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Engineering Special Forces: Heat and Cold


The driver of this car almost related to us during a business trip. By the way, he had a gun with him. They asked why. We received a capacious answer: "Just in case."

Bank, audit of the data center cold supply system . There is a functioning bank operating service; they have a service agreement with the organization Jolly Jellyfish LLC. The guys work, they get the money. But systems crash regularly, stopping at high pressure when the temperature outside rises.

We come to a place in the Far East to understand. Freon was collected, weighed, compared the design calculation from the manufacturer and the actual refueling. It's simple: the previous "service" poured into it more than necessary.

There is a nameplate where the model, serial number and in capital letters are written how much refrigerant should be charged. But all this is ignored, people work on sensations:

- Why scales? I already know how much you need there. There was a cylinder of 15 kilograms - it began to weigh about 12. Well, I filled three kilograms. Why three? Well, that’s enough.

Or, for example, a large plant in the Urals, there is another problem. At the installation, the contractor forgot to add an additive to the coolant, which reduces the aggressiveness of the environment. Two years later, the metal pipe was corroded from the inside by corrosion. Next up is an emergency stop of the equipment. We arrived, sorted out. Why initially, after the system was put into operation, no one took a refrigerant sample, did not analyze the chemical composition for safe operation - the question is.

This is a classic problem: people do what they feel, ignore simple things from textbooks and instructions. Therefore, we will always have work (and bikes). And we are doing what we do maintenance, prevention, commissioning and repair of engineers - and not only in Russia. Usually we arrive when the customer or his local contractors cannot figure it out.

Once we arrived, there was something strange in the building with the smells of ventilation. Shortly before that, there was a cosmetic repair. We started to look: when installing the ventilation system, the craftsmen started the wrong exhaust sleeve. As a result, the air from the bathrooms was drawn out with a decent pressure and then fed into the total volume.

At another facility, we had automation, scheduling and a fire. And the ventilation contractor began to change the filter on the ventilation system without stopping it. They depressurized it, opened the filter compartment ... Dust fell. Got on fire sensors. As a result, the evacuation of a large tall building in the middle of a working day. They began to tell us that this was a false fire alarm. But we, of course, quickly realized what the reason was.

Another time, in Tuva, they did maintenance of the UPS and the air conditioner. The air conditioner condenser unit was very dirty. It’s winter outside, you can’t wash it with water. We bought a box of other vodka. We sit, open the bottles, pour the contents into a bucket. Passers-by, who walked by, looked disapprovingly. And with great regret.


And here is one of the options for transport on business trips. Photo, by the way, is also from Tuva.

About North


In general, you can talk about working conditions for a long time. We work in the North, in the steppe, overseas, sometimes spend a month on business trips. But even in Moscow it is interesting. External air conditioning units on the 27th floor were mounted on one skyscraper. The tallest building in the area, minus 20 with Moscow humidity, and the wind from all sides. Unforgettably! By the way, these were one of the most expensive rigging works with us.

Last spring, the team drove by car from Magadan to Teply Klyuch, then from Aldan to Yakutsk. For two weeks, the air conditioners were repaired at -40 ° C, and then they caught a customer representative throughout Yakutia to sign documents with him.


Typical Yakut landscape. And the toponym is also typical.


Sometimes we have some free time on business trips. Yakutia, The Kingdom of Permafrost.

And in the Murmansk region, the wind turbine control system somehow broke down. This is an autonomous base station, tens of kilometers to the nearest connection points. If it does not work, people are left without communication, and in those parts without it nothing. We arrived at the mobile operator, and they tell us:

- Oh, stop, do not take off your jackets, take this on top.

And they give down jackets with such a thing like they took it in front so that the blizzard does not blow into the face. That trip was -30 ° C, the wind was under 10 m / s, judging by the base station logs. And the humidity there is 90-100 percent. The visor cannot be opened very much so that snow does not hit the face. And you need to blink more often, because the eyelashes can freeze.
On a polar night, they unload us, they throw us on a snowmobile from the road to the hill. Hard to go up. We:

- Maybe we’ll get down, we’ll go on foot?
- Yes, you will head off under the snow, there are three or four meters, we will not dig out later.

As we finished, we had to take an electric panel with us. And he weighed 40 kilograms of equipment. And it was necessary to drag him through this snow for about 20 minutes. He pushes through the snowdrifts, stands upright, and you pull him like a plow. An hour was crawling.

Come and see nothing. We had a polar coordinate system, the only reference point is a beacon at the base station. There are no more light sources. And the phone froze. They saw a small source of light, decided to go to it. It turned out that the driver arrived, turned off the car and read with a flashlight. Such an intellectual comrade, what should he do. And the fact that we need light from the headlights for a guideline, I did not think.

This is how to set up experiments with autonomous base stations far from civilization.

