Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

Last night (5pm) we had an electrical fault, which knocked out all mechanical services to just under half of the hospital.  I’ve just ( 2pm) got the power back on, and am going for a beer with the boys (this is Australia after all), and then home.  The work required a bit of on the hoof engineering but went well, but the cause of the fault, and so who pays, is contested.  So I thought I’d ask you lot what you think; here goes.

At about 5pm, I was doing  end of day checks after we’d been doing some work on the mechanical chilled water system.  When I went into the plant room above the older section of the Hospital, I discovered that power had been lost and the air handling units were off.  It turned out that the HVAC system to two blocks of the hospital was inoperable.  I sent electricians to the Mechanical Services Switch Board in the Plant room, and to the Main Switch Board, from which it’s supplied to see if a breaker (fuse – these are old and crappy boards) had gone.  A fuse on one phase of the sub main from the Main Switch Board to the Mechanical Services Switch Board had blown.  As nothing appeared to have operated in the mechanical board, I sent a team to trace the sub-main between the boards to find the fault.  It was pretty quickly obvious that one phase of the sub-main, an old (~35years) Pyro (Mineral Insulated Metal Clad – MICC) Cable had blown – picture below.

One phase of a MIMS cable sub-main had blow out, partially cutting another phase

MIMS cables are formed of one or more copper cores, surrounded by mineral powder (often aluminium oxide) encased in a copper sheath and possibly a PVC outer cover.

The pyros had been fixed to a cable tray using steel bands –apparently this is how it used to be done in Australia – instead of the copper straps recommended by the manufacturer of the cable.  This is a picture of the type of gear they used.

On the tray, some demolished cables, had clearly once been fixed with the approved bands.

On inspection it seems that many of the steel bands had broken, and that the copper cable underneath was scored.

To me this suggests that over tightening of the straps has occurred, and, because the steel is harder than the copper cladding of the cable, the cables have been damaged.  I suspect that a small penetration of the cladding may have occurred on installation, or as a result of vibration worsening damage caused by an over tightened steel band.  Over time, moisture may have infiltrated the mineral insulation, breaking it down, until the a short occurred between the conductor and the sheath.  My point is that this, in my opinion, constitutes a latent defect that would have eventually led to a fault, and that the client should seriously consider replacing the others cables that are in a similar condition.

The client’s representative, normally a mild managed man who just wants to be left alone, see things differently, however.  He contends that either, the cable has been hit, or that excessive vibration has caused the cable, which he insists was not damaged during the original installation, to be cut by the steel strap.  In either even, he insists, the fault, and so the cost, lies with us, the builder, and so he does not want to pay us for the repair work (~Aus$15,000).

I’m going to prepare a technical report form my PM about what the possible causes of the failure are, and what was most likely, and what the risk is of this happening to one of the others.

So there it is.  What do you guys think?  In particular, I’d be interested to hear if John has seen this before.

Because one of the projects we have going on is the building of a new kitchen inside the old hospital, I’ve been looking at refrigeration a lot recently.  Whilst we have a consultant for almost everything, commercial refrigeration seems to be viewed as something of a black art in these parts.  With a mechanical consultant unwilling to commit to a design, and a fit-out consultant who would only provide a performance specification (‘How do I build it then?’ was my question), I was asked to do some work with a number of WA refrigeration contractors to come up with a suitable design.  Immediately, I found that the gene pool was shallow, and, like the shallow reefs off this lovely coast, dominated by a rouge predator (did you know Perth is now the great white shark attack capital of the world?).  It was fairly obvious that one of the contractors had managed to cut himself a deal with some of the major WA suppliers and was muscling out the others (some even told me they had been warned off); unfortunately, WA is not unfamiliar with price collaboration and corruption.

So I got the only contractor (he of the shadows) who would even talk about tendering in so we could discuss the design.  I had billed it as a bit of a workshop where we could turn the performance spec into an outline design.  Two things were obvious within a few minutes: firstly, the refrigeration exercises we did at Chatham were very useful, and have made us easily as competent in refrigeration design as the jokers we have to work with (thank you Mark and Jim); and secondly, that this guy didn’t know his psychrometric chart from a hole in the ground.  Eventually, I was told that the price was the price ($1.3M by the way), the design was the design (done by someone else with his margin, rather than the performance spec, in mind evidently) and that I could take it or leave it, ‘but if ya leave it mate, there’s no one in the State that’ll touch ya.’  It was a little like something from Goodfellas.  Anyway, it turns out he was right; no one else would talk to us and he wouldn’t budge.  He was mightily displeased with me into the bargain, since it turns out he has been bamboozling us, and our client, for some time.

Having discussed this all with my PM, I was tasked with finding an alternative, which I have been doing over the last few weeks.  The guys I’ve recommended we sign up (I find out for definite tomorrow, but it’s really a no brainer) are based in Melbourne, will have all of the cold room components and the chiller units assembled in Melbourne, will fly a team of technicians here to do the build, and are still significantly cheaper than the, frankly, criminals we’ve been happy to work with in the past.  The result is that we save in the region of $300K and get a system that is much better suited to the client’s requirements than to the contractors profit margin, as was the case before.  A bonus for me was that I had to report on the Melbourne contractor’s previous projects, the standards at his factory and of his suppliers, and the technical competency of his team to produce a suitable design.  We did a test design exercise together based on the scout hut problem.

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Apart from the trip to Melbourne (I took Tasha along too), we’ve managed to fit in some excellent Aussie fun recently.  My office took Tasha and I to watch an AFL (aussie rules) match the other day, which was excellent, and we’ve made friends with a player for Port Melbourne in the VFL (Aussie Rules but limited to Victoria, cheaper, and with more fighting) who’s invited us to the grand final in a few weeks’ time.  Tasha is studying hard and has her entrance exam in Melbourne on the day before