Thursday, July 4, 2013

Logo and business cards

Logo design is a touchy subject at best. You inevitably end up with design by committee since if there's one thing the stakeholders will stake their hold on, it's the logo. One aspect my father was encouraging as part of joining the family business was for the new blood to feel personally vested in the company. His thought was that a "corporate redesign" was a crucial piece of that so that my partner and myself felt like the company was "ours".

So, as the artistic member of the company I took on the task to redesign the company identity starting with the logo. The company never really had a "logo" per se. My father's business cards were pretty generic and he used a line drawing (wood cut) from unknown origins.


The image is very hard to make out but it is an old mill with a water wheel. Something my father has always been very partial to and which has been the "logo" for the company for years. In the lower right is a francis turbine to show the more modern side of the business.

Knowing that I had to satisfy my partner and my father (who started the business) I attempted to stay close to the concept of the original "logo". This was the first attempt that my wife and I put together. We really do a great job of refining each other and while I took the lead on this I definitely could not have done it without her critical feedback.
Trying to convey the waterwheel idea while staying iconic. It was a reasonable start but I got some great early feedback from a Design Director I respect, "It's not there yet." So we kept going with it. I morphed the waterwheel into a francis turbine yet kept it's placement to convey a waterwheel idea. It was okay.
Still not there and the feedback from my partner was a wish for a kaplan turbine. Most of our machines are kaplan turbines and he felt we should represent that on the logo. The kaplan style would not work in place of the francis in this logo and I was really feeling like this was a dead end. So I started playing with ideas in totally different directions.

So this one was something I sketched up on my ipad using flipink. I was playing with the idea of using a dam but was struggling with how to convey the "power house" aspect of the dam (where the tubines are). My wife suggested the subtle outline around the text which I liked. It actually took me down a new direction.

So we added some turbines back in. I took some extra time and refined the francis turbine to be more realistic. I'm still a bit on the fence as to which I like better visually. You can see the Kaplan turbine now in there on the right and we're focused more on the logo type rather than a pure icon. I liked this look and was hopeful that it could work. The feedback was that my father wanted me to try to incorporate the house/mill aspect back into it. sigh

So a few more iterations and we arrived at this. Everyone's happy with it and I feel reasonably good about it. 

I like how it looks on the business cards. 


And I've come up with some ways of integrating the idea into other styles. Since I'm getting cards from Moo I've opted to get pictures on the back and I'm really happy with how they came out. Here are a couple of examples.




So it's been quite the adventure. I started playing with new logo ideas back in April or May and here we are in July already. Business cards have now been ordered and we'll have them for the HydroVision conference at the end of the month. Now on to the website. It would be nice to have something there so when people look at the card they won't hit an "under construction" page. :)

I can't thank my wife enough for her help on this project. You always get tons of feedback when doing this type of thing but it's rarely constructive. She's so awesome about pushing me that little bit further and I respect her comments. She always helps make it better.






Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Glados, is that you?

So for my main development machine, I picked up a 2012 27" iMac and maxed it out. Great machine, I already love it. I took a bit of a risk though and decided to purchase the VESA compatible one and a custom arm for it. The arm I got is pretty heavy duty and will hopefully give me some extra flexibility in my ergonomics. I have to say, it is quite impressive. Much thanks to ErgoMart who accidentally sent me the wrong one but them were great about handling it.


Sunday, June 30, 2013

Debugging a Model A

I got a call today from my father. Turns out that he was having a fuel problem with his new Model A Ford hotrod. The thought was that it was probably out of gas, but he wasn't sure because his fuel gauge didn't work.

He basically built the Model A from scratch. He pulled the rusted out frame and body from the woods and rebuilt it from the ground up. It's been cool watching him build it up from nothing but I must say, it's incredibly complicated to rebuild a car, even an old one. I sometimes imagine trying to rebuild the van from the ground up and it's mind boggling. The Model A is a 1930's car so it's not quite as bad. I can see now why Peter D has taken 8+ years to rebuild his 60's era Beetle.

