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...

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. 

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.

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...

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.