Revved Up Sparky
Senior Member
Andy's thread about the BA server has reminded me to post this.
In between certifying my companies' installers work I do EICRs.
Since April (on and off) I have been doing an EICR on a medium sized hospital with 4 floors and several hundred circuits. The Estates Dept gave me the circuit schedules from the last EICR which was done 10 years ago.
They have just one server room within which sits a large server backed up by a 2 x 16A UPSes.
On my circuit charts from the previous report it stated that circuit 9 fed the sockets for the server room which also supplied the telephones.
Having been impressed by the accuracy of these circuit schedules up to now I thought I was taking a safe risk.
I decided to inspect circuit 2 - a ring main apparently feeding 2 admin offices. So I tripped off the MCB for circuit 2.
As I opened a socket to split the ring legs for r1, rn, r2 I could hear in the distance the sound of a UPS bleeping. For some reason I dismissed the noise as probably being something else - hospitals always have bleeping machines. After a few minutes the bleeping changed to a more urgent tone - then silence - then crowds of people began running around shouting "the internet and the phones have gone off - what have you done ?".
Anyway to cut the story short, the circuit charts lulled me into a false sense of security. Perhaps this particular board was tested on a Friday afternoon 10 years ago. Or someone changed the circuits and did not update the circuit schedule.
What have I learned from this experience ? With hindsight I think I should have asked for a scheduled shutdown of the server at the beginning of the job in order to correctly identify the circuit feeding the server room.
In between certifying my companies' installers work I do EICRs.
Since April (on and off) I have been doing an EICR on a medium sized hospital with 4 floors and several hundred circuits. The Estates Dept gave me the circuit schedules from the last EICR which was done 10 years ago.
They have just one server room within which sits a large server backed up by a 2 x 16A UPSes.
On my circuit charts from the previous report it stated that circuit 9 fed the sockets for the server room which also supplied the telephones.
Having been impressed by the accuracy of these circuit schedules up to now I thought I was taking a safe risk.
I decided to inspect circuit 2 - a ring main apparently feeding 2 admin offices. So I tripped off the MCB for circuit 2.
As I opened a socket to split the ring legs for r1, rn, r2 I could hear in the distance the sound of a UPS bleeping. For some reason I dismissed the noise as probably being something else - hospitals always have bleeping machines. After a few minutes the bleeping changed to a more urgent tone - then silence - then crowds of people began running around shouting "the internet and the phones have gone off - what have you done ?".
Anyway to cut the story short, the circuit charts lulled me into a false sense of security. Perhaps this particular board was tested on a Friday afternoon 10 years ago. Or someone changed the circuits and did not update the circuit schedule.
What have I learned from this experience ? With hindsight I think I should have asked for a scheduled shutdown of the server at the beginning of the job in order to correctly identify the circuit feeding the server room.