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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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...