Fit For Purpose?

OK I am the first to admit that I am getting a little bit ‘rounder’ as I get older and that I need to do something about it. This was brought home to me in no uncertain terms last week when I made a visit to a large power generation plant in London. So off I set to catch the 7:29 train from Penrith to London, with my small suitcase containing all my safety gear – overalls, safety boots, hard hat, goggles, high visibility jacket and gloves.

I arrived at Euston Station and caught the tube to Tottenham Vase (not far from the Spurs ground), then a short taxi ride to a fantastic plant called London Waste. This power generation plant has five complete boiler lines and burns all the collected household waste for London. The energetic and enthusiastic plant manager was interested in installing Primasonics acoustic cleaners within one of his five economiser sections of waste to energy boilers. He had no experience of acoustic cleaners in economiser cleaning and obviously needed to talk through our proposals and feel reassured that acoustic cleaning technology would far surpass his existing steam soot blowers in terms of efficiency, performance, unit cost and maintenance costs.

One of the boilers was off line and so after getting kitted out in all my safety gear we headed into the plant to take a very close look at the economiser. The easy bit was simply looking in through several side wall hatches via access platforms. My ‘guide’ then suggested that we needed to go to the very top of this large piece of plant and ‘pop’ down through a hatch into the unit, balancing on steel girders in order to take some key photographs. Maybe it is some sort of obsession with me but I find that most power plant managers are extremely thin, fit men and so he quickly disappeared down through the hatch onto the steel inner frame. OK I managed to squeeze myself down after him and made myself ‘comfortable’ sitting on the steelwork. It turned out that this ‘look see’ was extremely important as there were a set of internal baffles which were not clearly seen on the dimensional drawing which would affect the type and position of the acoustic cleaners.

Ok job done, so now to get out – ‘how do we achieve this?’ I asked – ‘easy, just swing over onto this beam, grab the side of the hatch above you, pull yourself up and swing your legs out', came his reply which he quickly achieved. After a short prayer, I managed to get my upper body out of the hatch; however it took some time to ‘extract’ the lower half. I pulled and tugged at the same time promising faithfully to myself to start visiting the gym again. Finally I was free and all in one piece.

The result of my day’s activities was to form a friendly and trusting relationship with the plant manager and to return to Penrith tired but happy that use of each existing soot blower on that site will be redundant and replaced by the modern, innovative acoustic cleaners.

Photo: acoustic cleaner in position for economiser cleaning