I'm sure a full analysis will be performed after the recovery efforts are completed. I'm also certain the operators of both 25 Broadway and 32 Old Slip are working very dilgently to get them running. But I would like to point out, no one regularly runs their generators for 48+ hours as part of a normal test. In addition, most standby generators are fitted only for "limited" duration runs. You should expect problems during any extended run of a generator plant. I'm a bit surprised that 25 Broadway and 32 Old Slip are the only ones we've heard about. Until I know a bit more about what happened, I can't say whether any alternative design could have performed better. On Sat, 15 September 2001, Joe McGuckin wrote:
Was this unit tested regularly? With a load bank?
If there was a weekly test run, why wasn't this problem caught?
It seems like there's a lesson to be learned here.
My guess is that many sites' idea of a periodic test is to fire up the generator (without a load) for 5 or ten minutes and assume everything's ok.
How many folks actually perform a load transfer to the generator during testing to check out the transfer switch ?