Bad URD Pot.

[wtdoor67]

Troubleshot quite a few PD Mts. They're usually quite easy to recognize. Usually bubbling oil or so hot you can't lay a hand on em. Don't think I'm saying my experience covers all, just in my experience.

Only had one that surprised me. Had the usual no power call. I got there first as the other hand hadn't arrived. Single phase, looked simple. Dip fuse blown. Probably bad wire. First pot I looked in, everything normal, no smoked up elbows, nothing. I stood off the source elbow and thought I'd just start leap frogging. Before someone asks, yes we had a Chance phasing tool you use to find a bad run of wire. It was thoughtfully in the truck of the UG supervisor who lived and drove his truck home, about 25 miles away.

Anyway stood off the source elbow and went to the dip and refused it and closed it. It held. Back to the pot. Stood off the other elbow and thought, well I'll just stand off this other elbow, jab this one on and get this pot back on. It blew the fuse at the dip. Had to change out the pot. Evidently the primary buss between H1 A and H1 B was faulted to ground. Probably a lot of people have experienced this, but it was the only one I ever had.

And again this was before the more sophfisticated testers they have acess to now. Just blow a fuse and sectionalize it and thump it was their method.

[wtdoor67]

If anyone remembers the washed out overhead line that we temporaried quite handily, I won't bother. I'll post it if someone is curious. It hasn't been all that long.

[MI-Lineman]

Troubleshot quite a few PD Mts. They're usually quite easy to recognize. Usually bubbling oil or so hot you can't lay a hand on em. Don't think I'm saying my experience covers all, just in my experience.

Only had one that surprised me. Had the usual no power call. I got there first as the other hand hadn't arrived. Single phase, looked simple. Dip fuse blown. Probably bad wire. First pot I looked in, everything normal, no smoked up elbows, nothing. I stood off the source elbow and thought I'd just start leap frogging. Before someone asks, yes we had a Chance phasing tool you use to find a bad run of wire. It was thoughtfully in the truck of the UG supervisor who lived and drove his truck home, about 25 miles away.

Anyway stood off the source elbow and went to the dip and refused it and closed it. It held. Back to the pot. Stood off the other elbow and thought, well I'll just stand off this other elbow, jab this one on and get this pot back on. It blew the fuse at the dip. Had to change out the pot. Evidently the primary buss between H1 A and H1 B was faulted to ground. Probably a lot of people have experienced this, but it was the only one I ever had.

And again this was before the more sophfisticated testers they have acess to now. Just blow a fuse and sectionalize it and thump it was their method.

We have a lot of UG here and have suspected some pots only to find it was bad wire! We still blow fuses till ya find the bad section!:confused:

[johnbellamy]

I have not run across like that. Yet.

I used to do alot of this one man, so I got into the rutine of it was a single phase loop or lateral, this is what I would do. By the way, my service truck was a ford ranger, so no bucket.

I would go the the half way point, stand-off the out going cable, then I would pull the bayonet, also vent it, see if smelled funny, or was bloated, then I would go to each pad mount between there and the dip, do the same, pull the fuse and vent it,do a visual, then I would go HI Pot with my phasing set, this way you test cable only, but your buss is included, if it showed good, I would heat up the cable, then go put the fuses back in, then I would use the last pot energized, go slpilt the next section ect. If it was looped, I could get all back on, isolate the bad section. A lateral, get on who I could. Sometimes nobody if it was in the first run.

I got stuck on stand by one time, single phase, 1250ft run, fed one transformer, Had no bucket, so I climb the pole, lift the high side, test, ground my cable, Isolate my arrestor, take the ground off, drive back to town, get the Van, find my fault, also had to locate my run before thumped it so I knew where it ran, left my splice and UG tools at the fault site, about 700 ft from the transformer. Ground at the padmount, drive the van back to town, get the backhoe, dig er up, splice er, backfill er, drive back to town. Remove my ground at the padmount, drive back around, put er back together, heat em up. Ah, the good old days when I could do what I wanted to. Those days are long gone.

[Lineman North Florida]

We have a lot of URD pots that blow the weak link fuse in the tank, nothing to do but change them out on single phase, 3 phase pots sometimes we unbolt the lids and change the weak link, I think we have about changed out all the old pots with the bay-o-net fuses, the biggest thorn in my side trying to troubleshoot URD is when the primary has a T-Splice in it and you don't know it cause it aint marked on either of the 2 pots your working on at the time.

[johnbellamy]

T-Taps on secondaries were dumb enough, T-Taps on primary UG, **** that.

[wtdoor67]

Only place I ever ran across primary URD T splices was this muni. Talk about a mini nightmare. Cracked me up watching those half asses muni hands trying to sort out one of those. I only experienced about 2. Talk about a bad idea. Who ever came up with those was a moron.

