The Burner

The Burners are A-gang toys in AMR used to remove hydrogen and carbon monoxide (the last is courtesy of you smokers, thanks). Here's an article about them if this interests you, or you've brain dumped it all: }clicky{

As the name implies, every burner contains a bank of big heaters, which are normally turned off and on automatically via a heavy-duty electrical relay called a "contactor". These are usually pretty reliable, but one underway the main contactor in one of our burners ate itself, apparently out of spite. Unable to explain why the contactor had died, we simply replaced it. This fixed the problem, and life went on.

That is, until the new one broke just a few days later. Now we really had to roll up our sleeves, as these contactors are not exactly cheap, and we didn't have an infinite supply of them. Still unable to find anything wrong with the circuit electrically, we finally just decided to leave it tagged out. After all, that's why the Navy gives you more than one.

Those of you who've seen Murphy's Law first hand know what inevitably happened next: The second burner failed just hours after they put it online, and it failed on a massive scale. There was no way to fix it at sea, even if we scavenged parts from the first one. Having little choice, we moved the contactor from the really broken burner to the possibly-broken burner. This again worked for a few days, and then died in a cloud of stinky black smoke.

We eventually ran out of contactors, and had to jury rig a big LVRE circuit breaker in place of it to keep the one remaining burner going. That also meant stationing someone in AMR to manually operate the heaters, a watch only slightly less exciting than guarding an empty parking lot in BFE. Since it was E-div's shit that was broken (as the A-gang chief so kindly put it), we got to stand the watch.

Then fate intervened, in a manner that a sailor only sees once or twice in his entire life. While we were installing the replacement switch, one of the A-gang nubs happened to wander by and asked what we were up to. We told him that the contactor kept burning out, probably because it was cycling too often, but we couldn't figure out why before we'd fried the last one on board.

"Well, " he said, innocently "If the heaters are cycling too much, why don't you try shutting the bypass damper?"

"The whaa...?" inquired my leading first.

And, sure enough, there was a damper open that was basically causing the heaters to constantly cycle on and off in an attempt to heat the air up properly. At first, there was some suspicion among the forward gentlemen that WE'D opened the damper... but that was until someone pointed out it had been open so long it was painted in that position.

The spotlight shifted to A-gang, and the poor nub and his firends ended up having to stand the watch rather than us. I'm sure his brethren were less than thrilled, but I can assure you he had everything on his card that we could sign off done by the following day. Lesson Learned: When you're an electrician, everything looks like an electrical problem.