Trying to get away from hot work

going_commando said:
I'm a cowboy and I don't even install distribution breakers when energized, unless its Square-D I-line. Even then I don't like it, but any other brand I ain't doing it. All the bolts and screws on every one else's are sketchy as hell.

Ohhhhh, you are talking about regular loadcenter/panelboards at 120/208? I'm less worried about those, but an office has downtime. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to a scheduled shutdown after hours or on the weekend. Computers, servers, etc should be on battery backups anyways.
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Probably the safest to install hot, but things can still go wrong. I had a guy putting one in, but luckily it was de-energized, it was an older I-Line, and the buss insulator crumbled. I’ve told this before, but I denied a live work permit for a tech changing out a plug in breaker at a Dollar General, he called back saying he was glad I denied it, because when he pulled the old breaker out, part of the buss came with it, it had melted to the breaker.
 
going_commando said:
Computers, servers, etc should be on battery backups anyways.
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That's the rub... we ARE the battery backup, and the panels the guys are working on are the last step between those batteries and customer IT hardware. No matter how many times we tell customers "Get a rack transfer switch to protect your single corded devices," there's always that neck beard who thinks best practices don't apply to him.
 
ModbusMan said:
That's the rub... we ARE the battery backup, and the panels the guys are working on are the last step between those batteries and customer IT hardware. No matter how many times we tell customers "Get a rack transfer switch to protect your single corded devices," there's always that neck beard who thinks best practices don't apply to him.
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Yeah, and pretty easy to do, we did a data center for a major dental company, each server had a redundant power supply that automatically connected when power was interrupted on one of the two circuits feeding it.
 
ModbusMan said:
the panels the guys are working on are the last step between those batteries and customer IT hardware. No
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I have had scheduled outages for entire data centers to work on their UPS.
They transfered the operating work to another location, just like they do during natural (weather related) disasters.

It helps to make sure you and the data center manager are speaking the same language. Our work was scheduled to take less than 1hour. But, when the manager heard 'outage' he expected the entire building would be put in darkness with a multi-hour response time from the utility and sending employees home.
 
hillbilly1 said:
Yeah, and pretty easy to do, we did a data center for a major dental company, each server had a redundant power supply that automatically connected when power was interrupted on one of the two circuits feeding it.
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We had a factory muli-day total outage for servicing their incoming switchgear. Their data center switched over to gen and UPS. During the outage the customer decided to mechanically cycle, on-off, all of their breakers in the facility. Yep, even the UPS output.
 
hillbilly1 said:
Yeah, and pretty easy to do, we did a data center for a major dental company, each server had a redundant power supply that automatically connected when power was interrupted on one of the two circuits feeding it.
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Just because it's easy doesn't mean our customers do it.
jim dungar said:
It helps to make sure you and the data center manager are speaking the same language.
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I think you're missing a key issue... it's not "We are the only customer of our own white space, and just want to not do x." It's that we provide traditional colocation to others, and taking down a distro panel that feeds their gear requires at minimum 30 days notice. Think Equinix or Rackspace...
 
ModbusMan said:
I think you're missing a key issue... it's not "We are the only customer of our own white space, and just want to not do x." It's that we provide traditional colocation to others, and taking down a distro panel that feeds their gear requires at minimum 30 days notice. Think Equinix or Rackspace...
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Then schedule the outages 30 days into the future even if it is a "we need to do this NOW!!!!" kind of "emergency" work. If y'all keep doing energized work for a non-justifiable reason (to keep tenants from grumbling) then that becomes the norm. As long as y'all keep reinforcing the norm, then nothing will change.

Talk with whoever your safety is, say you want to enforce a policy of no more energized work just to satisfy tenant desires. Doing so is compliant with the NFPA 70E 110.2(A), 110.2(B), & OSHA 29 CFR 1910.333(a)(1). This is because doing energized work just because people don't want to go through the hassle of deenergizing their equipment is not a justifiable reason to do the work while energized.

When tenants/management complains that they have to wait 30 days for anything to be done, then perhaps talks can then be had about having tenants installing their own UPS to tide their equipment over for 1-2 hours and maybe decreasing the wait period from 30 days to something more agreeable.
 
Amazon is a pain the butt customer that way too. I had to redesign the shunttrip control for the ups main in a brand new DC. The engineer called for a 24 volt coil for a 225 amp main breaker. Inrush was 45 amps running through 5 amp contact blocks and a 50 va transformer! LOL! Anyway it took 3 months to arrange a shutdown and test of the new controls on a DC that wasn’t even operational yet! They were still setting racking!
 
DBill64 said:
Doing so is compliant with the NFPA 70E 110.2(A), 110.2(B), & OSHA 29 CFR 1910.333(a)(1). This is because doing energized work just because people don't want to go through the hassle of deenergizing their equipment is not a justifiable reason to do the work while energized.
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This is probably the track we're going to have to take.
DBill64 said:
perhaps talks can then be had about having tenants installing their own UPS
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That'll never happen. Tenants (including telecoms) are forbidden from having their own battery backup systems (setting aside that they're additional points of failure we don't want to get blamed for, they're an additional fire and electrocution risk, and wouldn't be shut down by the facility EPO). I suspect all colocation providers have this sort of language in their own service agreements.
 
DBill64 said:
Then schedule the outages 30 days into the future even if it is a "we need to do this NOW!!!!" kind of "emergency" work. If y'all keep doing energized work for a non-justifiable reason (to keep tenants from grumbling) then that becomes the norm. As long as y'all keep reinforcing the norm, then nothing will change.
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Good point
 
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