Situations where circuits need to be worked "live"

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TVH

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Please list the various situations/conditions where electrical circuits must be worked "live".
 
NEVER. There is never a situation or condition that live work MUST be performed. There are however, situations and conditions for which deenergizing introduces additional or increased hazards.

FPN No. 1 of Article 130 - NFPA 70E states; "Examples of increased or additional hazards include, but are not limited to, interruption of life support equipment, deactivation of emergency alarm systems, and shutdown of hazardous location ventilation equipment."
 
Depends on what your are calling "work". Some testing and troubleshooting has to be done live, in which case you can do it but need the proper PPE and training.

Other types of "work" need to be justified that it is safer than shutting the system down, that would be very rare. Think of it like you are in court on the stand following a serious accident and you have to convince the court it would have been more dangerous to shut the equipment down (Weekend, nights, during outage) than to perform the work live as was done. If this type of work is done live you need training, PPE, and an EEWP.
 
Sure ... it's pretty hard to pull a meter without it being 'live.'

I'm currently working on a house that has no means to disconenct power to the panel, and no main breaker. BTW, there's a good 20 ft. of unfused, unprotected cloth-covered romex feeder between the meter and the panel - a cable thet runs up one wall, over a bedroom, and down into the closet wall to reach the panel. (1957 house)

With the panel being an obsolete model, I'd say there's a chance of a breaker needing replacement. SOMEBODY is going to have to work 'hot,' for at least a moment or two.
 
renosteinke said:
Sure ... it's pretty hard to pull a meter without it being 'live.'

I'm currently working on a house that has no means to disconenct power to the panel, and no main breaker. BTW, there's a good 20 ft. of unfused, unprotected cloth-covered romex feeder between the meter and the panel - a cable thet runs up one wall, over a bedroom, and down into the closet wall to reach the panel. (1957 house)

With the panel being an obsolete model, I'd say there's a chance of a breaker needing replacement. SOMEBODY is going to have to work 'hot,' for at least a moment or two.
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In that case the only legal option for an employee of an electrical contractor is to have the power company kill the power.

It is what we do.
 
iwire said:
In that case the only legal option for an employee of an electrical contractor is to have the power company kill the power.

It is what we do.
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Agreed.

In my area the POCO will not allow an electrician to pull a meter. You must contact the utility and they will send out a lineman or meterman.

Chris
 
Funny ... around here, the PoCo just opens the seal for a service change. The EC gets to cut, and re-attach the PoCo feeds. Good thing, too .... the PoCo needs a couple days to send their guy out, and the city needs at least a day's notice to inspect. When was the last service change you did that left the customer 'dead' for a week?

Still ... where does NFPA 70E distinguish between the linesman and the electrician as to 'working hot?' I can't accept that this forum is ONLY for employees of electrical contractors.

Face reality ... it is the nature of the trade to work in the presence of electricity. It's even necessary to work with 'live' power. As absurd as this may sound ... I ask all to examine the absurdity of the 'don't work live ever' extremists. For example, ratcheting a 'bucket' into switchgear is 'working hot,' though everything is guarded in the extreme. The equipment is designed to be worked that way.

Likewise, you can kill the main breaker in a panel- but if you try hard enough, you can still find something 'live.' How far are we going to carry this silliness?

I can hardly wait for the next service call, where the customer has a bad breaker, or requires an additional circuit to be run. Just wait until I tell the customer that folks here think it's necessary for me to have the PoCo disconnect the whole building, shut the whole place down, so I can connect the pipe, pull the wire, and snap in the breaker. That will go over even better than my killing all the lights to change a bulb.

It is integral to the trade to work in the presence of electricity. It is basic to the trade that one learn how to do this. The recent silliness for 'documented safety training' totally disrespects the training represented by a journeymans' card.

Maybe the next step will be to ban me from the forum unless I can produce 'keyboard certification.'

In the remodel I described, each circuit will be tested, repaired, maybe even replaced. So that the job may progress, this is done one circuit at a time. Some would have the PoCo called to break the seal each time a breaker is pulled or replaced? Yea, that'll make the folks at the PoCo happy.
 
renosteinke said:
Funny ... around here, the PoCo just opens the seal for a service change. The EC gets to cut, and re-attach the PoCo feeds.
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That is irrelevant, if you let your employee pull the meter and expose themselves to live parts you are breaking Federal standards and you are subject to fines.

Still ... where does NFPA 70E distinguish between the linesman and the electrician as to 'working hot?' I can't accept that this forum is ONLY for employees of electrical contractors.
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This forum has nothing to do with it, OSHA standards have different rules for linemen then non-linemen



Face reality ... it is the nature of the trade to work in the presence of electricity. It's even necessary to work with 'live' power.
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Not true of an electrical contractor in almost all cases and in the few case that live work is allowed full PPE is required.

It is time for folks like yourself to face reality, your way of working is going away.
I ask all to examine the absurdity of the 'don't work live ever' extremists. For example, ratcheting a 'bucket' into switchgear is 'working hot,' though everything is guarded in the extreme. The equipment is designed to be worked that way.

