The previous post was written at about 9:30 last night, and ends on an optimistic note. Of course, any hint of optimism demands retribution from the Lords of Karma, so I got a phone call at 9:45 telling me the power had gone out on campus. The power was apaprently off for something like an hour and a half, which is distressingly typical.<\/p>\n
Happily, the person who called me was my research student, calling from the lab to tell me that he had shut down the valves on the roughing pumps. This is an important step, because the turbopumps don’t automatically re-start, but the roughing pumps do, and if you don’t close the valves, they get oil all over the system.<\/p>\n
The lasers all went down, but back when I was starting up, I bought fancy power supplies with various safety circuits for $1000 apiece. That’s probably saved me replacing the lasers four or five times– suddenly cutting the current to a diode laser can kill it, as can a power spike when the supply comes back on. The fancy supplies have protection circuits to prevent that, and are worth the money. There have probably been at least fifteen power outages in my time here, and the lasers have come through every one thus far (knock on imitation wood-like desk).<\/p>\n
I don’t think anything has been permanently damaged, though one of the mechanical roughing pumps was kind of cranky when I re-started it (it stalled out and tripped a breaker, but the second try got it running). The vacuum systems all pumped back down, and the lasers appear to be lasing. None of them will be at the right frequency, of course, but that’s relatively easy to fix.<\/p>\n
Still, it’s incredibly frustrating when this kind of stuff happens. It screwed up my whole plan for the day, as I needed to come in early and get everything turned back on. Not to mention that these repeated outages will shorten the life of the vacuum pumps.<\/p>\n
That’s life in experimental physics, though…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The previous post was written at about 9:30 last night, and ends on an optimistic note. Of course, any hint of optimism demands retribution from the Lords of Karma, so I got a phone call at 9:45 telling me the power had gone out on campus. The power was apaprently off for something like an… Continue reading Power Outrage<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my_lab","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}