Day 6 – Etec Practical Course

By | March 20, 2017

After arriving nice and early at 7:30am, I proceeded to screw all the face plates in, the power sockets and checked my motor control again. We then livened the board and tested the lights, and the sockets and then the motor control.

The lights and sockets were fine. The motor control had a few issues. First, the live conductor was touching a screw that was touching the metal case which was earthed. This caused a spark and for the upstream circuit breaker to trip. I mistakenly used the circuit breaker as a switch instead of using the main switch.

Once this was fixed, my main controller was energized but the star/delta didn’t energize. After 30mins of troubleshooting I discovered that I had 1 wire missing. When I put the extra wire in place, it worked correctly. Then we found the lights weren’t working. All the lights had LED’s and needed to be changed to normal filament.

The last problem was the phase rotation of the motor meter. It rotated the opposite way meaning that I had a phase transposed. I had to troubleshoot this and correct it as well. The troubleshooting gave me a chance to learn a lot more than if everything went smoothly.

One important point Andre mentioned was to test the existing gear. Don’t trust that because it is brand new out of the box that it works.

Afterwards, I had to strip the board back down, do some paper work and then I was outta there!

It was a great week and a bit and has certainly provided a lot more confidence to me when working with electricity.

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