MY EXPERIENCE IN ELECTRICAL MAINTENANCE

I had fortunately some hands-on experience in Electrical Maintenance in Graphite India.Mr A K Jain used to be the GM,Mr K M I Bhat incharge of the Electrical section and Mr. G N N Rao the plant engineer Electrical.Mr. Mohan Rai was in-charge of Mechanical maintenance. I was interviewed by Mr. G N N Rao.Since my basic degree was in Electrical Engineering this place was very apt for me as I understood by and large the Electrical Engineering component very well.Mr.Narayan Vellampil used to be incharge of Energy conservation.

GI or Graphite India as it is known  is one of the few plants that directly gets 66KV into the plant from one of the substations which is stepped down to 11 KV by two independant transformers and the 11KV stepped down to 440volts by another four Power Transformers.,I used to be associated with the Motor room and there were various kinds of motors operating in the plant which needed re-winding.The Engineering fraternity were ably supported by a team of Electricians and fitters and I take pride in handling some of these staff very well in day to day breakdown issues.

Two key situations come to my mind which taught me lasting lessons.First was a constant tripping on the 440 volt side of a 11KV to 440V step down transformer. It tripped suddenly one morning and no one had a clue why it was happening. We struggled with this for nearly two days first changing the cables from the transformer to the Breaker and resetting the relay settings after which the problem ceased. Much later when I was heading the Computer section for few years a similar problem was hapenning in the UPS room and my earlier experience in this field came handy and I asked the staff incharge to reset the relay.

Another crisis came upon some time later when the transformer oil of the 66KV transformer had to be changed.After the oil change when the system was being charged an alarm bell was ringing.This went on for many hours.Mr GNN Rao and myself we were pouring through all circuits to ascertain the cause but later almost into the night we reset the bell and the system could be  charged. Such simple trappings could create crisis in maintenance .