Day 5 - Bummer, Hummer

So, Wednesday was to be our last day at the substation, but only a half day there, and then a direct drive from Ballarat back to Melbourne. In Melbourne, I was scheduled to give an overview presentation of our company's system to some of the employees of the utility as a precursor to the true training I have now started last Thursday, continuing Tuesday and Wednesday 10,11-April.

The day started off the same as Tuesday, I remembered to grab my free bottle of Orange Juice and small box of Purina Corn flakes from the kitchenette in the room, we'll call this a snack, and we got on our way to the substation. Once at the substation we were greeted not with "G'Day", - which yes they do say here, but not paired with "Mate". "No worries, Mate" is a common saying - but instead with "Bad news". We were then informed that a 'Catastrophic failure' of one of the transformers feeding our system had occurred the night before and caused an electrical outage for a couple hundred customers for about 30 minutes in the middle of the night.

Crap!! There goes our trial! How did this happen?

What the utility workers knew, as did we, my companies equipment has safety fuses all over the place and could not cause this type of failure. The failure was in fact on the High Voltage side of the transformer, outside of our equipment, but inside the internal switching mechanisms of the transformer itself. In English, there was a manufacturers failure in the unit. Not our fault; nothing we could have controlled; a failure suitable for a claim against the company that made the unit.

Hooray! We can continue the trial!!!

And continue we did. I had planned to capture some engineering data from the equipment, so I pulled out the second laptop I had brought with me and proceeded to run trials with 50% of the hardware. This lasted all morning while the guys at the utility arranged for the proper work to be completed at the substation to put us back at 100% by nightfall, this ended up not happening, either, but we are still operational and working well, just at less than 100%

I can show you a picture of the failed hardware that is not ours...



The black stuff you see is crude oil. And it smelled like crude oil. Nice thick, hard to describe if you haven't smelled it yourself, but it brought back memories of oil wells and crude oil and learning about throwing cow pies as Frisbees. Fun stuff.

When my data collection was done, and when we realized that there was nothing else that we could do to help, we left. We skipped lunch and drive right into the city. We thought about stopping, but the last easy place to stop before getting onto the highways in the city was this place...



and I am trying hard not to go to places that we have at home (even if the name is different, although I don't count BP gas stations, at which we had stopped on Sunday). So, we continued into the city, parked the car, and I grabbed a change of clothes and ran up to check into my hotel room before my presentation. I even had time to shave (GASP!!) thanks to skipping lunch. I made up for it later with dinner, but that will be my next post. Sorry, but I have to run.