Hardest Project you did

Without a doubt the "hardest" job I had was down to not being able to make changes to the code while the system is running. I'll not name and shame that particular manufacturer.

So my commissioning days were spent thus....

1. Leave home at 06:00 to be on-site for 07:00 start-up (dictated by the customer because of 4 below).

2. Spend all day from 07:00 to 17:30 "observing" and planning any changes that were needed.

3. At 17:30 operators would initiate CIP routines, and "do an Elvis".

4. After the last CIP finished at 21:30, I was free to make any modifications that were needed. Mostly these were trivial, but needed doing, but occasionally it took an hour or two. Download the modified code (unable to test it, no-one there to run the plant).

5. Save, and hit the road, picking up a take-away on the way. Usually got home around 23:00, bed for 00:00

6. Back to 1.

To be fair, in the three weeks this went on, I did very little actual work... but it was an incredibly hard time.

The hardest project I did is the one that I am going to do next.

Oakley said:

The hardest project I did is the one that I am going to do next.

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Good one. There are only two good projects, your last one, and your next one.

jdbrandt said:

Good one. There are only two good projects, your last one, and your next one.

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You are only as good as your last project. Well that's the way it works around here anyway.

Oh this thread pushed me to a dark place where my bad memories are stored.

Concrete batching plant, old none plc controls suffered an unrecoverable catastrophic failure. Come quick, get us going as soon as possible.
Nobody really knew the correct operation of the sequences and everyone told me a different one.
After a week of wiring, building, fitting and writing in excess of 5K steps it still wasn't going correctly. And now, I was to blame when it did something it didn't use to.

The help I was getting was totally contradictory and when I said 'you told me it went like that' NO, I said this...........

<Shiver>

Goody said:

Oh this thread pushed me to a dark place where my bad memories are stored.

Concrete batching plant, old none plc controls suffered an unrecoverable catastrophic failure. Come quick, get us going as soon as possible.
Nobody really knew the correct operation of the sequences and everyone told me a different one.
After a week of wiring, building, fitting and writing in excess of 5K steps it still wasn't going correctly. And now, I was to blame when it did something it didn't use to.

The help I was getting was totally contradictory and when I said 'you told me it went like that' NO, I said this...........

<Shiver>

Click to expand...

Yea its always fun to figure out the process AS you build the controls. Kinda like building a car AS you drive it down the street... Should work out great....yea...no problems

1 incinerator with a heat recovery system that heated up our thermal oil system (about 50k gal)
1 Oil heater (boiler) that would heat the above system when the was not running
2 mix rooms that held 15ish vats about 2k gal each, mixed epoxy resin (MEK, DMF, Acetone, etc)
2 treaters 8 stories tall
500 ft 48" duct work running from the heaters to the treaters
All supply equipment (fans, electrical, water, everything)

The above system was running for 10 plus years then one Saturday blew up....

Just about 3 weeks later we had it up and running again, 18+ hrs a day and help from about 70 contractors, a lot of the parts we reused...

The duct filled up with the gas from the mix room, when the heater purged it used the gas to purge... when the pilot flame lit it also lit the gas in the duct work, it was like a 500ft x 48" pipe bomb

No one got hurt but its hard to put out flames when the fire mains get blown off the wall and you have no water