Powerplant Control Panel Tour - Part 1 Authorized Personnel Only S4E1  

Seconded! :)

I will join you lol 😆

Yes

Abso-lutely!

MOST DEFINITELY!

This person gets it. :) We call it "Old School Cool".

I prefer analog to digital... With analog, after using the panel for a while, you can just glance at it to see if everything is were it's supposed to be at. That pointer should be pointing that way, this other one next to that line, etc. With digital, you have to mentally decode the values and some of them can trip you up in a scary way... It is supposed to be a 9 or a 6? Or 8 versus 0. There is a place for digital - when you have to know what the value is, not where the pointer should be. My iWatch has an analog face.

@@fredinit I was entirely confused by your post until you started comparing individual digits. Just because something is digital, does not mean it needs to show numerical digits. You can put a dial gauge on a screen just as easy as a value read-out. And then, if you ever need a more precise value for whatever reason, the digital information, in precise digital representation, will be displayed below/next to/inside of the dial. Or, at least, it should be this way. I recognize it's often not, but that's a design decision, not a limitation of digital information.

I have to agree!!! Flew on old S-58 helos, to myself the cockpits are sexy

​@@kindlinthere are places where each one has its advantages. For instance sometimes its still nice to have the needle movement of an analog meter like when troubleshooting an oscillator. Its much more intuitive to see a meter sweeping back and forth than a bunch of digits flashing. But like I said each one has its merits

Thank you SO MUCH! :) I appreciate you! There's more episodes coming!

@@Physicsduck He stole my comment, I literally feel like an excited little kid watching Newton's Apple all over again. I'm an IT nerd but I wish so bad I could work with stuff like this.

Thank you! I'm thrilled you like the new editing style! It's a ton of work and I was worried that people would hate it. It seems everyone actually likes it. :) There's MORE COMING SOON! Thanks for being the most important part of all this! I appreciate you! :)

​@@Physicsduck New viewer here, I could use slightly longer time between jump cuts, maybe with a bit more natural transitions. The cuts feel abrupt and needless sometimes. That said, if you are just now experimenting with a new format, you'll settle into a good rhythm and figure out what works best for you. Keep it up!

@@phillyphakename1255 I concur.

Any support is sincerely appreciated (check the link in the description to my ko-fi to help me make more videos). I'll give you a full tour of LOTS of power plants, in great detail, one video at a time. I'm already working on exactly that. Check out my recent longform video on it to get started. :) Thank you!

That had to be one hell of a show.

Shit that is the stuff of nightmares, now I see why Chris talks about syncing to the National Grid properly. RIP to the old man by the way, just like the old boy a few doors away he was a live liney.

Interesting!

I would wonder how accurate those tales are. RAN boats at least from the early '60s had load-shed protection in the power supply circuits. They would also have been the best engineered power units at the time. Synchroscopes have existed for decades and were present in the '60s. I have worked in power generation plant rooms with late '50s equipment and load shedding was present even then. You cannot physically connect an incoming source to a mismatched alternator.

@@greywolf271sure ya can, never under estimate the power of human stupidity....i can't tell you the number of times i have been the better idiot....metaphorically , pull the wrong levers in the exactly wrong order at exactly the wrong time and boom lights and sirens....

Thank you! :) I'm going to do a video about exactly that very soon. :)

Hey! So YOU'RE my subscriber! Thanks for watching! It's good to be back!

​@@Physicsduck You was gone for a hot minute

@@Physicsduck Hey, there are at least 2 of us.......

I assure you, the past two years were the longest decade of my life. It's good to be back and I'm so very thrilled that you're here! :) Thank you!

@@Physicsduck sometimes it's good to take time off though to recoup

WHAT! That's AWESOME! I'm sincerely honoured, thank you! And hi to all the cool kids in your class! :) Děkuji!

Thank you! :) It's coming soon!

​@@PhysicsduckThank You!

Thank you! I really appreciate that! I tried to make it a short, but couldn't fit enough of it into the 1-minute timeframe for it to still make sense like I wanted it to. There's just too much setup required. I could do it with animation, but I'm not that good an animator. Perhaps I'll take another crack at this when my skills have improved a bit. Thank you for GETTING it though! I appreciate you! :)

Agreed. Another rabbit hole would be to discuss exactly why capacitance and inductance affect PF but in opposite directions.

lol, thank you! LOTS more coming!

Not entirely new, but we'll take it.

Thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying them! More are coming as fast as I can make them, it takes a lot of time, energy, and money to make videos at this level. :) But I'm on it!