About Ivanovo


Recently we went to Ivanovo for scheduled maintenance of an uninterruptible power supply and battery replacement in a large shopping center. The story is ordinary for us: we transfer consumers to external power supply, then we remove the power module weighing about 70 kg from the cabinet 10-15 cm in front of it so that it is de-energized, and we begin work ... And so when we removed the module, a characteristic clap occurred. Flash, puffs of smoke. And the customer has working hours, customers ...


That same power module.

To restore power supply, at least according to a temporary scheme, the input and output wires were simply planted on one bus. They put new fuses in the electrical cabinet, supplied power. Ticket offices did not work as a result of 10-15 minutes.



Well, then the question arose of what to do about it. They recalled that we have the same office in our Moscow laboratory. We decided to use it as a replacement and take it to the Ivanovo office and a spare power module. Colleagues loaded, our service car rushed to the city of brides Ivanovo. All this in one day: it all started at about 11 a.m., at the beginning of the third the car started from Moscow and at about half past seven in the evening.

I did scheduled work all day — sorting through the batteries. There is another ambush. I open the box, and instead of ten batteries there are nine. It turns out, shortage. I called my colleagues again, I say: look, where can I get one in Ivanovo? They worked quickly: literally 10 minutes later they sent the coordinates of the store where you can pick up such a battery.

The driver arrived, we unloaded him, and waited for the shopping center to close. By 10:30 p.m. we arrived at the place, took the battery modules up and then, until one in the morning, they dismantled the burned-out UPS and put in a new one, and started up the car. At the same time, they found two more fused fuses. And then, when the UPS was debugged, they waited for the servers to be raised remotely, since the local employee was sleeping a long time ago. This whole process ended at half past three in the morning. And at eight in the morning - rise to again go to the shopping center and take out old batteries for recycling.

On the same day at 17 o’clock we were in the office. What can I say: we met the deadlines for the planned trip, although I had to work in emergency mode.

About the warm edges


We also have work in quite exotic places, Latin America, for example. We live there on the site - the so-called distant objects. The site is on a mountain, the height seems to be small. But this is the driest place on the planet - Atacama. I have photos from a hygrometer where it shows 8% humidity. Locals say: "This is still good, we have visited 1%." Well, for us it’s not very, because blood constantly flows from the nose: low humidity, pressure, unusual height of 1,550 m above sea level affect.

The locals changed diesel fuel to water at the rate of one to one: one liter of diesel fuel per large tank of water. When you wash, it is better not to open your mouth, because if you swallow it, the consequences can be dire. We always have antibiotics with us.

But this is not all: there are also black widows and other living creatures. When you go to bed, you need to shake the whole bed and clothes so that no one is left in it. Because during the day, insects can crawl, and in the morning you can not get up. If someone bites, then there are about two hours to survive. During this time, you can only go down the mountain and, if you're lucky, find a doctor. Therefore, by the way, we do not go there in the spring, when insects are especially active. In other periods of time everything is quiet there, and it feels as if there is nobody. Just a desert with tall cacti. Their needles are such that a person can be pierced.


And this is also Chilean everyday life. Not all the same to be engaged in engineering!


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It happens that we do our own thing, and other contractors are conducting their own project nearby. While reconstructing one large building, we watched how electricians from another company worked. Everything began with them as complex tests. It was necessary to transfer the building to power from the city beam to power from a diesel engine. Electricians put a diesel per megawatt, but they did not understand the circuit. The building stood at the intersection of two districts and had two inputs respectively. Transfer to autonomous power supply worked well, but they started switching back ... Bam! Meeting! At this time, we mounted our communication equipment (we did not connect it yet), we hear a loud pop, as from an explosion, and pitch darkness. Silence. Only the monitor in the corner to burn remained on the uninterruptible. Then an electrician, deafened by the explosion, walked around the building and answered all questions:

- Do not say anything, I still can’t hear.

In the shopping center, we ordered six meters of large cross-section cable for work , and they brought us a whole reel. Enough to connect the neighborhood. They printed our requirements, but it seems that not everything was printed. When everything became clear, the supply manager worried most of all:

- You told the UPS to change, sent the cable marking. And I gathered half of the people from the shopping center to push this coil into the room!

I think the scraps were used. By the way, about trimming. I heard a story at one of the sites when the contractor was allowed to take out unclaimed installation materials. The phrase completely sounded like this: "You can take it out for yourself, you just need to draw up a document." For some reason, they did not hear the second part of the proposal, and as a result, the driver with this load almost went to prison. Well, that sorted out.

By the way, in March-April we have the most season in the service - both for maintenance and for service procedures in general.This year, the virus made its own adjustments, but, for example, not so long ago they called us from one glorious Siberian city. There, the customer has a problem - the humidity in the data center does not correspond to the design indicators. While we know that the load on IT equipment is insufficient there, and the air conditioners work, they cool it. So, when the business trips begin again, we will deal with their settings on the spot.

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