Recently, we were working with a customer that had new diesel generators installed at several sites.  We happened to meet the generator maintenance technician at one of the sites while doing other work. An interesting discussion ensued.  It turns out that the technician, in his instructions had been told to set the maintenance routine up so that the generator ran for 15 minutes once a week, under no load.

Generators are no different than an automobile when it comes to engine maintenance.  It’s common knowledge that the worst thing you can do to an automobile engine is to only run it for 15 or 20 minutes and then shut it off. This has to do with several items that affect an internal combustion engine.

First and foremost is the oil.  Oil oxidizes while sitting in the crankcase.  This causes acids to form and chemistry to change.  What removes these acids and normalizes the oil is heat and pressure over a minimum period of time.  15 minutes is not long enough to heat the oil and maintain that heat and pressure to remove the acids that form from the oil oxidation.

Oil and heat has a secondary affect on an engine.  Oil attaches and migrates into the pores of the metal. This limits rust and other contaminates from bonding to the metals of the engine.  The classic example of this is in the form of a cast iron skillet.  Anyone who cooks knows that a well seasoned cast iron skillet will not have food stick to it. The vegetable oil permeates the pores in the iron, thus not allowing things to stick. To maintain this, you must use the skillet regularly, get it hot and allow the cooking oils to penetrate into the iron. A skillet like this also will not rust, and will last for years.

Secondly, moisture affects an engine – particularly the exhaust system.  The engine needs to heat the exhaust system enough to boil all the water condensation out.  Have you ever noticed that during the winter your car exhaust has “smoke” coming out for some time after you start it, but it disappears once the engine gets hot? That’s the water vapor escaping as the system heats up.  A generator is no different, and the exhaust system is critical to proper operation of any gen-set.

It’s important to remember that the engine is only half of the generator.  The other half, the actual generator has its issues too.  It is also affected by moisture and heat.  That is why it’s very important to exercise the system under a load.  This allows the electrical portion of the generator also to come up to operating temperature.

Lastly, the NFPA has specific standards for testing.  The critical section is in NFPA 2010 Section 110, Chapter 8.  The maintenance routine is in Section 8.4. Specifically, Section 8.4.2:

“Diesel Generator sets in services shall be exercised at least once monthly for a minimum of 30 minutes, using one of the following methods:

(2)    Under operating temperature conditions and at not less than 30 percent of the EPS nameplate kW rating”

I will take issue here: I don’t believe that monthly testing is adequate.  In our industry, and for critical sites, weekly is required, with all the above criteria met.

There are several other standards dealing with standby generators, their installation and maintenance. Specifically, NFPA 70/NEC 701, which deals directly with “Critical Operations Power Systems” and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. I would recommend that if you have not reviewed these standards, that you do so.

One of the best things of being in business is the access to free trade articles. I regularly get NASA Tech Briefs – what can I say, I’m a tech junkie. They have, from what I can discern, a few other sister publications.  One of these sister publications is Photonics Tech Briefs.  Most of the time, this has articles specific to hardware design; lasers, OTDR‘s and other serious technology and fiber optic discussions.

However, this months feature article is on Ethernet over Fiber Optics.  Titled “Demystifying Optical Ethernet Networks” this really gives an excellent basic understanding of how Ethernet works in carrier networks for the uninitiated.

These networks are becoming more and more predominant – particularly for larger customers, or customers in areas that have a better technology infrastructure. Ethernet is becoming a more common access method for everybody.  What I really like about this paper is how it’s broken up in to the PHY layer (or physical) versus native Ethernet and long haul carrier Ethernet over SDH networks.

This is also just a technology paper, not published by any specific vendor. I recommend that everybody go out an take a few minutes to read about Ethernet and how it all works together over a wide area to provide services, and what happens in the middle.

Introduction

In these series of posts, I plan on going through the background of Unified Communications, where it came from and how the industry and technology developed into what it is today. I’ll be doing this by breaking things down into key areas that I feel were definitive in nature and process.  The intent is to keep things on a high level and business focused; this is not intended to be a deep dive, but rather a paper from an independent source on why this important to you as a City Manager, member of a County Board of Supervisors or Rural Electric Executive.

The structure I’m planning is as follows:

• History – You can’t know where things are going if you don’t know where some of the technology and business drivers came from.
• The light turns on – When manufacturers came to realize where the real work and value was in the product(s) and where the values to their customers are.
• Standards – Standards are a integral part of technology, but standards are open to interpretation and can effect decisions long after a choice has been made.
• The Meat of the matter – How and what they’ve really unified, and how the applications play into a homogenous communications system.
• The last posts will be about applications specific that I see where Municipal Governments and Rural Cooperatives could see lower costs, increased productivity and better customer service metrics.
• Finally, a summary of the key points over what I’ve talked about.

I’m not intending to make you an expert. I just want you to feel comfortable when you have to sit in a meeting with a vendor and listen to some of the buzz words and techie talk. Of course, you could always hire a consultant.

The grand plan is to publish the final version as a white paper and make it available as a download.

This is a blog environment. I encourage comments and suggestions on these topics.

I follow several feeds on Twitter, including some of the posts from this year’s Voicecon conference.  Here is a quick article about all the UC buzz at Voicecon this year.  For those who don’t know what CEBP stands for: Communications Enabled Business Process.

I think it’s interesting to see some of the solutions, including video and tying back into social networking.  All the big players seem to have some niche in the market.  For my customers, I would recommend going to the Voicecon website: there is a number of free resources there.  I will post them later as I have a chance to go through them.

For Municipal/Governmentals this can be a lot of buzz.  Let’s face it, sometimes it’s all you can do to get dial tone to some people. I recently had to call a county highway department for a customer project. When no one picked up, the line was answered by what sounded like a $20 answering machine from Wal-Mart.

What this does is gives you another route of communications to remote field or highly mobile people. An enlightened municipality could take something like this and automate permits and inspections or dynamically assign people to tasks (i.e. Park Ranger to check in a group at a pavilion) with out any other human involvement. Depending on  your sophistication internally this may be an opportunity to show value to your constituents and lower costs. This would also drive a conversation into an external web scheduling application, but that’s a topic for another time.

On the other hand, this can be a very effective mechanism for cooperatives.  There are a lot of things that can be tied back into business processes. The business model is substantially better for capitol investment in this type of technology, and REC’s typically have a large number of highly mobile people.  A lot of managers, inspectors and engineers, while mobile, do not need a radio like a line crew would. However they are out, and catching them can be troublesome. They are also tied to email as well as to a phone call to their office. Here, Unified Communications and ultimately CEBP can be a boon to productivity to these people.

Look for more in this forum on this subject.  I’ve lots of ideas on how local governmental and REC customers can leverage this technology!