Likewise, you can kill the main breaker in a panel- but if you try hard enough, you can still find something 'live.' How far are we going to carry this silliness?
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We are going to not allow electricians to be exposed to live parts, that is were we are heading.

The company I work for already has that policy and yet we still mange to get the work done.





It is integral to the trade to work in the presence of electricity.
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In the presence of electricity yes, in the presence of exposed live parts no normally, it is not. If you feel the only way to troubleshoot something is with it live OSHA allows that.


It is basic to the trade that one learn how to do this. The recent silliness for 'documented safety training' totally disrespects the training represented by a journeymans' card.
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The j-man card means nothing to the feds, every area has different requirements to get a j-card, some places hand them out like candy.

Maybe the next step will be to ban me from the forum unless I can produce 'keyboard certification.'
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Hmmm, tempting but no ....... not really fair. :D

In the remodel I described, each circuit will be tested, repaired, maybe even replaced. So that the job may progress, this is done one circuit at a time. Some would have the PoCo called to break the seal each time a breaker is pulled or replaced? Yea, that'll make the folks at the PoCo happy.
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Ahh, you use your head, do all the work you can ahead of time and then schedule one outage?
 
renosteinke said:
... I ask all to examine the absurdity of the 'don't work live ever' extremists. For example, ratcheting a 'bucket' into switchgear is 'working hot,' though everything is guarded in the extreme. The equipment is designed to be worked that way. ...
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Most switchgear that is currently installed cannot contain the arc blast if there is some type of problem. Also any interaction with the live parts when you cannot see the live parts has an extreme risk. There may be loose parts or even a tool left by a previous worker that ends up across the bus and causing a huge arc flash incident.
 
What do you do if you have a customer, a good customer, (a global corporation) who has an entire computer server room with 4- 42cir. 200a 120/208 panelboards feeding all the servers in the room. These panels are on a ups, the ups is backed up by a generator. The point is, they can't lose power. In fact they only shut down select servers one day a year. This usually results in massive panic when things don't re-boot properly. When a 3 pole 20a breaker needs to be installed for a new piece of equipment what do you do? I would most likely install the breaker and move on. I can't imagine a trying to schedule a shutdown of servers that do who knows what, world wide 24/7, just to install one breaker.
 
Plan a shutdown, I have a sunday night short outage planned this weekend to swap a bunh of breakers out with modern replacements and GF modules for a similar customer. They all have the flexibility to work around this sort of thing.
 
zog said:
They all have the flexibility to work around this sort of thing.
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I agree.

If the data center does not have the flexibility for a planned outage, the odds are good they will eventually experience an unplanned shut down, what will they do then?
 
btharmy said:
What do you do if you have a customer, a good customer, (a global corporation) who has an entire computer server room with 4- 42cir. 200a 120/208 panelboards feeding all the servers in the room. These panels are on a ups, the ups is backed up by a generator. The point is, they can't lose power. In fact they only shut down select servers one day a year. This usually results in massive panic when things don't re-boot properly. When a 3 pole 20a breaker needs to be installed for a new piece of equipment what do you do? I would most likely install the breaker and move on. I can't imagine a trying to schedule a shutdown of servers that do who knows what, world wide 24/7, just to install one breaker.
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I will guarantee that you would have no where near enough liability insurance to cover their loses if something happens and you cause a shut down. To say nothing of the physical risk to you.
 
don_resqcapt19 said:
I will guarantee that you would have no where near enough liability insurance to cover their loses if something happens and you cause a shut down. To say nothing of the physical risk to you.
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It's all well and good to simply say "schedule a shutdown", but there's a lot more to it than that for a most data centers.

I friend of mine spent three months planning a 5 hour data center shutdown for yahoo. There was some equipment that had been up for 3-4 years and initially nobody even knew who was responsible for it, it just worked. They had to catalog/verify every item powered, who was responsible, what it did, etc. There were some reports, but things change and that doesn't include the report. They also had to schedule in multiple vendors' field service in case something didn't come back, not to mention the systems staff to take things down, bring them back up, and check everything out.

I am definitely not saying "just work it hot", just that it can be more complicated than just pulling a switch (I assume that Don's been through this at least once or twice). When you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars downtime cost for installing a 3-p 120v breaker, I would expect any business to take a close look at the project. Of course, that's also when it makes sense to do things like installing spare breakers and lead their outputs to a j-box. Then you can tie on to them without even opening the panel. (Saw a j-box with 6 or 7 L21-20R's on it, they were terminating the spare breakers in the panel next to it. When you needed a circuit, pull it off the receptacle and run it out another pipe to the equipment.)

All that said, turn it off first, then install. Very few businesses can't manage Saturday night downtime.
 
I have worked in plenty of data centers, Fidelity Investments, Monster.com are a couple people would know and scheduling a shut down is as easy as the IT folks will let it be but many will did their heels in hoping we will cave in and work it hot (an OSHA violation for pretty much anything other than troubleshooting)

And as Don points out just because you decide to work it hot does not mean there will be no shutdown, instead of being planed it will be unplanned due to a mistake, it may harm people and equipment and know them off line for much longer time then a planed outage.
 
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