I did see one thing there I thought wasn't bad. Those double bushing inserts for a pd. mt. Don't know how common they are but if you wanted to run a radial off an existing pd. mt. just remove one of the bushings and then you could screw in a double bushing and then you had a third point for an elbow to feed the radial. Seemed to work alright.

Old live front pd. mts. Talk about a trap for dummies. Those munis can be dangerous. Some are quite sophfisticated though. Just depends tho.

[wtdoor67]

We have a lot of UG here and have suspected some pots only to find it was bad wire! We still blow fuses till ya find the bad section!:confused:

Be a hero and contact Hastings there in the great state of, yes, Michigan and have the demonstrator demo one of those bad wire phasing sticks like Bellamy is speaking of.

No need for fuse blowing, you can find the bad run without any hassle. Some may have had no luck with those tools but I like them.

Of course I bet your co. won't spend the bucks for the really good machine but maybe they would get one and pass it around the district. Those with the little radar screen. A real cadillac. Tells you exactly the footage to the fault, just dig it up and fix it, no hassle.

Fuse blowing and thumping is hard on wire and breakers. 21st century you know Mike.

Chance or Hastings make the little phasing tool Bellamy is speaking of. Pretty handy.

[MI-Lineman]

Be a hero and contact Hastings there in the great state of, yes, Michigan and have the demonstrator demo one of those bad wire phasing sticks like Bellamy is speaking of.

No need for fuse blowing, you can find the bad run without any hassle. Some may have had no luck with those tools but I like them.

Of course I bet your co. won't spend the bucks for the really good machine but maybe they would get one and pass it around the district. Those with the little radar screen. A real cadillac. Tells you exactly the footage to the fault, just dig it up and fix it, no hassle.

Fuse blowing and thumping is hard on wire and breakers. 21st century you know Mike.

Chance or Hastings make the little phasing tool Bellamy is speaking of. Pretty handy.

Actually we have the Hastings "Hi-pot" adapters but they tend to lie? We have one Chance set that seems to work well! We also have a VON portable thumper but that doesn't come out until the service worker sectionalizes the bad cable! I've mentioned gettin the "fault tamers" but of course they don't want to spend the money?

Now our company is pushin "Kadee" minutes? I don't know if I spelled it right but basically it's the time it takes to restore an outage! Problem is it includes when they wait two hours till the normal shift starts to call some one or when a job falls through the cracks or is already done! So they'll be pushin the line workers to get sh!t done faster to make up for their faults?:rolleyes:

[Lineman North Florida]

Only place I ever ran across primary URD T splices was this muni. Talk about a mini nightmare. Cracked me up watching those half asses muni hands trying to sort out one of those. I only experienced about 2. Talk about a bad idea. Who ever came up with those was a moron.

I did see one thing there I thought wasn't bad. Those double bushing inserts for a pd. mt. Don't know how common they are but if you wanted to run a radial off an existing pd. mt. just remove one of the bushings and then you could screw in a double bushing and then you had a third point for an elbow to feed the radial. Seemed to work alright.

Old live front pd. mts. Talk about a trap for dummies. Those munis can be dangerous. Some are quite sophfisticated though. Just depends tho.Door those T-Splices are from the past and they were a bad idea but that does'nt change the fact that we have to deal with 'em, it;s really not to bad if you know that you have one in a run and kow that you are not dealing with just a run between 2 transformers,usually they are the problem and when they are I usually splice 3 pieces of cable up with elbows on top side and plug them on an LB bar in new primary junction cabinet that this caused me to install. On the fault finding I have tried the Hastings and a White the Hastings IMO were the best hands down that is what we still use today, I have not had on lie to me and the times that I have went around to someone who has it was usually an arrestor plugged on miss-marked cable still plugged on tx or one of those dreaded T-Splices, we also have a Vaughn unit that is supposed to shoot thru the tx's and show open in your cable run, but I have'nt messed with it enough to be very proficient with it. I agree about live front tx's being a disaster we still have a lot of them that we are working on getting changed out. We use the screw in double bushings when we need a radial pulloff and they work good, we call'em Superclosure's I'm one of them muni hands:D,but it aint the only place I ever worked.:D

[climbsomemore]

The Hastings Hi pot adaptor seems to be very sensitive to cable length... a long run of cable will offer enough capacitance the Hastings won't always charge it reliably. It wont read well on large diameter conductors for the same reason.

If you test a cable that actually has a fault ... lot's of guys never understood that the meter will rise and fall as the juice passes through the meter... finds the fault and leaks down to the earth.

A good cable should rise and go to "0" as the capacity of the cable balances with the charging current passed into it from the tool.

