Fun with Electricity
With all the excitement of the weekend, I forgot to write about last Thursday. I’ve been working on a project now for months. Finally I was going to test the first panel and pump on Thursday afternoon. This should be cake, but no. First, nothing works in the panel, I look around inside and discover that the transformer is missing a wire, hence the reason there’s no power. I tell assembly to fix the control and the department supervisor decides to work on it. He also decides to try and test it by himself. This is when he discovers that the wrong transformer is in the panel. He turns power on and parts start frying due to a high voltage. Great. Now I have him replace the parts and wait for me to test the panel. Everything seems fine when I decide to apply power yet again. I press the button and “BOOM!” The panel blows up. When changing out the transformer, a wire got nicked and copper was exposed. The wire welded itself to the panel. There was a hole blown into the backpanel and a gouge out of the bottom of the enclosure. The good news is, I almost had my arm inside the control when power was turned on. That would have hurt. Thankfully, most of the parts were salvageable. What a great end to my work week. I’m now having issues with the circuit breaker, but the control will turn on without blowing up now.