Worklife - Refrigeration takes time

23 days ago

Good day everyone! Zak here from Cape Town, South Africa.

We are nearing the end of our project in the harbor... for THIS current vessel. The instinct to get done and get finished as fast as possible is strong... and incorrect.

I can see it across the whole dock. Companies, persons and the client engineers are all keen on finishing up as soon as possible and want to get this vessel our of the harbour.

There are many reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that this year is unusual. There is nearly no gap between this vessel and the next.

If you are used to 3 vessels a year for 60-80 days with 30-40 days in between and then a longer gap somewhere else in the year, there is a sense of pace.

However, this vessel is (hopefully) leaving our harbour, and therefore we will not be called back to it, on the 27th of April... and the next one arrives (hopefully delayed) by the 5th of May...

So this is going to be gruelling... or I need to assume a different frame of mind in order to survive it all.

Refrigeration takes time.

This is the Technician and his assistant working on the Provision plant.

Everything was running to good temperatures, especially the Freezers which needs to run down to -20C and then stay around there. Every 12 hours there is a 30min defrost cycle and the temperature will rise... also, people might open the door and the temperature will rise.

After a weekend and the bottom right freezer would not go below 2C.

This was after these technicians were rushed off site because "look the temperatures are correct and there are no more faults and alarms". My argument was that we need another day to make sure that everything is indeed all good.

But the customer overrode this and said that it was not necessary.

This is the condensing plant where everything was peachy. It is one Condenser plant and 6x evaporator plants. The NEW issue came up at one of those six. So fault finding needed to happen there.

On the day the Technician was not on site I was told to look at controls and found the defrost settings were incorrect... almost as thought someone had tampered with them...

I set them up right and things got better... But we still had an issue.

The Technician was recalled to site.

After a day of fault finding and careful consideration the Evap was pumped down and the EXV orifice was removed. It was not dirty, but it was possibly the wrong size. So he changed it and ran the unit down to -10C. It would need to run many more hours to get to -20C.

We shall see today what happens...

Thank you for reading this post!

Cheers!
@zakludick