Electrostatic Precipitators

Electrostatic precipitators. Is there any piece of gear, other than the MGs, that E-Div hates more? Here's a link to an article on them ]CLICKY[ but I can give you a better description: Imagine a steel cube, about one foot by two feet by two feet, that weighs about 30 pounds. Inside are a million metal plates, coated with something along the lines of tree sap which smells exactly like ass. Every corner and edge of this box is razor sharp, guaranteeing that trying to move it anywhere on the boat results in a few good cuts and puncture wounds. Now picture twenty of these boxes, crammed into the most inaccessible location you can find in the overhead. That's an electrostatic precipitator.

When I got to my first boat, the normal method for cleaning the plates inside each cube was to wrap a kimwipe around a metal ruler and scrape it around frantically until the kimwipe disintegrated. It didn't actually clean anything, but it made us feel like we'd at least tried before we cranked up the voltage in a vain attempt to keep the current in spec. Sometimes we'd go crazy and try to spray them clean in the head forward of AMR using a bilge blaster; again, they're effectively coated with tree sap, so this just ended up making a mess.

Then one day, when we had all twenty of the modules stacked up outside AMR, the COB decided (for reasons known only to him) to make one of the cranks empty out all the crap stored in the laundry room. Since we were already using the hallway, the nub ended up stacking about fifteen bottles of stripper on top of our cubes while we were drinking lunch.

As I mentioned, these modules are like ginsu knives, and at least one of the bottles started leaking. We didn't know it until we went to wash one of the modules and there was a big black puddle of death underneath. Sure enough, the stripper, which was designed to remove floor wax, was also ideally suited for cleaning electrostatic precipitator plates. All you had to do was soak them in a mixture of stripper and water for a few minutes, then rinse. No scrubbing required, but you do have to crank way down on the voltage afterwards to avoid frying the controller. After that, we had bottles of stripper stashed all over the engine room prior to getting underway.

Speaking of arcing and sparking, another electrostatic precipitator story comes to mind. We were in the yards and I was heading back to the barge when my leading first stopped me and told me to go fix the number one precipitator. Apparently the old ammeter had died, so he gave me a spare one to install.

It was about 2 am, and I was tired and sore. I opened up the controller and saw immediately why the old meter had eaten itself: some numbnuts had connected the high voltage lines (carrying something like 15,000 volts) directly across the ammeter (which was designed for a milliamp of current, max). Whoever hooked it back up didn't know how to read the terminal block numbers, and installed everything off by one slot. Anyhow, I wired it up correctly, cleared the tags, turned it on, and went to bed.

About an hour later my leading first racks me out, pissed. Why wasn't I working on the precipitator like he ordered me to? "It's working fine", I replied "what's the problem?". He thought I was BS'ing him, so he stomped off to go prove me wrong. I went back to sleep; I'd seen this side of him before. He never came back and I was able to get a few more hours of sleep before another wonderful 14-hour "normal work day".

Later, I found out why he didn't believe me. He and a couple of his inner circle had been farting around with it all freakin' day; they'd fried three or four meters easter-egging and had just given up for the night when he ran into me. Assuming I wouldn't have any better luck, they wanted me to keep working on it so we could at least say we'd tried. I didn't think anything more of it at the time (the shipyard was notorious for not being able to hook stuff up correctly, so I have lots of stories like this) but showed up as a comment on my next eval.

No Ka Oi!