Been a busy couple of weeks here…
I’m still ‘the one employee that’s capable of doing the thing’, so my days are filled with random crap that interrupts whatever it is I actually need to get done…
Take Friday for example; Thursday night at 7pm the CFO texted me with the ‘honey do’ list for Friday… So Friday started off with getting to the office early so that I could get a ladder and unscrew one of the battery-powered cameras someone had me stick on the building to recharge it. We ran out of ports on the five 24 channel recorders, so I was tasked with adding some of these Eufy battery powered cameras to a few places – and they need periodic ladder work to recharge.
Then it was off to the break room to take a look at why the soda machine was leaking again; it froze up again – low freon, the exact same diagnosis as last time. So the response to that problem was “It’s the same symptom as a month ago when you had me take it apart – did anyone pay someone to fix it? No? Well then it’s the same problem as month ago when you had me take it apart…”
So it became my problem to locate someone to fix it…
They I got cornered to do more 3D printing for one of the departments – mostly because I made the mistake of being seen with the screwdriver that is Blender, so now I get voluntold to do all of the random 3D printing because no one else can be assed to figure it out.
And this was just the first hour of the day.
This week I took it upon myself to try and figure out why the two 60-ton rooftop AC units (RTUs) were acting so bizarre…
Since we moved into the building like 20 years ago, the north RTU has run all twelve its exhaust blowers at 100% year round and the south RTU never runs them at all. So the building ventilation is all fucked up because during the remodel someone got the brainwave to split the building return air east-west while the supply is north-south – so the unit supplying the air either never sees that return pressure, or is trying to compensate for the air flow of both RTUs.
The end result of this is having to run the south RTU in ‘stage 6’ cooling and the supply pressure at 1.4″ all day to force cold air into the south end of the building to keep people from dying because the exhaust is on the north end on the other side of a few doors… While the north RTU tries desperately to pull a vacuum on the building which pulls in hot outside air from the main doors and the elevator shaft in the summer, and handily sucks all of the heat out in the winter.
We’ve had the HVAC company look at them repeatedly over the last two decades – but they seemed pretty sure it was just they way they worked.
A very long story short, I discovered that the last owner had routed the ambient air pressure input into the system to the intake side of the supply fan section of the unit – pulling a vacuum on the ambient sensor. What this did was convince the RTU that the building pressure was at 0.25″ over ambient (the max it can read) so it would run its exhaust fans at 100% any time it was in operation because it thought the building was about to explode from over-pressure.
For the curious, building pressure should be at about 0.05″ over ambient.
The reason for this had to do with the very-problematic server room and its heat load. The previous owner had run two flexible 12″ HVAC hoses from the 3rd floor server room on the south-east side of the central fire corridor to the intake for the north RTU to try and evacuate the heat. To accomplish this they rigged the north RTU exhaust blowers to run at 100% 24/7.
When we moved in I ripped out all of that ‘aftermarket’ ventilation and then forgot about it.
Anyway, Wednesday morning I started taking things apart; tracing pressure sense lines and checking system controls and voltages, and by noon I had both RTUs working properly – both RTUs now sense and respond correctly to building pressure over ambient, so they both only run 1-2 exhaust blowers to properly keep the air moving a bit. This also allows the RTUs to keep the building at 70 degrees on all three floors, when it’s 95 outside, at stage 3 cooling – so they are both now running one compressor all day (instead of two).
Basically both RTUs are now probably half as expensive to operate in the summer while the building is more comfortable – and in winter it should cost half as much to heat. And when the monthly electric bill is $10,000 and the AC is about 50% of that – it’s not inconsequential.
Another of the side quests at work currently is cleaning out all of the various storage areas where the detritus of the last 27 years as been squirreled away… This week saw the return of about a hundred banker’s boxes from off-site storage which need to be gone through.
Interestingly – for me – was several boxes from the IT office two buildings ago which contained a lot of stuff I brought with me when I started at the company in 2004. So here’s a trip down memory lane:
My first MSDN kit, from 1996… When I say I’m tired of Microsoft’s bullshit – it’s not just a turn of phrase. I’ve been in the trenches since the invention of trench warfare.
But it’s never been just Microsoft – I dabble in everything… Here’s a boxed copy of RedHat 6.1 from 1999…
While we’re in the 90’s, here’s a selection of software that was important. The floppies come from a time when damn near anything you stuck into a computer needs both configuration and drivers…
Back in the 90’s Netscape Navigator was the professional grade power-tool of Internet utilities, and I spend sooooo much time in it in the before-times…
Check out those system specs!
Moving forward a few years and here’s Microsoft’s 2003 offerings that I was workign with to keep my skills sharp:
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