would run each generator for about 30 minutes. Each of these tanks were fed by fuel pumps from a very large fuel tank.
Sounds like a good hook up till they found the fuel pumps hook up to the outside electrical supply. Catch 22 at its best.