The four letter "W" word

I have been working a bunch. It is what we refer to as "outage season" in the power plant biz. The plants in my region need to shut down at least twice a year for maintenance. Typically the work is accomplished in 8 to 10 days. The schedules are aggressive and work is done around the clock. I recently was in Oahu. Usually after stating this everyone says "NICE". But.... when you are working 13 to14 hours a day from dark to dark it really does not matter where you are. As long as the bed is decent and the food OK I could be in the middle of a desert.

If you have any interest in power boilers read on.... else Emily will be loading up some new pictures of the midget soon.

The picture below was a good find. You can barely see the cracks running horizontally across the weld repair that was done years before. We ground the crack out and this tube was extremely close to failing. Finding these is equivalent to a needle in a hay stack. There are 54,000 linear feet of boiler tube and this problem is only 6" long. Compound this to the fact that I have only 48 hours to find these problems so that they can be repaired quickly to stay on schedule makes for a challenge to say the least.


Frequently there are large areas of tubes that require repair. Below is a picture of a swath of tubes 22 wide and 8 feet tall that were in rough shape. Already repaired once several years ago by building up the thickness of the tubes with weld beads. The white marks are thickness readings and there was no way these were going back in service. Some were thin as a pop can. In fact the boilermakers worked all night trying to weld on these and made about 20 holes in them. Went to plan B and replaced the whole section.


There will be five boilers down for repair over the next two weeks. Requiring 350 mile night drives between a couple. Off to Minnesota again as well. Minneapolis is a nice city. More for those technically orientated later, will be safe. Life in a respirator, ahhhhh, bliss.