Sabatoged

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hillbilly1

Senior Member
Location
North Georgia mountains
Occupation
Owner/electrical contractor
One of my techs has a store that reported a 200 amp breaker that was tripping taking down the lighting and computers and registers. He could not find anything wrong, so assumed iy must be a weak breaker (load was only 59 amps,) so he replaced it. They called back again saying the breaker was still tripping about every two hours. He baby sat it for four hours, and nothing happened. As soon as he went out to his truck to do the paperwork, it "tripped". Still could not find anything wrong. This "continued" for another day, and still nothing could be found. I drove 4 1/2 hours early Sunday morning to see what I could find out what the problem was. The store had turned off the breaker in fear of a fire overnight, so I cut it back on, and put a recorder on it. I never left it alone all day, when I was not there, my tech was. No problem all day. Left the recorder on overnight, no problems recorded. Let my tech go home the night before, so I was now the only one watching it. Worked fine for about three hours, but I had to step out for a conference call. After about 10 minutes, the manager came running out saying the registers were down! Went back in, the lights were still on (I locked that panel before I went out) but the breaker for the computer panel was TURNED off, not tripped. Whoever turned it off found out too late they could not turn off the lighting panel! (two totally seperate feeds from the service) Busted! They are going to put up a camera to try and catch which employee was doing this.
 
robbietan

robbietan

Senior Member
Location
Antipolo City
hillbilly1 said:
One of my techs has a store that reported a 200 amp breaker that was tripping taking down the lighting and computers and registers. He could not find anything wrong, so assumed iy must be a weak breaker (load was only 59 amps,) so he replaced it. They called back again saying the breaker was still tripping about every two hours. He baby sat it for four hours, and nothing happened. As soon as he went out to his truck to do the paperwork, it "tripped". Still could not find anything wrong. This "continued" for another day, and still nothing could be found. I drove 4 1/2 hours early Sunday morning to see what I could find out what the problem was. The store had turned off the breaker in fear of a fire overnight, so I cut it back on, and put a recorder on it. I never left it alone all day, when I was not there, my tech was. No problem all day. Left the recorder on overnight, no problems recorded. Let my tech go home the night before, so I was now the only one watching it. Worked fine for about three hours, but I had to step out for a conference call. After about 10 minutes, the manager came running out saying the registers were down! Went back in, the lights were still on (I locked that panel before I went out) but the breaker for the computer panel was TURNED off, not tripped. Whoever turned it off found out too late they could not turn off the lighting panel! (two totally seperate feeds from the service) Busted! They are going to put up a camera to try and catch which employee was doing this.
Click to expand...

I am going to buy a pad lock because of this....
 
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hillbilly1

Senior Member
Location
North Georgia mountains
Occupation
Owner/electrical contractor
I would not have thought of it, except I had a previous experience with a national auto parts retailer, Their registers kept crashing, so they thought they had a power issue, drove ground rods, run new grounds to water pipe and building steel, put a voltage recorder on the service for two weeks. They replaced all registers and the servers. Ended up, one of the assistant managers was passed over for a promotion, and was crashing the system. Somehow the IT people figured it out.
 
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hillbilly1

Senior Member
Location
North Georgia mountains
Occupation
Owner/electrical contractor
Update; since we installed the power quality monitor and the camera, the breakers have mysteriously NOT "tripped". Have not heard if they caught the saboture yet.
 
dmagyar

dmagyar

Senior Member
Location
Rocklin, Ca.
Same problem happened to me

Same problem happened to me

I do some work for a company that constructs water treatment machinery. These get placed in lots of different situations where you can't underestimate the "politics" which are going on behind the scenes.

Short of it was that one of the machines kept on tripping out during what was supposed to be a "test" to see how well it worked. Nothing could be found wrong, except for those interested parties lurking around. I suggested one of the fake video camera domes be installed to find out who was shutting the system down. Problems mysteriously stopped.
 
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stevenje

Senior Member
Location
Yachats Oregon
Many years ago I was running pipe above a drop ceiling over some offices in a "Secured Building". I noticed a small red light glowing above the drop ceiling a couple of offices down the hall. I shined my flash light at it and it was a camera pointed down into the office through a return air grill. I stopped what I was doing and went to the security supervisor and told him what I found. His reply was you didn't see anything and to forget what I saw. I knew who sat in that office and always wondered what was going on.
 
Jraef

Jraef

Moderator, OTD
Staff member
Location
San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
Occupation
Electrical Engineer
A division of my company sells and installs a system called "Longwatch" that allows video data to be transmitted over SCADA communications platforms across long distances. Some of the stuff that they've shown me that turns up confirms the paranoia that I have long felt about things like this.

I had a project at Boeing once where there were a lot of VFDs and PLCs on crane controls. At least once a week, a VFD would mysteriously cease to function and I would get called out to troubleshoot, taking me away from the original project which was assembling and commissioning the crane controls. It was always the same problem, the VFD programming had been reset back to factory defaults. We always suspected that the Gremlins were the night shift crane maintenance crew who were bored. We hooked up a door switch as a PLC input and did a time-date stamp on activation. Sure enough every time a VFD would loose its programming, someone had opened the cabinet during the night shift, even though everyone swore they were nowhere near them.
 
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