One Pin...

This is a continuation of the generator issues that I talked about back in the post from Sep. 5th. As mentioned in that post, our primary generator had been running at 56Hz instead of the 60Hz that it was supposed to operate at. So we had brought the secondary generator online in order to then investigate the primary generator. Well, before I had a chance to diagnose the issue with the primary generator, we had that long 24hour power outage where once again the UPS's throughout the hospital were all beeping, and after such a long period of time beeping some had even been unplugged or ran out of battery power. So I went to investigate because I suspected we were running on the primary generator again. When I got to the generator room sure enough the primary generator was online and was running at 56Hz again.

56.2Hz...No bueno

I found Rosmel and Jared and asked about the changeover and was informed the secondary generator had overheated and shut down leaving the hospital without power. So they opted to return to the primary generator.

At this point I decided to take a look and see if there was an obvious reason the generator was running slow. In hindsight I wish I had done this sooner. Donning my ear muffs I went into the generator room and performed a quick inspection of the throttle linkage above a very toasty CAT3208 engine. Right there it was. Where two different levers were normally connected by a small strap, the pin connecting that strap had fallen out and the two levers were simply hitting each other now.

The strap (left arrow) should be connected via a pin in the top hole (right arrow)

I was honestly amazed at first at how lucky we were that the two levers were aligned such that the throttle was still somewhat functional even without this strap correctly in place.

The offending pin can be seen down in the valley off the block and injector pump.

The good news in all of this is that its a relatively easy fix. The bad news is the hospital needed this generator for power. After some discussion with Rosmel and Jared we settled on a plan of firing up the secondary generator, transferring the hospital over to it, shutting down the primary generator, fixing the throttle linkage, firing up the primary again and cutting back over to it, all before the secondary generator began to overheat. So we informed the hospital that there could possibly be an outage at 8:30am (if the secondary generator shut down on us), thankfully Christy hadn't started surgery yet and that team was willing to wait for us to do this work. So we gathered the tools we needed and waited outside the generator room until it was time to move.

Dennis, Rosmel, Jared, and myself

8:30 hit and we went in and performed the cut over. We reinstalled the new pin, and cut back over to the primary generator approximately 3-4min later. It couldn't have gone any better! Praise the Lord!

This is how the linkage is supposed to look.

60.4Hz!

I still need to investigate the secondary generator over heating, but its nice knowing we have a properly operating primary generator now.

Keep after it!