Good day everyone. A very tired Zak here from Cape Town, South Africa.
Look at that twilight sky over Table Mountain. Beautiful isn't it? In the forground you can see parts of the site at the Gariep.
I would be more pleased if I had not been spending 13 hours on site.
The end of this project turned into quite a disaster. If things had gone the way it was planned or purported to work, we would have knocked off early afternoon.
There was already a bit of unplanned work when we pressure tested and gasses a system that "was in working condition when you started", which then made a hell of a racket when we started it up. As did the other circuit.
There was something very wrong with the compressor, so he had to remove it from the system, get riggers to take it off the vessel put it in my vehicle, and drive it to the compressor repair place.
They opened it up and we saw what we were suspecting:
That's a broken pistol head! There was no way this machine had been in working condition like this. There would be zero compression or work done by the refrigerant.
The compressor was fixed. Returned to site. Rigged back on. Connected to the system. Pressure tested. Vacuumed. And the following day commissioned. Now it ran, but at a high head pressure.
There were some dirty strainers but even after cleaning them out there was still a problem with temperatures.
So we took the header off the condenser tubing...
Well of course the compressor is running high if the piping looks like this! This was NOT in our workscope. But we cleaned it.
We then cleaned the condenser tubing as well...
With no rodding tool, we made do with water and a flexible electrical cable and cleaned out all the tubes.
We then tried to reinstate the header...
But this socket on the condenser head plate was so corroded that it broke as we were trying to line up the flanges.
The RED mud stuff is mostly rust... this and other places is where it comes from. Because we could not just repair this pipe we took the header off the other condenser and started cleaning that one as well.
This one was even more blocked and dirty and it stank terribly. We cleaned the header piping and cover and then managed to get THIS one installed on the first circuit. The second circuit did not have a working compressor anyway so it would not matter.
Finally we got that connected up and the compressor running. The pressure was back down to a normal running temperature and the system operational.
My employer and the technician and his assistant all left site and I was left behind to meet up with the QC to sign off our jobs and to do Timesheets, Progress Reports and scan and submit COCs and Checklists for the installation.
I got off the vessel to find this amazing view...
Then went home. Tired.
Thank you for reading my update. Hopefully I can do more writing on Hive next week.
Cheers!
@zakludick
I have absolutely no idea how humans can assemble and work on such huge machines amd maintenance them like how you showed us here. Thank you for sharing Zak~ and hey man, its been a while hasn't it? :) Hope all is well buddy.
Hey hey man!
It's better now that we are finished!
Gosh, I hope you get some time off to rest during the festive season?
Yeah, the 21st is our last day and then returning on the 8th of Jan.
I see it was a tiring day but you survived the day with solutions to issues at work. I commend you for being hard working my friend. Keep safe always especially you are surrounded by heavy equipment daily.
Thank you!
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