So back to the task at hand. Putting more gas in the tank did NOT help and we had to assume that the fuel filter was clogged. A quick trip to his house yield s a fuel filter from an earlier vintage that should work fine. swap out the filter and he gets about another mile further along before it dies again.



This time we find that the fuel line is clogged and the filter seems fine (the new filter was in a transparent housing). So a wire up the fuel line and a drain pan was necessary. And, low and behold, the fuel line was clogged up with ... bugs. That's right, the fuel tank was full of dead ants and metal shavings. Well, not full, but enough to clog the fuel lines a few times. We babied it home and my father spent the rest of the day cleaning it out. yuck.

I wish I'd have gotten picture of the actual bugs. It brings new meaning to the term debugging.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

More old mill stuff

I spent some more time exploring the mill the other day. Found some more cool stuff I wanted to post.

HELP!

Sir, we've got a leak in our penstock.


Are you feeling lucky, Mr. Bond?

For the record, this thing is very big and very rusty and if it fails there will be a very big problem...

Friday, June 28, 2013

#2 PLC issue revisited

So after we got back from our field trip, I stopped in at the Gilman mill to (hopefully) start moving our desks to the office. Turns out the cargo elevator is still dead so we STILL (at the end of week 3) don't have anything in our office. -_-

Anyway, while I was there I was talking to my partner and his father and the topic of the glitch with #2 came up again. It would seem that the "stuck button" problem has happened again in just a week. My partner's father held nothing back in voicing his frustration with how the PLC was now dependent on the PC and how F*&%ing stupid that was. I had learned enough about InduSoft the previous week to feel comfortable adding in a couple of status indicators that would show the current state of the virtual relay in the PLC. If it works the way I think it will, they operator should be able to see if they relay gets stuck because the indicator light will stay on. Hopefully I'll get an update on Monday as to whether it helped.

I have a few ideas on things I'd like to change but I'm still a little reluctant to start reprogramming our PLC...


Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Field Trip!!!

So my partner, Greta and I took a field trip to a great little hydro site in Wapinger Falls, NY. Harry and Sarah made us feel incredibly welcome as they walked us through all of the cool stuff they're doing. They own three sites and have really taken great steps to make everything consistent and usable. Their focus was on automation and remote monitoring and they've really done a fantastic job.

The first thing Sarah showed us was the more than 16 networked surveillance cameras that they can access right through their iPad. These cameras are set up at all their sites and are a combination of static cameras and Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) cameras. The PTZ cameras they are using are top-of-the-line sony cameras with 26x optical zoom which allows them to use one camera to monitor both overall spaces and individual gauges on a panel! Very nice setup and something we're looking to do at our sites as well.

The Wapinger conference room. PHS has got to up it's game!

The next thing Sarah showed us was the PLC control panels they had put in. Instead of a PC running something like InduSoft, Sarah is using a HMI touch panel to interface with the PLC. Their system is from Beijer Electronics and is a stand alone hardware/software solution that includes networking, remote access, reporting and control. These touch panels are completely customizable and programmable via C# which is appealing.


Two of the Beijer panels from two different sites. Each panel is customized to look like the machines at the site. 

Turns out that PLCDirect has their own panels now called C-More HMI Panels (Get it?!). These panels would theoretically be designed more specifically to work with the PLCDirect PLC but they don't look as high quality and there's no information on how they're programmed. PLCDirect's competitor to InduSoft looks, if possible, to be even worse. It's possible that the C-More panels would be worse as well. I need to do more research.

Harry and Sarah were awesome to us and the Wapinger site is really a show piece. There's an onsite apartment, a party room with dance floor, salad bar and soda fountain and all sorts of neat touches. I'd love to turn one of the PHS sites into a show piece.

The network closet wasn't a show piece though...

Whereas this old panel (not in use) really was!

After Wapinger, we all went to Leppert-Nutmeg to see how generators get refurbished. These guys had just refurbished one of our generators and we thought we'd stop in for a tour. Unfortunately the guy who was supposed to give us the tour was busy. Instead, the president of the company grabbed us and gave us an amazing tour of their facilities. We were very impressed, not just by the breadth of services they offer, but of the specific knowledge that the president of the company shared with us. He knew about every project in there, what was being done and what state it was in. He shared some mind boggling stories about some tidal generators that were never designed to be serviced... Turns out they needed to be but it's just not possible. Everything had to be scrapped instead of repaired.