Now THAT is an excellent comment :) Thank you! There's a shot in there that shows the entire panel all at once so that all the readings match up in relation to time. That way people can check their math and be sure they got it right. :)

Also, there is a phase voltage vs line voltage argument and so on.

@@Physicsduck which now causes this armchair idiot to ask: Would there be benefit to taking Vegas Mode to level 3: A, V, kWh for each phase? (how critical is it that the 3 phases be somewhat balanced?)

Another fun one is delta-wye connections and wye-delta motor starters. It's amazing they figured that out and it can all be done with contactors!

@@Physicsduck thank you! Good thing that electricity works the same in America and Latvia. Just some parameters change.

AVITECH! YOU'RE HERE! OMG! THANK YOU! It's so very good to be back, and I'm glad you stuck around! :) Thank you!

Only problem with that is that this is almost completely obliterated by the variation in timing of the recorder itself, from things like battery voltage drift affecting the crystal oscillator that provides a sample clock, to temperaure drift as well that make it vary. You get more of a graph of oscillator drift with time, and with analogue tape, with wow and flutter, it is even worse. Digital the hum is hard to recover, mostly because most recorders will absolutely actively remove 50/60/100/120Hz noise with narrowband filters in the DSP engine that does the pre encoding processing, simply to reduce data use recording hum, and then your typical Frauenhof encvoding to MP3, FLAC or even AAC, will strip out all the bass noise to a great extent, unless not masked by other sound energy, so the recording will have very little data to begin with. Even if you were recording using WAV or other lossless CODEC, the data stream would have very little hum imposed on it, and if recorded off a phone line, with all the equipment along the way adding in hum, and the SPEEX codec doing serious decimation to get all this data into a single 8kbs data packet system, you will be hard pressed to get anything. You can do it in theory, but need both a good recording, no digital to analogue conversions until the final ADC to record, a log recording using a very well disciplined ADC clock, preferably a Rubidium disciplined one, though an ovenised crystal that has been running for 1000 hours continuously is a close second, and really good dynamic range to be able to use DSP to do the narrow band filtering needed to remove all the rest. Yes there is a paper, but it is idealised, and real life is hard to actually implement.

Thats just like... Marco Reps levels of zeros right there

I didn't say it was easy 😀 I did kind of gloss over that with "a bit of analysis" which should have been a "complex piece of analysis requiring looking for a best fit taking into account variances in the recording fidelity". It doesn't always work and yes modern digital recording filters can make it harder but still often record harmonics that are usable with the right analysis. Tom Scott did a video a few years ago.

@@ThePoxun Yes I remember seeing a video from somewhere on this exact subject and it was to do with law enforcement from memory and Tom Scott rings a bell.

@@SeanBZA There's not such a big of the problem. What you need to measure from recording is the frequency fluctuations, and since they are relative - you can find the correlation between your fluctuations and grid fluctuations.

Honest question - why is it bad? I'm no EE or anything but I have actually always been irritated by some of the other alternatives like Amp-hours for battery packs. In that context I think watt-hours is much more useful than amp-hours, right? What am I missing?

I don't really get it either, but it may have to do with the fact that the Watt is defined as 1 Joule per second? So 1kWh is just one thousand Joules per second times 3600 seconds, and the units cancel out and leave you with 3.6 million Joules. Which is all fine and good, but the Joule is a very small unit for measuring the energy consumption of an average household, whereas a kWh is about the energy an average household uses in an hour according to this video, so it makes sense to me that that would be the more popular unit here

​@@theWONDERFULwizbecause we already have a unit to measure power over time. It's called the joule.

No, there's one worse: the kWh/year unit. used to indicate power consumption over an average year. Now you're mixing three time magnitudes!!!

I too hate the kWh unit. It's truly cursed. My biggest beef with it is using it in reference to electric cars and charging. You see, your car might have a 70kWh battery in it. Your charger might be 10kW. So, How fast does it charge? 10kWh per.... hour... um... So it returns 10kWh of battery capacity per hour. Yeah... having "hour" as part of your actual unit is terrible. I think joules would be the better unit, as others have said. Or, maybe megajoules for battery packs. Alas, we are standardized with kWh for both batteries and the grid. I hate it.

The disclaimer needs its own thumbs up button!

Came here to say this. disclaimer is epic!

There's a couple of the old slate panels still in use out here in the wild. I'm trying very hard to be able to get some video of them, but the security guys have a problem with that. They DO exist though, and they're STILL IN SERVICE!

Thank you so very much! This one was HARD to make, and I'm glad you appreciate all the effort behind the scenes.

