Ooops power off

[m4tty]

Hi,

Doing a job last week in an industrial estate resiting a board from the mains cupboard to the unit.

My pal who im doing the work for tells me what breaker the board is fed from backed up by the caretaker. When i got down there to do the job i switched off the breaker they told me whilst checking the board with me Fluke T100 and its not that breaker lol. So i proceed to take the lid off the 3P board to see what mcb the board is covered by.

The industrial units are all occupied by officey people ... insurance etc. So i cant isolate. As i undone the last screw the lid slipped and knocked the mainswitch and turned the whole industrial park off for a split second. SUITS appeared from everywhere ... IVE LOST MY WORK blah blah blah lol. Accidents happen

So you can guess i wasent flavour of the week that day.

Thought id share my moment of stupidity and before anyone says anything about opening the board when it was live i was very careful and wasent alone.

I do expect to get some stick so fire away. Tin hat on

Cheers

Guinness

 

[revjames]

Good one Matty

I was working in a college and we were converting 42 rooms into 12 self contained flats. The painter was very obnoxious and insisted on having very loud music on. I politely asked him to turn it down, he turned it up., I went to the switch room, unlocked it and turned the whole building off. He threw a wobbly and went to the site manager, unfortunately there was a couple of occupied flats and they were none too happy. The message to other trades? DONT MESS WITH SPARKS!

 

[Andy™]

ive done similar a few times

and the same with the music - been working in many council houses where they insist on playing the music loud.

you wouldnt think you would need to isolate the full house just to change a light switch etc....

and as for those who complain about the power going off and work getting lost etc.... simply ask them what they do in case of power failure.

 

[steptoe]

my mate done that once(he was actually the foreman for the firm I worked to at the time)

we were opening a large 3ph board in a printing works when it slipped and hit the main sw.

its NOT good,

all I could do was laugh as he had insisted on doing it cos,

"some of you idiots will drop it and knock the main switch off!"

:slap

 

[Evans Electric]

The bloke who never made a mistake never did anything M4tty .

I've done the same , not the main switch but caught various MCBs as you lift the cover off. It won't be the first time and it won't be the last.

Now enter the " Safe isolation" brigade who will say that the board must be switched off .

One of the few companies to tackle the problem of computers losing data was Barclays. We did their re-furbs for some years and they had a seperate board supplying computer plugs ,which were non-standard ( earth pin was sideways ) . The board lid was locked, the key with the manager .

Simple but system worked well .

 

[Sidewinder]

Ford use the same sideways earth pin for their shop floor 230V sockets too!

 

[Evans Electric]

Was that to stop them being nicked Sidey ?

 

[Sidewinder]

Probably mate!

 

[kerching]

Was that to stop them being nicked Sidey ?

of course it wasn't, stupid.! If you cannot trust a Banker then who can you trust... :coat

 

[Evans Electric]

Tell you what , they specified Wandsworth sockets , obviously specials , but they certainly knew how to charge for them.!!

 

[ProDave]

Reminds me of when I did a PIR in an office.

It was only a small office, so it was easy to get them to shut down their PC's one at a time so I could test them, and all the extension leads etc.

Until it came time to test the sever. Fed from a UPS.

After several phone calls, I was given permission to pull the plug and test it all.

Word was it then took them all afternoon to get the server running again. Nobody knew anything about it, how to boot it up, what passwords to use etc.

 

[revjames]

I was in a Westpac bank in Auckland NZ, I had installed some data and was just plugging in a patch lead RJ45 into the cisco router. As I plugged it in, banking staff came running in shouting 'What have you done?" all the PCs were off, lots of people at the counters no PCs on at all. I ran through what I had done and wondered how I could have caused such a catastrophe when a frantic looking AC guy came frantically running in... I re set the MCB that he had tripped, I rebooted the servers and counter PCs and made sure the manager knew who it was that caused the blunder....

 

[Phoenix]

I plugged my loop tester (on full test) into a socket in the server room of a building I was testing that I thought was on the some circuit as the one the other side (which I had identified), unfortunatly it seemed it was on an RCBO tripped out and cut the power to the camara rack, looked in a few boards didnt see it, but as I hadn't found them all that that point, asked the head cartaker and he seemed relaxed about the whole thing, we found the tripped rcbo and reset it, and just managed to get to the server room as some IT chaps turned up at it and had a bit of a moan!

 

[Sidewinder]

Is this lot one reason why we should have robust T's & C's for our PIR's!!!

 

[pickleye]

The painter was very obnoxious and insisted on having very loud music on. I politely asked him to turn it down, he turned it up., I went to the switch room, unlocked it and turned the whole building off

I'm working amongst 6 painters at the minute, its like living in a cut price musical:red card

 

[batty]

I'm working amongst 6 painters at the minute, its like living in a cut price musical:red card

Ok as long as its not radio 1

 

[pickleye]

Singing and dancing!... the paint fumes i guess

 

[Evans Electric]

I was in a Westpac bank in Auckland NZ, I had installed some data and was just plugging in a patch lead RJ45 into the cisco router. As I plugged it in, banking staff came running in shouting 'What have you done?" all the PCs were off, lots of people at the counters no PCs on at all. I ran through what I had done and wondered how I could have caused such a catastrophe when a frantic looking AC guy came frantically running in... I re set the MCB that he had tripped, I rebooted the servers and counter PCs and made sure the manager knew who it was that caused the blunder....

Remiinded me of attending a fault at a Barclay's Branch , opened the main panel, put my Drummond tester between a phase and earth and their main switch tripped out in the basement . The staff went into "Bandit" mode , all cashier tills locked , outer door locked , phoned police.

Turned out their main switch was a TP 100A /100mA RCD . Utterly ridiculous on a TNS .

At another branch I pulled a fuse marked "Strong Room Lights" Lights went out and we started our work. Girl comes down from the third floor , "Have you switched our macine off ?" "Not us Love" Turned out a feed had been taken off that circuit to the third floor ........ it fed a machine that stores all the data from the cheques paid in that day , then it is sent to some great clearing bank at 1600hrs . Oooops !! They had to stay late to feed it all in again !!

 

[aidanb19]

When I worked for a generator company that looked after a well known supermarket's standby generators, there were often stories (not me thank god) of run testing in the wrong mode, which results in the whole store going off then just the critical coming back on 20 seconds or so later!

 

[revjames]

I was installing one of 2 x 50KVA UPS in the basement of Telstra NZ in auckland. 50mm 3 phase in singles in and out. The guy helping me was struggling with one of the terminals but eventually managed to get it in. A few weeks later I was there doing some running checks including current loadings with a clamp meter, I moved the blue phase (still called that in NZ) to get the clamp round it and shock horror it came out of the terminal. Someone ran in yelling what have you done - 27000 customers in the Pacific rim had just been dropped.... ooops.

I might add that the person who had struggled with the terminal had actually stuck the cable in the wrong place and tightened the screw without actually checking the cable was firmly connected. (the moving cage that goes up trapping the cable as you tighten, the cable was not in it but underneath it)

Big investigation but thankfully I was vindicated.