High stress stories. What do you have?

I did a small ip address change on a freezer. No big deal right? This plant is a pharmaceutical storage. The customer said I could have 22 minutes of down time total. Once I shut the system down they informed me that the freezer had just over $700 Million in product in it. No stress there just a small amount of pocket change.

Your clients are irresponsible people. If everything went well, you should get drunk.

My worst was at a large Midwest manufacturing plant. I had allowed a full week for commissioning the controls, normally more than adequate. The commissioning was timed to take place during a scheduled plant shutdown.

The owner supplied VFDs had tremendous problems, and their supplier's technician couldn't figure it out. I finally (by pure dumb luck) spotted the short causing the problem - this was Friday afternoon. The shutdown ended at Sunday's second shift.

The plant manager pulled me aside and said "If you can't get this system running by noon Sunday, 2,000 people can't come to work Monday."

I made it, with an hour to spare. I don't want to do that again!

JeffKiper said:

I did a small ip address change on a freezer. No big deal right? This plant is a pharmaceutical storage. The customer said I could have 22 minutes of down time total. Once I shut the system down they informed me that the freezer had just over $700 Million in product in it. No stress there just a small amount of pocket change.

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What ???
You did the job with no Risk Analysis ?
No Method Statements ?
No back-up plan in case your modification wasn't successful ?
They just handed the plant to you, and then told you the risks ?

goghie hit the nail on the head - they were irresponsible.... hope you got paid well for carrying their risk..

The have had siemens on site for 6 months. This was a simple ip change the only thing i did was to place the PLC in program mode and change the address. The backup was to install the 1756-AENT card that I have as a spare. I learned years ago always have a fall back plan.
my risk was low but the stress was super high.

I was bullet proof years ago. Some of the old timers kept telling me to have a plan. I did a control flash on a MLX 1100 during a 15 minute outage. You know what happened I bricked it. Lucky for me the old timers had already gotten a unit programmed and ready to drop in. They saved my backside. A lesson learned that I think about everytime I take some risk.

You guys are brave lol. When I shut something down I tell them it's down until I'm done. If they don't like it they can go work somewhere where the equipment wasn't built next to Noah.

I'm getting crusty as I get older.

My worst was the installation of a new conveyor system over the Christmas shutdown. Midwest was the only company to bid on it (in that time frame, other companies bid as well, but said that it would have to wait until the summer shutdown to get completed).

My part wasn't all that stressful, but the superintendent of the job was freaking out and would not allow me to go back to my hotel at night. I stayed on the job, around the clock for two weeks, with a four hour break after the first week (I went AWOL) for a SSS ("S..., Shower, and Shave"). I got my butt chewed out for that, but I'm no stranger to those...

The Super had my boss come out from Kansas to, quote: "Fetch me coffee, and to make sure that I didn't die".

The tragic thing was that Bob, the superintendent, had a massive heart attack and died shortly after that.

I was crushed. He was a good friend (regardless of the butt chewings).

I used to work for a meat plant. We were upgrading the controls on the plant-wide refrigerated air units one weekend from SyMax to CompactLogix. I wrote the program and was in charge of the whole thing. The meat plant thing is key here because if the refrigeration units didn't run the plant couldn't run. Everything was going good. I got it all wired up. I had done a previous system before that went smoothly, so I was expecting the same from this.

First thing I found was that none of the damper motor feedback signals worked. Hmmm, strange. So I looked at a damper motor. Signal was listed as 2-10vdc. Problem is, I used 1769-IF16C for all my analog cards. Stupid me didn't look at the actual devices and just assumed all the analogs were 4-20mA like the previous system. Cue a desperate search for 1769-IF8 cards, getting our local distributer to open up shop after hours on Saturday to sell them to us, and me nearly having a breakdown. But they got in there and the signals worked. I was 100% sure I was going to be fired on the spot. They took pity on me I think.

I learned a lot of lessons on that job, mainly how important it is to plan ahead.

Not PLC related but stress. We designed and supplied an extensive stainless conveyer system for installation during shutdown. Dimensions were verified by 3 different people.
After a week of long hours and product was starting to come down the system. We discovered that we were off by 6 inches (major problem).
Turns out that the cust replaced a 6 in block wall with 12 inch blocks. That was our reference.
We made it but they lost some product.

Mine also had nothing to do with PLC's.... boiler systems, I HATE THEM ALL

One system was 3 tanks, cold, warm and hot... the hot was the pain in the ***, it was over 120k gallons of 550 deg f water/steam and was pressurized to about 20-24 bar, with the high pressure it would keep it in a water and not steam, we would get leaks in the tank and have to drain weld the leaks (for a few days) and then re-pressurize/fill/ heat the system all this using thermal oil that was about 800 deg f

Once I made the smaller heat exchanger (about 30 ft long) jump about 6 inches, son of a ***** I hated that job, another time we had an oil leak in the heat exchanger and the water was in the oil, every time the water would flash it would sound like we were all going to die and blow everything up

Once we did blow up... we were even on the evening news, after finding the man hole covers to the duct work about 300 feet away it made me very gun shy

I hated that job... I was in my twenties and they put me in charge , you talk about stressed, I guess I was the only dumb *** that would do it

Plant manager does tour of plant with some members of top management.
Coming to certain production line, telling all them higher ups how important this machine currently is. Only machine capable of using the product that's been sitting in cooling tanks for hours now.
Explains that it is imperative that this machine keeps on producing, else they'll have to throw away several tonnes of product. (yay dairy)

I was just there on my route, taking back-ups from all the machines, since we had a power shutdown/maintenance the next day. Main reason why it was critical the machine kept on running.

Plant manager sees me coming, with laptop in hand, points at me and say: This is one of the fine people making sure it keeps running.

Open up laptop, wake it, hook it up to power. The moment I hook it up to the MPI port of the Siemens CPU, that green RUN led dims, the orange STOP led lights up, along with the red System Failure one.

The sound of air escaping through the release valve complemented the feeling of blood draining from my face.
As a young lad of 22-something, barely having enough experience to be allowed to touch a PLC, having just stopped the machine that should not be stopped. In front of your boss's boss, his boss and that guys boss.
No need to say what my stress levels were like.