@@Physicsduck Of course! I find things like this very interesting. Even though I don't know a ton about power, it's still very interesting to learn some stuff!

Excellent! I'm glad you're here! :) You might want to check out the Discord too, link in the description! :)

Thank you! :) How do you like the new style?

Can’t speak for Steve but I like the new ones and the old ones almost equally. I think the new ones come off as more polished. Also Blackstart plz! I noticed in one of your earlier videos a series of 12V batteries and while not ideal could be used to blackstart site 2. Has your site ever practiced a blackstart??

Thank you! The past two years were the longest decade of my life. Now we're back in action and there's LOTS of new content headed your way. :)

Thank you! :) They're coming! Scripts are already in progress on both :)

Plus, the phases are never balanced. (the enduring problem of every power company. I pay attention to it in the data center, but there's not much I can do about it.)

THANK YOU FOR THE SUB! :) It was a rough ride, but now that I've been to the bottom I can teach people which way is up. :)

@@Physicsduckim happy to tag along for the ride!

That's awesome! Thank you! :) I was worried about making such a radical change in format and I'm really glad you're enjoying them! :)

Thank you! :) I'm glad you're enjoying it! :)

Check the Shorts section on here. I've been slowly ramping up making videos for a few weeks. and THANK YOU FOR STILL BEING HERE! :) I appreciate you, and your patience :)

That's AWESOME! Thank you for being here! I love that you're getting into the industry and learning the trade! You're one of the COOL kids now! :) Thank you for being a part of this, and you're personally invited to the Discord! Check the link in the description for a place to come hang out with a ton of other people as weird as we are. :)

Used to work for a major audio lab. Our speaker test racks had massive 1:1 inrush transformers just to handle to jarring voltage drop that a dozen subwoofers barking off pink noise at high dB's would pull. Even comcert hall PA's drop into protection mode without them.

Thank you! There's more coming soon! :)

Thank you! :) It's AWESOME to be back! I'm so truly thankful that you're still here! :)

THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE! If you see my video on TikTok please let me know where. I don't HAVE a TikTok (at least, yet....perhaps I should?). So that means someone stole my video.

Thank you! I'm glad that you appreciate all of the facets of these. :) You rock!

Gracias Felipe! I'm so glad you're here and enjoying these! Thank you! :)

Thank you! :) I'm glad you like the new style! The last episode of APO was actually two years ago. A year ago I was still in hell.

Thank you! :) I'm glad you're enjoying the new videos! MORE COMING SOON! :)

Thank you, so very much, thank you. That means more than you might realize. I just spent the past couple years in the darkest places you don't ever want to see or know about, with a great deal of time to really focus on what I wanted to do with my life. This video is the first publicly visible tangible result of that plan. It was only with great trepidation that I finally published it, because it's such a niche topic and I have so little credibility. Who the hell would want to hear me talk about boring silly things like powerplant engineering? How could I ever actually make it worthwhile to spend so much time, effort, and money making videos that nobody will ever want to watch? My reputation is torched, and I'll never get any kind of sponsor support to fund this, it's all on my head. So to put this out there and see that people actually like it, and to see that someone with your perspective and experience truly gets it and thinks so highly of it........that's the whole ballgame, right there. Fifteen years I've been on this platform, thousands of videos published, and god only knows how many comments I've read. I've read comments that made me thankful, that have made me angry, and that have made me laugh. Yours is the first one that made me cry. Thank you, from my soul and with all of my heart, thank you. cb

Thank you! I'm glad you're getting something out of this! :) Stay curious! and thank you for being here! You're the most important part of all of this!

Thank you! :) I'm glad you caught the shorts! It seems that they're two different audiences, but I'm glad you made the crossover :)

@@PhysicsduckAnd also thank you for vegas mode, the more control panels the better.

Thank you SO VERY MUCH for being here and enjoying them! I appreciate you! :)

Thank you for being here! :) I'm glad you're enjoying the series! LOTS more deep dives coming! :)

I'm BACK! And even better, you're still here! HOW COOL IS THAT! :) Thank you!

Thank you! There's over a THOUSAND videos on this channel, and plenty for you to explore. :)

Thank you mate! And thank you for sticking around all the time! :) I'm so glad you're HERE!

It's coming! and THANK YOU! :)

Thank you! That means a lot, it's good to know that people are enjoying the new style. :) Thank you for being the most important part of all this! :)

Thank you! It's a pleasure to meet you and I'm glad you're enjoying the videos! :)

Thank you! :) I'm glad you're enjoying the videos! Black start script is in progress!