life in a power house

[Frank46]

One of the fun jobs I had many years ago (retired) was cleaning out the huge condensers that would cool water down to usable tempratures. Depending on the season of the tear and being on the east river in nyc you'd be suprised as to what gets sucked into these condensers. First you have to crawl through a hatch into the condenser and put down 12' long planks so you won't fall into the condenser inlet tunnel. You really don't want to do this. Don't ask how I know. You would literally pick off the dead and dying sea life along with a large collection of wildlife know as the dreaded east river white fish.You see when people have fun and using the dreaded east river whitefish then they ususally end up in the toilet bowl and start their journey through NYC's sewer system and many of these critters end up in the water and get sucked up into the condensers. Well the condenser tubes get a through cleaning. You make off a section of the crown sheet where the tubes are. Then you take these little sponge rubber bally that is covered with a really course abrasive. Ah, now the fun is ready to start. Next up is the two triggered water and compressed air gun. So here you are busily stuffing these bally into the condenser and when you have your section full of balls Then is the time to use the gun. First trigger to be pulled is the water trigger which shoots water into the now plugged tube with about 125psi. Very quickly then you pull the air trigger which may air pressure as high as 150 psi. The whole deal with this is to give the air something to act on which is the water.And the air proceeds to blow out all the junk from the tubes and scrubbing them at the same time. Funny thing is that if its reasonable quiet you can hear the balls impacting the opposite end of the condenser. You normally get a good loud WHAP sound. Me and my buddy would be able to get one half of the condenser cleaned and then go over and collect the balls we just sent over. Well one night we were just getting to start up when we spied moving lights at the other end. Usually the foreman checking our progress. You never saw two 21 year old guys proceeding to blow the balls out to the other side so fast. You could hear all sorts of screaming and yelling because they were getting hit by these balls and whatever wildlife was in the tubes. About ten minutes later the foreman much the worse for wear and stinking like dead fish starts yelling at us to come out of the condenser. He says "didn't you hear me screaming and yelling??" Nope says I. then I tell him let us know when you check the other side so's we don't shoot the balls through. So he goes off on his merry way and we continue shooting balls. Half an hour later we see some lights, and sprang into action. More screaming and yelling. by now he's really ticked off. didn't you hear the yelling and screaming? nope. Why didn't you tell us you were going over there in the first place??. He says I was just checking to make sure this bank would be done by the end of the shift. I told him get lost as we will be done way before shift change. You see with the combination of the water and air those balls come screaming out of the condesnser hole at well over a hundred miles an hour. And if you accidently get hit you know you have been hit with something. Had a lot of fun cleaning condensers. Frank

 

[Sven]

Well, Frank, I'm glad you had fun shooting condensers. We're located on the upper Mississippi river and all we'd see on the intake side of our two units with straight through condensers were dead fish and crayfish. We shoot 3" long plugs and you sure wouldn't want to get hit with one of those. We set up tarps on the far end to catch the plugs. Plus we often take out 1/2 of the condenser while on reduced load to shoot. Gets a bit hot in there! Our two big units use cooling towers, so all you have to deal with is slime. Not a bad job, but I made shift supervisor 15 years ago, so all I had to deal with is guys like you! But I also retired last January, so now all I have is memories and a pension check.

I'm happy!

 

[Squarebutt]

If you worked farther north you could have eaten lobster three meals a day: Abrupt End to a Free-for-All on Lobsters - NYTimes.com

 

[Frank46]

Sven, only worked the labor gang for about a year then transferred to the oil farm. Then made supervisor and was out when I had 30 years. When we worked 12 hour shifts on major outages guy would setup 55 gallon drums full of water if you were unfortunate to be in the area you got a few shower. But when the fire hose came out to wash the stack passes you really needed eyes in the back of your head. Used to clean clinkers out of the passes in the boilers with firehoses and flush the clinkers down to the ground floor of an 11 story boiler. And the clinker grinder chutes would get plugged with clinkers. You stand to one side with a fire hose blasting at the mass of clinkers trying to punch a hole in the mass. Soon's you started getting water back we'd run and out would come the trapped clinkers with about 10,000 gallons of water. They don't have those problems today with the oil fired boilers. Frank

 

[1morethan8]

I was on the fabrication end... so sorry I missed all the fun after they were shipped out.. yeah, right!

 

[wundudnee]

I worked in a cellophane plant power house. We didn't have our own boilers, but we were next door to a Kansas Power and light plant. We sold them anion water for their boilers and they sold us steam. All our air compressors, chillers and such were steam turbine driven. There was also quite a bit of steam used in process.

When they shut the plant down I was 57 years old with hair on my face and looking for a job. I applied for a boiler operator's position with the State of Kansas. They asked me if I could run boilers? I told them that I'd never even seen a boiler let alone run one, but I thought I could probably learn.
I had handled the steam side for some time.

At the state plant we had three 300hp and one 400hp gas fired boilers. They were also able to fire on oil if there happenend to be a gas shortage. I hear guys, including you guys talking about coal fired boilers and it makes me feel real lazy and lucky. We took them down every summer and ran the tubes, changed out all the low water cut offs, retucked all the firebrick and painted everything that didn't move. When we fired in the fall it was like new. We had TV, internet, coffee pot, microwave, a big highbacked leather chair and a light switch. The only time it ever got lonely was at 03:00 or so when you would get an alarm for low water or blow a sight glass.

You worked hard all summer then got to watch it like a furnace run all winter, good job.

 

[Frank46]

Back in the mid 60's it was still legal to burn coal on the power plants in new york. Spent many a day shoveling coal in front of the mills when the operator had to open the reject door on the mill cause the mill was plugging up due to wet coal. Sometimes the mill feeder pipes from the mill to the boiler would get plugged up and glow cherry red from the coal burning in the pipes. You would have fly ash all over the place and they had one guy whose job it was just to run a little payloader picking up the 55 gallon barrels of flyash. Nasty stuff. Then there were the coal bunker fires. You'd be standing there for hours with fire hoses trying to put the fire out. Frank

 

[skrazo]

Ahhhhhh........reminiscing about all the above stories changes my "retirement outlook" from "brown years" to something closer to "golden years", but I'm still looking for "golden".

 

[Frank46]

When they were still burning coal and especially in the winter outages the plant would be very cold. Don't know how many 55 gallon drums we punched holes in and start fires to keep warm. Start off with some wood and when it got going a few shovels of fine coal and that would burn all day. At the oil farm we'd be unloading tankers at 5 below zero during that time never shut off the truck just to keep warm. Rain, snow,ice,even had part of the dock underwater during a nor'easter. Thunder storms with visible lightening we shut down. Frank

 

[Sven]

You mean to tell me NY outlawed burning coal in a power plant? As in an electric generating station? Unbelievable! My unit alone burned two 120 ton train cars of coal every hour. We've installed new burners to lower NOx and are in the process of building a new state of the art scrubber to capture 90% of what little Hg is in the coal, 99+% of flyash and I don't remember the % of SO2 capture, but VERY high. Will be one of the cleanest boilers in the state by this time next year. Except for the Pacific Northwest where there's major hydro-electric, we have some of the lowest electric rates in the country. With new controls and equipment, coal is not near as dirty as environmental extremists would have you think. Plus it was a great career!

Wet coal! Frozen coal! We've had out share, but Fuel Handling has gotten a lot better, too. Thankfully!