So we're not supposed to go to the pub

[Evans Electric]

It tells me the file is too big.. How do i make it smaller??

john..

Who am I ?  The Forum  IT expert  ???  Murdo .    Oh yes so I am .         I dunno  , it always just works in 3 clicks.

There you go  ..1...2...3... and ...

 

[apprentice87]

I will have another go!!

Yeh!! the hospital boilers in about 1975.. The place was so clean i cannot tell you.. I learnt so much there, welding, turning, pipe fitting, alsorts!!

They were oil fired with heavy oil, stuff was really thick and had to be heated to about 180 Fahrenheit before it left the storage tanks.

You would have generally two boilers online, one on standby, so up to temperature and near enough pressure but not producing steam, and one in bits..

It was more or less fully automated and was amazing for a 14 year old kid to see.. i could write for days about these things!!

Now they are all gone and the place is heated with gas, The boilerhouse is more or less filled with junk now. terribly sad for me to see..

john..

 

[Geoff1946]

This brings back a lot of memories for me.  My Dad was sole maintenance engineer at a small rural hospital which had originally been an isolation hospital and was re-purposed as a post op' recovery satellite unit to bigger places.  The patients and families either loved it, - drive out in the countryside, or hated it, - poor bus service.

We lived in a house on site and I spent lots of time in my teens helping out on all sorts of jobs. 

Dad was a skilled fitter but in this job did just about anything, maintaining (initially) a 1901 Lancashire boiler and steam plant, a bank of automatic coal fired hot water boilers, later converted to oil and a complete on site sewerage plant, in addition to general building maintenance and repairs.  Specialist electricians, plumbers, etc were called in only rarely.

I learned a great deal there and I suppose that was what set me on course to an engineering career.  By the age of about 15 I was quite familiar with three phase motors and starters.

I'm still happy to turn my hand to most manual tasks.

 

[Phoenix]

Look very similar to the boilers at a animal products rendering plant I did some work at, three in one big boiler house, one in a separate boiler house. All running on tallow that they produced themselves, wans't the best smell but compared to the rest of the plant it was actually a breath of fresh air. The plant would be shutdown on a Monday morning for the boilers to be cleaned out, and other maintenance going on in the plant. They would then get back up and running somewhere late on in the afternoon and they would run right through 24/7 untill the weekend when the weeks worth of 'material' to process ran out. Sometimes they'd be running on a sunday, sometimes not. Interesting place once you got past the smell. I actually the other day managed to find a half bottle of alcohol hand sanitiser gel in the van from when I was working there.

As a side note, I wonder how they will fare with corona virus (I'm sure they must still be running, I cant see how it can be allowed for the stuff they take in to pile up for three weeks, that would be a public health issue in itself). I do wonder if due to the nature of it, that anyone from there who catches it might end up with very mild effects, I imagine being in that place keeps your immune system running at a reasonable rate, not immune to the particular virus of course, but effectivly on high alert to deal with whatever comes in pretty quickly

 

[apprentice87]

I worked in a garage once. i was only a kid.. I had to do the brakes on a mini van that was owned by the rendering works round the corner. The wheel arches were full of thick lard like grease and the entire thing was crawling with maggots, [It was the middle of summer]

As i say, i was only a kid, now i would just flat refuse to do it until it had all been steamed off..

john..

 

[Phoenix]

I felt sorry for the fitters and other maintenance chaps, having to wade through it and change motors for example that were completely caked in the grease, or clearing blockages in the plant, one of the worst areas was actually the waste water treatment facility, mankey greasy water everywhere, there was some kind of sludge pump that run intermittantly and had a small drip onto a mechanical coupling, such that when it ranm, it sprayed it out not only over the back wall, but up thr front of the distboard that was immediatly behind. Lastest generation schneider board but looked like it was decades old from the smount of dirt and rust. When I was first shown around there I felt like I was going to throw up from the smell, a week later I was wandering around knowing it smelt bad, but not phyically affected anymore.

Of course it was the height of summer that I was there during a heatwave.....

 

[apprentice87]

Urrrrrrrgh.... !!!!!

When i was working in the hospital boiler house many many years ago, the chief engineer told me that "you cannot catch germs from a bad smell" No idea if this is true though!!

Subject came up as they were prodding me into action with helping to repair one of them industrial waste disposal kitchen things.. The kitchen often STUNK, and still does 45 years later!!

Moral: Do not drop spoons in the disposal machine, it does not like it!!

john..