I wasn't able to take any pictures here but it was awesome and I wouldn't hesitate to work with them again. 


Friday, June 21, 2013

My first day on the PLC

FINALLY!!! After nearly two weeks, I've gotten the opportunity to work on something that fits my skill set.

Turns out that we had a glitch in the control systems for our #2 generator in Gilman. Apparently, the wicket gate that controls water flow to the turbine would always re-open no matter how often you tried to close it. This meant that our PLC programmer would be coming up to take a look at it and see what might be wrong. I dedicated my whole day to shadowing him in order to learn as much as possible about our control systems.

Turns our there are two parts to the control systems in Gilman. The first part, the most important part, is the PLC or Programmable Logic Control. This is the computer that lives inside the control panel for each machine. It contains all the logic for when to open gates and all the water level, temperature and hydraulic sensors. In general, the PLC is pretty simple and typically very stable.


(This is not our PLC but is a representative picture. I thought I had one of ours. I'll replace this soon)

Each of the vertical pieces is a module that handles inputs or outputs. Inputs would be from sensors, outputs would be to relays. One of these is also the CPU and another is the communication module (Ethernet). I believe the Power supply is separate and there is also a bridge (between horizontal groups of modules).

Our PLC is a PLCDirect DL205 Series. Supposedly we've standardized on this series across all of our sites. There are always new ones coming out but standardizing is also a good idea. I don't expect to be upgrading these for a while.

So in order to program the PLC, you need to connect to the internal machine network. This is a normal ethernet network, but is not connected to the internet (yet...). We then use PLC Direct's DirectSoft 5 programming software. It is programmed using Ladder Logic, which is apparently an electrical engineering thing but seemed straight forward enough.


Not the most informative image, but this is what DirectSoft 5 looks like. This shows relays and what they trigger. The left panels are debugging tools.

So DirectSoft 5 outputs into the PLC so it never produces a UI for anyone to see (OH THE HUMANITY?!?!?). Instead, the physical control panel is the UI, which is kind of novel. So in addition to DirectSoft, there is a remote monitoring tool located in the main office that aggregates information from all the PLCs (one per generator) so the operators can see everything all together. That is the other part of our control system and was created using a tool called InduSoft Web Studio. To be blunt, it sucks.

A screen from indusoft showing the status of the #2 Generator

It's incredibly bare bones in terms of it's look. We're a version behind so maybe it's improved, but I doubt it. It's designed to provide a read-only interface to the PLCs. It has the ability to provide write access to the PLC but we've found it to be buggy as you will find out. 

So, if you look closely at the image you can see two buttons in the middle of the page labeled OPEN WG and CLOSE WG. These buttons were added for unknown reasons in order to allow the operator to open and close the wicket gates without having to leave the office (lazy?). These buttons perform a write operator that closes a virtual relay in the PLC. That virtual relay is a parallel path to the physical relay that will trigger the wicket gates to open. The button in InduSoft is supposed to be an instantaneous button so that when the mouse button is down it closes the relay (on) and when the mouse button is up then it opens the relay (off). The problem, after a good deal of debugging turned out to be that the virtual relay was stuck closed (on). The VIRTUAL BUTTON was stuck... By clicking the button in InduSoft a couple times we were able to get the virtual relay to open (off) but we could not figure out how the relay got stuck in the first place.

One of the problems with InduSoft is that their components are closed. So beyond setting a couple properties in the on-screen button you don't have any control over how the button sets the virtual relay. The best I can come up with is that there's a momentary communication hiccup when the user stops clicking the button and it fails to send the relay open signal. Once that virtual relay is closed, there's no explicit way to open it. This is a bad design as you NEVER want there to be something in the PLC that can only be effected by the computer. We'll need to fix it.





Tuesday, June 18, 2013

How do you know your hydro site is working properly?