Personally I always regarded the Hastings as a "screening" tool... and would back up that test with a fuse... or just bring a thumper truck out and high pot the cable with a 'real' high pot machine.

Any one who uses the Hastings ever notice problems when you leave the cable hooked into a transformer at the far end of the cable your testing? I dont know it it makes any diference... but I kinda like to have possible bad cable totally isolated from any windings ....

[Lineman North Florida]

The Hastings Hi pot adaptor seems to be very sensitive to cable length... a long run of cable will offer enough capacitance the Hastings won't always charge it reliably. It wont read well on large diameter conductors for the same reason.

If you test a cable that actually has a fault ... lot's of guys never understood that the meter will rise and fall as the juice passes through the meter... finds the fault and leaks down to the earth.

A good cable should rise and go to "0" as the capacity of the cable balances with the charging current passed into it from the tool.

Personally I always regarded the Hastings as a "screening" tool... and would back up that test with a fuse... or just bring a thumper truck out and high pot the cable with a 'real' high pot machine.

Any one who uses the Hastings ever notice problems when you leave the cable hooked into a transformer at the far end of the cable your testing? I dont know it it makes any diference... but I kinda like to have possible bad cable totally isolated from any windings ....Just used the Hastings Phase-Tel the other day on a run of 1000mcm urd right out of the station it ran thru and was spliced in several manholes and the first place it could be isolated was a switchgear that was approx 1/2 mile from sub, there was another circuit in the switchgear for us to get power off of tested run of cable and it did take about 1 minute for good cable to back down to zero but it charged bad cable and reading stayed up so we had no problem with it working on long runs of large cable, as far as leaving cable hooked into tx as you say instead of parking on a standoff bushing, the one we use will always show that cable to be bad or a bolted fault,we have to have it isolated. We are either using a different phase-tel than what you are using or I mis-understood your post.

[wtdoor67]

No offense Florida. My jibes are at the ones who have always worked at the same Muni. Not too well rounded in my opinion. Need 2 or 3 places at least to make a pretty decent hand I think. I hate the "that's the way we always done it" crowd.

Really the only phasing tool I ever used on URD was the Chance. Had good luck with it. Figured Hastings was handy for MI.

[Special ED]

We have a lot of URD pots that blow the weak link fuse in the tank, nothing to do but change them out on single phase, 3 phase pots sometimes we unbolt the lids and change the weak link, I think we have about changed out all the old pots with the bay-o-net fuses, the biggest thorn in my side trying to troubleshoot URD is when the primary has a T-Splice in it and you don't know it cause it aint marked on either of the 2 pots your working on at the time.

Eff a bunch of T splices! Had an engineer come up with the bright Idea to install some here in Louisville on a job. Boy did I hate that. Their reasoning was they didnt wanna junction box cause they are ugly. Im very good at my URD splicing and knock on wood none have blown up yet. But those T-splices are just dumb.. Easy to mess up and cost more money down the road. Plus if you dont know they are there you will be lookin forever to find a fault sometimes.

As far as the troubleshooting. I prefer the hipot adapters on my chance equipment. A good thumper with a radar on it is the bees knees! Gives ya the footage and you just goto town dig it up and fix it. One thing I dont agree with is Ive seen some contractors thumping secondary services with 1000s of volts.. Get a megohmeter for that crap.. 27kvDC on 600 volt insulation I promise you will find a fault! lol

For bad secondaries I use a megohmeter and when possible on primary I use a portable Hypotronics machine.. Very nice and it only weights about 50 pounds.

[Trbl639]

Never used the Testers ya'll are talking about......outfit i worked for didn't have em......

Finally got the Thumper with the radar and it was nice...when it worked...we did have the Secondary/service UG fault locator machine and it worked good enough for ya not to bet money against it...think it was a Hypotronics, but can't remember for sure..........

As far a T splices, we didn't use them, but the oilfields in this area are full of Y splices....might be the same one ya'll are talking about.......engineers didn't like the Jct boxes in the middle of the roads when we extended to a new well site, and they didn't want to spend the money to splice the existing UG to get it out of the middle of the road.......

[slimdalineman]

Never used the Testers ya'll are talking about......outfit i worked for didn't have em......

Finally got the Thumper with the radar and it was nice...when it worked...we did have the Secondary/service UG fault locator machine and it worked good enough for ya not to bet money against it...think it was a Hypotronics, but can't remember for sure..........

As far a T splices, we didn't use them, but the oilfields in this area are full of Y splices....might be the same one ya'll are talking about.......engineers didn't like the Jct boxes in the middle of the roads when we extended to a new well site, and they didn't want to spend the money to splice the existing UG to get it out of the middle of the road.......

by sec urd fault locator maybe you mean the AL-60. we use the hypotronics for locating lead cables in manholes and then identifying the phases after the underground crews remove the lead.

