1...2...3...

Each time the power goes out at the hospital I start counting the seconds. Waiting for the generator to automatically start, bringing the hospital back online indicated by the tones echoing throughout the hallways as the UPS's are relieved of duty. Most of the time, when I hit seven seconds everything has come back to life. Tuesday started no different. ENEE had announced an emergency power outage for grid maintenance and the power had gone out around 7:45am, seven seconds later we were back online. Five minutes later we were in the lobby singing with the patients when once again the power goes out. I knew that was out of the ordinary but decided to wait and start counting. When I had counted into the teens I quietly started walking towards the generator building, then jogging, then running since at this point it seemed all but certain something had gone wrong.

When I made it to the generator room our primary generator was shut down and the normally green "G" indicator on the control was now red indicating an alarm had occurred. I fired up our older semi retired secondary backup generator and finally, power returned to the hospital. I'm thankful for our "backup to the backup" but unfortunately the radiator is plugged up with dust so it can easily over heat (a little inconvenient for us this time of year). Shortly after getting the secondary unit online Carballo arrived with the same level of panic as I had. The controller indicated the unit had shut down for an "under voltage/under frequency" alarm which roughly translates to the engine was not spinning fast enough. So Carballo and I proceeded to comb over the unit trying to determine why it had shutdown. Not finding anything obvious we proceeded to start and run the unit without transferring the hospital to it as a test run, and it ran as if nothing had happened. We weren't happy not finding a cause but decided to go ahead and put it back on standby so if the secondary unit shut down it would fire up and take over.

When you have your laptop plugged into one generator and a fan pointed at the other you might not be having the best of days.

By late afternoon Carballo and I still had not found a cause for the shutdown but our secondary generator was starting to run hot. In an effort to help it out we brought in a large fan to try and direct cooler fresh air directly at the engine/radiator but we were only staying about 2 degrees below the alarm threshold. Later in the afternoon the lights in the hospital once again went out, knowing Christy had a patient in the OR added to the panic as I once again found myself running out to the generators. Thankfully about seven seconds into my run to the generators the lights returned. Our primary generator had once again assumed its duties and now our secondary unit was the one showing a lovely red "G" indicator (felt like musical generators at this point). It had finally lost its battle with the heat and shut down with an alarm indicating over temperature, our primary generator ran the remaining few hours of the power outage without any hiccups. It wasn't until the next day that I found a loose wire that supplies the power needed to control engine speed. Thankful to have found the needle in the haystack.

Keep after it!