Got trained today on at the Gilman plant. I use the term loosely because I'm not going to be an operator but I need to start understanding everything that goes on. My partner took my around and walked me through the "mechanical rounds" which the operators make in order to ensure that everything is running properly.

So how does one determine whether their hydro site is running properly? Essentially it comes down to checking about a hundred oil levels and temperature gauges. You see, if you run out of oil (or hydraulic fluid) then shit starts going south... fast. Similarly, a bearing that is going bad then it will generate more friction which will cause it's temperature to rise. I'm not 100% clear on how many of those temperatures are monitored via the PLC.

One of the reasons that Gilman has a full time staff, unlike all our other locations, is that it is not fully automated. One of my tasks will be to help bring it up to full automation, though I'm concerned that in doing that I may end up putting some people out of jobs...

Update on my desk

So, the "desk" I picked out of the old mill office ended up being a bigger find than I realized. You may have seen the old picture, it just looked like a reasonably good drafting table. Turns out to be a bit more.


So in addition to it being a drafting table, it's also a light table. The internal lights can be adjusted for different brightness levels and the surface is a nice frosted glass. This picture shows that it can (easily) be adjusted from completely horizontal to completely vertical. I'm not exactly sure why yet but I'm sure it will become apparent soon...

Finally, and most spectacularly, is the fact that it has an electric height control. There's a toe switch that allows you to raise it up to about my armpit level and down to my waist or even a bit lower. Very cool. It weighs about 200 lbs and has so far been painful to move around but I'm excited to finally get it into an office. Maybe by July...

Tomorrow I'll try to figure out the brand on this thing. I keep meaning to get that.


Friday, June 14, 2013

My First Week


So, my first week in the hydro business has ended. It's been a pretty strange week with all sorts of stuff going on. It's definitely not like any first week on a job I've ever had. Coming from a relatively well defined first week with training and mentoring I can only say I'm glad I don't have clear goals either...

Let's take a look at what I did do this week:

  • I got an overview of the Gilman hydro site by my partner. He knows that site quite well and I learned a lot.
  • I got paid. Which was amusing. Things are pretty loose in a four person company.
  • I was a scavenger digging through old cast off junk from the old paper mill. I found a few useful items.
    • A totally solid label maker in perfect shape. Makes modern ones look cheap and flimsy. I think I can still get cartridges for it.
    • A Netgear VPN/Firewall that appears to still be a current version. Need to see if there are firmware updates and such.
    • Two 16 port 10/100 switches. Will probably end up putting these into other sites.
    • A really nice drafting table that will become my new desk for up here.
  • Drafted up drawings for a water level sensor installation and shelf bracket. Not glamorous but it gave me an opportunity to work with some of the guys at Gilman.
  • Met with the company accountant. I'll probably be working with him as I work to get the books moved over to QuickBooks. Which I have no idea how to do... :)
  • Researched how to secure the network at a hydro site. Talked to a cisco representative about the ISA550W which looks like a good solution. Talking with them more on Tuesday.
  • Researched security camera systems for the hydro sites. Looking at a Swann system because they're reasonably priced and seem to have the features we need.
  • Worked on the company logo. Making some progress with it. It's still not quite what I want.

Not exactly what I signed up for (yet) but I got to work from home a lot this week. There's no office set up, so if I'm not at the Gilman site them I'm just at home. Hopefully we can get that taken care of this week and get the additional equipment ordered for the office. For general research the 13" MBP Retina works great but when I sit down to work on the logo and stuff I really want a larger monitor and a Wacom...

I'll leave you with a picture from the Flume...




Radiator bleeding by sunset

So...

$800 later my van is fixed. Good looking body work, paint is a bit off, and a new water pump. Yay! So apparently a car who's radiator is on the entire opposite end from the engine is a bit of a PITA when it comes to bleeding the system. Also apparently, the guy I took it to didn't know how to do it...

So...

We ended up driving to littleton, almost overheating the van, and waiting in a grocery store parking lot for my dad to come help. Eat your heart out AAA... So he and I jacked up the van and were bleeding the radiator right there in the parking lot. Good times.