[slimdalineman]

Actually we have the Hastings "Hi-pot" adapters but they tend to lie? We have one Chance set that seems to work well! We also have a VON portable thumper but that doesn't come out until the service worker sectionalizes the bad cable! I've mentioned gettin the "fault tamers" but of course they don't want to spend the money?

Now our company is pushin "Kadee" minutes? I don't know if I spelled it right but basically it's the time it takes to restore an outage! Problem is it includes when they wait two hours till the normal shift starts to call some one or when a job falls through the cracks or is already done! So they'll be pushin the line workers to get sh!t done faster to make up for their faults?:rolleyes:

Most of us down here use the Chance for Hi-Potting the cable...we always place cable in standoff..only have had problems on really short runs because needle moves quickly if your not paying attention you can miss it...also some problems hi-potting in the rain.

[Lineman North Florida]

No offense Florida. My jibes are at the ones who have always worked at the same Muni. Not too well rounded in my opinion. Need 2 or 3 places at least to make a pretty decent hand I think. I hate the "that's the way we always done it" crowd.

Really the only phasing tool I ever used on URD was the Chance. Had good luck with it. Figured Hastings was handy for MI.
No offense taken.:D

[Lineman North Florida]

Eff a bunch of T splices! Had an engineer come up with the bright Idea to install some here in Louisville on a job. Boy did I hate that. Their reasoning was they didnt wanna junction box cause they are ugly. Im very good at my URD splicing and knock on wood none have blown up yet. But those T-splices are just dumb.. Easy to mess up and cost more money down the road. Plus if you dont know they are there you will be lookin forever to find a fault sometimes.

As far as the troubleshooting. I prefer the hipot adapters on my chance equipment. A good thumper with a radar on it is the bees knees! Gives ya the footage and you just goto town dig it up and fix it. One thing I dont agree with is Ive seen some contractors thumping secondary services with 1000s of volts.. Get a megohmeter for that crap.. 27kvDC on 600 volt insulation I promise you will find a fault! lol

For bad secondaries I use a megohmeter and when possible on primary I use a portable Hypotronics machine.. Very nice and it only weights about 50 pounds.Went to Louisville a couple of years ago when what was left of Ike went through there and worked a few weeks, some of the places we were had some of the oldest rattiest overhead that I have ever seen, It looked like it never had any maintenance done to it, we were working for LG&E, worked with a couple of there hands that were good guys, funny thing is the LG&E hands and the KU hands did'nt seem to get along, maybe it was over college football seemed odd to me, did'nt mean to hijack the thread just saying.

[Special ED]

Went to Louisville a couple of years ago when what was left of Ike went through there and worked a few weeks, some of the places we were had some of the oldest rattiest overhead that I have ever seen, It looked like it never had any maintenance done to it, we were working for LG&E, worked with a couple of there hands that were good guys, funny thing is the LG&E hands and the KU hands did'nt seem to get along, maybe it was over college football seemed odd to me, did'nt mean to hijack the thread just saying.

LG&E got a new VP and his bright idea was cut out all maintenance and focus only on new conctruction... Oops.. They went bout 20 years with no maintenance and what you seen on Ike is alot better than it was! lol **** used to be talked about all over the place how messed up it was. Spec book? Whats that? Some of the hands building **** out here cant even spell spec book let alone use it.

As for LG&E and KU not getting along I dont get it either. LG&E came first and bought KU. LG&E is union lu2100 and KU dislikes the union.. Its funny. LGE shirts say LG&E/KU and the Ku shirts say KU/LG&E. lol

[CPOPE]

We have a lot of UG here and have suspected some pots only to find it was bad wire! We still blow fuses till ya find the bad section!:confused:

The transformer should have an under-oil fuse that coordinates with the riser pole. If you are still fault finding by cutting in half and closing in you are behind the times . It(repeated fault current) does damage to the wire.

Check out some of this equipment, You need the right tool to do the job. These companies are coming up with and improved new test sets daily

http://www.hdwelectronics.com/prod_sheets/comprehensive-product-sheet.pdf

[MI-Lineman]

The transformer should have an under-oil fuse that coordinates with the riser pole. If you are still fault finding by cutting in half and closing in you are behind the times . It(repeated fault current) does damage to the wire.

Check out some of this equipment, You need the right tool to do the job. These companies are coming up with and improved new test sets daily

http://www.hdwelectronics.com/prod_sheets/comprehensive-product-sheet.pdf

Yeah I know but try and tell the guy with the wallet runnin the place! All about outage minutes to them!:rolleyes: