I certainly know over on this side of the water large electricity customers with generators have a very valid reason to run long tests. Basically the national grid gives you a *huge* discount if you run on generators at peak times which is usual 6pm to 5am. I certainly now all our larger CO's run the gens like this. The first time I saw this I thought the CO was on fire due to the diesel fumes the voice guys had a good laugh at me !. Before someone asks we have a very steady national supply over here so running the gens is purely a commerical aim.I would have thought that even stateside this would make sense no ? Regards, Kevin On 15 Sep 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:
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 ?