Really though, God uses all things for his glory and man, did we ever see his glory in that parking lot.




And we did finally get home. 

A ghost town attached to a hydro site

I mentioned the other day that the Gilman site used to be a paper mill and that the majority of the mill was now unused. Actually, I think my words were that the rest of the mill was dead. There are different flavors of dead at the mill.

There's the upper middle section that housed the paper machines themselves. Those areas are industrial dead. There's minimal lighting and tons of junk lying around. We're trying to sell the machines so we're trying to "preserve" it a bit with as little effort as possible. The outside of that area of the building looks pretty awesome. The paper machines ran so hot that there's tons of HVAC mounted on the outside of the building.


I love it.

The next section of the mill is the nasty middle office area. While not nasty back in it's day, these lower level mill offices were used for managing the floor. Unfortunately, the roof failed...

Now it's all black mold and water damage. It's so bad I want to hold my breath while walking through it. I was exploring one day during the rain and it's just terrible. There's water coming in everywhere and a storm drain pipe split on the floor and just pours water in. It's just nasty.

Then we come to the "abandoned" type of dead of the main administrative offices. This area looks reasonably normal if a bit neglected. The really disconcerting part of it is that every calendar still shows 2007. There a few areas where unopened mail is still sitting there post-marked 2007. We found someone's lunch (yuck) and a few other signs of an unexpected closure. 

(Coffee?)

Then there's just all the weird stuff you find lying around. We were scavenging primarily for furniture but we were also just looking for anything that might be useful. The guy who ran the mill when it closed already grabbed a bunch of stuff and I heard that one of our (former) operators had been stealing stuff from the front office as well. So we weren't sure how much we'd find. 

One strange one was a fairly modern router wired into the office network, plugged into an old APC power supply and still-on. There was no internet connection hooked in but it was placed near one. It was hacked in so strangely that it had to be reasonably new. 

Turns out we had tried to access some information off the old mainframe (VAX) when we first purchased the plant and had hacked in this network. Apparently it didn't work but I'm not sure what the goal was. That router came with us for use elsewhere.

I found a nice new laptop, the only one left probably. I expect any others were stolen. It's about 2" thick  and not very sleek. Pretty classic though. That keyboard has some serious travel too...
Damn kids and your trackpads...

Since furniture for PHS's new office was our first priority I was scrutinizing all the nice wooden desks in the administrative offices. They're all basically the same as the one above and not particularly interesting. Back at home I have an old oak drafting table that came out of another paper mill and I was hoping to come across something similar. Turns out I was in luck.


It doesn't particularly look like much here but that drafting table is incredibly solid and in really good shape. I'm excited to get it out of here and into our offices.

Overall there were some interesting and strange things we found while digging through the old mill offices. Overall it was just kind-of sad. Whatever happened it was very sudden and nobody really gave a crap. There's no sign of a bank coming through to sell off stuff. We just got the whole mill, as-is, when we bought the hydro portion. 

Our problem now...

Poverty...

I had an interesting experience this morning. I encountered a traffic jam in downtown Gilman VT. Now to most of us, a traffic jam is by no means unheard of and is certainly not something to write home about, but in Gilman VT?!? I figured there must be an accident. Turns out I was completely wrong.

I ended up going the opposite direction to check on the van before coming back and getting into line. A line was exactly what it was and I ended up driving around them. As I went by I realized that all these cars (and there were quite a few) were in line to pick up food from a food cupboard sort of truck. THAT is the kind of economy up here. It's a small town and the line for the drive through food cupboard was out into the street and down a block. With the paper mill closed (in 2007) there just aren't the jobs for people here. Another town nearby is struggling for the same reasons. There's just nothing for people to do. We employ about 10 people but can't support any more than that. I'm hoping that we can get other parts of the mill up & running and get a few more people back but it will never be able to support the town the way the paper mill did.

My previous company donated a pile of food to the food cupboard back in Rochester last year. I think I'm going to see if PHS wants to donate up here as well. There's definitely a need...

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Vanagon Update

I mentioned earlier that I hit a deer on my way up 91 in VT. It's been painful having it at the shop and I'm checking on it just about every day (it's around the corner from the Gilman site). So my super-bumpers managed to absorb most of the damage, but the deer hit at least a bit over the bumper. I'm not sure if it's because of hitting the brakes right before I hit the deer and having the nose dip allowed the deer to hit above the bumper.


Once we got it all apart it turned out I was really lucky it missed my condenser and my radiator. I took it to the Rock-n-Roll Garage in Gilman VT and they dug right in and straightened out dents. You know you're in VT when the mechanic tells you that they had your car hooked up to a tree with a come-along in order to straighten a support piece. :)


Anyway. They got the nose mostly straight now. They'll be repainting it tomorrow probably. I'll be stopping in to see how it's going. So far so good.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

An overview of the Gilman site

The Gilman site is one of the hydro sites we're involved in. It's the biggest site we work with and it consists of four turbines of various sizes. It also happens to be attached to an old paper mill that has not run since 2007 (before we purchased the site).

There's an interesting history with the Gilman site particularly with my family (and others who work with us). When my father finished college he spend a year in Illinois (where I was born) before heading back to Northern NH where he grew up. His first job when he got back was at the Gilman paper mill. At the time it was owned by Georgia Pacific and he was working on a wood boiler generator. We're still trying to get that generator back online but the paper mill is pretty much dead (more on that later).

The hydro site is in good shape though. As I said, we've got four turbines working which put out almost 4 Mw/h when there's good water, which there is right now. What's really interesting though is the fact that the turbines provide an glimpse into the history of hydro.

We have two turbines (called #3 and #4) which were installed in the 1930s. The've been upgraded, but there's still a great deal of original stuff on them. For example, the actual generators attached to them are original and still working. They look nothing like modern generators (which look like big electric motors) but there's no reason to remove them.

(1930s Generator)

And then there's this crazy contraption, which (I believe) controls the wicket gates for the turbine. We're replacing it with a single hydraulic cylinder, but in the old days it did something a little more complicated...
The WHOLE thing is being replaced by a single hydraulic cylinder...

These first two turbines are of a style known as a double camel-back. As far as I know, it's not a style used anymore. 

The next turbine was built in the 1960s and is known as the #2 Turbine. I believe it's a vertical francis turbine and it's generator is significantly smaller and more efficient than #3 or #4. I need to get a picture of #2. It looks completely different and is in a very different section of the power house. 

The #1 Turbine is our newest (installed in the 1980s) and our most powerful. On a good day it will do 2.5 Mw/h. It is a horizontal Caplan set up very similar to the image that links to. 


This is a picture of the generator and gear box for the #1 Turbine. It's big, don't get me wrong, but considering it's generating 3x the power, it's still pretty compact. 

Overall it's a good site. We've got a pretty sweet trash-rack setup that let's an operator clean all the racks then plow the crap off the dam. It's mostly sticks and stuff and is your standard river flotsam for the most part. We'll pull out trash when we find it. 

The site also has these slick inflatable bags along the top of the dam. In good weather this allows us to increase our head by some amount (not sure how much... maybe a foot or two). More importantly though is that in heavy water, we can deflate them to allow more water over the dam to avoid flooding the power house (which seems to happen once a year anyway). It's incredible how strong water is. 







Sunday, June 9, 2013

First Requirement: Bud Lite

A quick note about moving in.

We arrived this past Friday at our new apartment. I need to thank my parents for so graciously setting the place up for us. It's furnished and they redid the kitchen and reorganized the upstairs so that both kids had separate rooms. It's really great (if a bit eclectic) and we love how little we needed to do to make it livable.

What I had not realized until now was that there is a requirement in the North Country to have Bud Lite in the refrigerator. I'm not even kidding. Our refrigerator actually INCLUDED a can of Bud Lite in it. I failed to take a picture right when we moved in when the fridge was completely EMPTY except for one single can of Bud Lite. I'm so afraid of a random inspection that it still lives in our fridge...



Biolite Camping Stove Review

I mentioned in an earlier post that we used our new Biolite Camping Stove from Biolite. For those who don't know, this is a unique new camping stove that runs on "available biomass" more commonly known as sticks and twigs you find around the camp site. It claims to boil water in about 4 minutes and supposedly produces very little carbon (smoke). The stove is what is known as a jet stove, where air is forced into the combustion chamber in a very controlled way. There is an air layer between the combustion chamber and the outer body of the stove and a fan forces air into that layer which has strategic holes in the main chamber to provide oxygen to the fire in a very specific way. This results in a clean, hot burn that isn't really affected by wind and isn't picky about fuel.
(This picture shows the stove with our camping teapot on top)

The coolest feature on the stove though is how the fan is powered. There is a small rechargeable battery in the orange part that you need to pre-charge at home. Once it's charged though, there is a copper rod that sticks into the fire that is part of a Thermo-electric generator that maintains the battery, powers the fan and... as an added bonus... charges your cellphone!!! Sounds great, so how does it really work?

In practice, the stove is amazing. I had to use one of the fire starter sticks they give you the first time I started it but every time since I've been able to put together a small pile of tinder at the bottom and start it with a single match. You drop the match in, give it a couple seconds to catch then turn the fan on low and it just takes off. The fire is hot enough to cook/boil on in under five minutes. 

Once it's going you just keep dropping sticks into it and it keeps burning. Incredibly simple. As I learned how it worked I also found that adjusting the fan from low to high gave you a bit of control over how hot the fire was and how often you need to add fuel. It's definitely the type of stove you need to keep an eye on. You'll need to drop a stick or two in every few minutes but you don't have to baby it. 

Boiling water was reasonably quick. I did not time it but around 4 minutes seems reasonable, maybe more like 5 or 6. Where it really shined though was with the add on grill, a $60 addition that we decided to try because we were unhappy with the taste of meat grilled on propane.

(You can see my phone charging at the bottom)

As you can see, the grill is large enough for 3 pre-made hamburger patties. It sits just on top of the main stove and is supported by two additional legs. It is not exactly "sturdy" but it never felt like it was going to tip over or fall. There is a flip-top door that allows you to add fuel to the fire while grilling. The grill piece feels a little flimsy and is easy to bend. I need to mess with it a bit to see how best to clean it without bending it. 

What really surprised us about the grill was how great everything tasted. We've cooked sausages, turkey-burgers and hotdogs on it and everything was great. The real surprise was the turkey burgers, which tend on the bland side in general. They were the best burgers I've ever had on this thing. I have no idea why, but they tasted SO good. We were cooking over split firewood pieces, possibly oak, which may have helped. Anyway, the grill is awesome. What a great way to cook food over natural sources.

Let's look at some of the details. It is a relatively smoke-free stove. As long as all the air jets are working correctly, it burns the wood very cleanly. If you over-pack the chamber it will start to smoke. There's also something about the grill... all the juices from what you're cooking drip down into the fire chamber and burn, which can get a little smokey. It didn't create much smoke (compared to a normal fire) and it didn't adversely affect the food we were cooking. 

Finally, the charging works. It's not a great alternative for a wall plug but if you're out camping and need to top off or make an emergency call it will suit your purposes. I think I got about 20% charge while cooking dinner. So it's not fast, but it works. 

Overall this stove is amazing. I paid about $120 for the stove and $60 for the grill and it was worth every penny. I'm not a big fan of cooking on propane and this is just so convenient and easy. We bought some fire wood and split it but did our first use with just random twigs and sticks from around the camp site and it worked great. I highly recommend this stove. 


Saturday, June 8, 2013

Ancient technology


Debugging a dial up modem today. Needed to grab my debugger (headphones) before I was able to make any real progress. I'm unsure if the computer's date and time are causing problems but they certainly made me confused when I was reading the log file.
So after debugging and digging through the weird log files, apparently the remote computer is sending a "NO CARRIER" message. I'll need to dig into what that means on-site probably. I wonder if a USB modem and windows 7 will work on my MacBook? Good times. 

Thursday, June 6, 2013

A Note on Leadership

Had an interesting situation come up during the generator pull at Quinabaug. I've already mentioned that we messed up the rigging job and ended up being lucky the generator wasn't damaged. I also explained how we were supposed to have done it. If I knew how we were supposed to have done it, why did we mess it up?

Good question. Of course, I didn't know that was how to do it until after, when I asked someone, "what should we have done?" Turns out the guy I asked, Mr. P, was an expert rigger who had rigged everything under the sun in a huge variety of situations. Mr. P was trained by the best and knew his stuff. I kept things easy while talking to him, I knew nothing about it beyond basic physics so I listened to his insight with an open mind and asked a lot of questions to educate myself. I did, however, refrain from asking one question: "Why didn't we do that?"

It still bugs me. Mr. P was right in the middle of the rigging operation. Why didn't he speak up? Was it because he wasn't specifically in charge? Was it just a mistake like everyone else made? I'm not sure. I suspect the former. My father, who is "in charge", specified that the rigging was another guy's responsibility. Did Mr. P take that (too) seriously and defer everything to the designated leader? He's good at what he does but he's not exactly a people person.

I spend three years leading a team where EVERY person who worked for me was a leader. A leader who was trained to speak up if something was not going the way they thought it should, regardless of who was calling the shots. For someone working on a job to NOT act that way feels absurd, yet that may be the new situation I'm in.

You can bet I'll be looking for ways to change that mentality.


Day One

Today was my first day "on the job." As part of our move, I decided to put Danielson, CT at our half-way point. Danielson is home to the Quinabaug Dam (on the Quinabaug River) and the Five-Mile Dam. We were here to perform maintenance on the Quinabaug Dam, more specifically, to remove the #2 generator which had been overheating.

Phase 1 of this job involved the arrival of a huge-ass crane. With eight massive wheels this thing was going to be reaching out over the dam and retrieving a 15,000 lb. generator from inside the power house. I have to say, between the crane, which was very nice, and the operator, who really knew his shit, I could not believe how subtle of adjustments they could made to the position of the crane. "I need to take it up an inch" was not even remotely a problem. Very impressive.


So the first trick for getting a 15,000 lb. chunk of metal out of your (power) house it to remove a portion of the roof. This next picture is the section of roof we took out that just happens to be designed to be removed. This part was pretty straight forward. The next part is the tricky part. 



I can't say I've ever put any real thought into how you attach a hook to a giant generator before. It never really occurred to me that it might be a challenge. It has a couple (large) eyelets on top, just slap some hooks on them and let's go! Well, not exactly.

Turns out that our generator is at an angle, because of how the water goes through the turbine. I'm not 100% clear on why exactly this is, but it is. This means that you need to rig it at an angle and pull it very carefully so it doesn't mess any of it's connector bits up. This is very important... and we messed it up.


So there's a technique to making sure the crane is exactly above the center of what you're trying to lift. You drop the hook all the way down so it's hanging just about your target and have the operator adjust the crane till it's dead center. This way, when you lift, the target (our generator in this case) won't shift. Let's just say that you don't want a 15,000 lb. generator shifting.

So we didn't do that... Yeah, totally just eye-balled it. oops.

Thankfully when the generator shifted it only shifted a little and nobody was in the way. We recognized the problem too late to fix it but early enough to make sure nobody was nearby. You're not going to stand there and stabilize something that big. If it wants to swing over and hit the wall it's going to do that with or without you in the way. So we made sure nobody was in the way and thankfully it didn't actually hit the wall.

Once that part was done we just lifted it up and put it on a (big) truck to ship it to the factory for refitting. Things weren't very exciting after that. We did some other maintenance that need the crane (you rent it by the day) and I ended up heading back to the campground around 1:00 to make any early start on the remainder of the trip.

Quinabaug Dam

Things didn't really go the way I planned though. I had been out in the sun too long and ended up with sun-stroke. I couldn't do anything but kip-over for a couple hours to recover. The put our early start rather late. Just to make sure it stayed interesting, I hit a deer on the highway in northern VT with my van. The super-bumpers took most of the force but it still did some damage. We'll have to see exactly how much when I get it to a shop...

I'm pretty sure that was the "Welcome back to the North Country" deer, too...