Tuesday, November 30, 2010

It's been a while...

Last time I posted I told you I wasn't dead. Judging by the look Ralph gave me when I was in school last time, I will be if I donn't get something posted!

Life has been crazy for the last few months but work has gone very well. Since I last posted my company transfered me to a military base in Virginia where I'm working on a headquarters building. I've had the opportunity to do a number of different jobs in the couple of months I've been there. Working on getting the backup generator lifted into the generator enclosure was a highlight. We're studying rigging and lifting in class right now and watching a crew of professionals lift a 15 ton generator 30' in the air and land it with an inch of its final location was impressive.

I've also gotten a chance to basically construct the two of the building's electrical closets by myself. Unfortunately the job is all MC and the customer wants a very orderly appearance. I ended up spending a month in the ground floor closet hanging transformers, mounting panels, setting up cross mounted strut and hanging cable tray to run the MC from the place it comes into the closet to the appropriate panel. Then I got to start trying to relabel, dress, and land the circuits. It would have been easier to mount a trough on the wall and bring the circuits down in pipe but my forman wanted the circuits landed directly. It took a long time but I'm really proud of how well the closets turned out. I'd take a picture but I'm pretty sure the security folks on base would frown on pictures of their building being posted on the internet.

Speaking of security, I currently find myself on my company's security team. I've spent the last few weeks pulling a huge number of cables to each secured door in the building, mounting security panels and hanging cameras outside of the building. I've gotten a chance to spend some time pulling fiber optic cable which is pretty cool. We have one more floor worth of wire to pull, then the termination begins!



Expect a bit less time between posts from now on...

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

I'm Not Dead!

The last month has been wild. The JATC transfers apprentices every year to broaden our experience in the field and I transfered almost a month ago. I went from a company working a relatively small job at a hospital in downtown DC to a company working a MASSIVE data center in Ashburn, Virginia.

The first thing that hit me was the scale of the project. There were never more than 15 electricians at the hospital. Even when I worked outages, there were maybe 25 to 30 electricians, tops. I showed up my first day in Ashburn and there were over 100 electricians - just electricians - at the jobsite.

The work is completely different too. I was used to running small pipe, 3/4" or 1", pulling wire in conduit, wiring equipment, etc. I've found myself in a world of 3" pipe (or bigger,) load banks and bus duct in rooms the size of football fields. There's 35,000 volts coming into the building. Even the control voltage is 600v!

All of this is, of course, incredibly cool. Running big pipe is just like running small pipe but you get to use a table bender. Landing wires in load banks is just like landing wires anywhere else except the wire is bigger. All in all, it's a very cool job. I just wish Ashburn, VA wasn't so far from my house...

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

New Phases

Get it? Phases! It's an electrical joke... Ok, never mind.

My apprenticeship finds me in the middle of a lot of changes. I've just completed the last of the finish work in the work area I've been in since before Thanksgiving. It's amazing how much work (and pipe and wire!) went into four relatively small rooms! I've gotten to do a lot of really interesting things like wire operating booms and install isolation transformers. The last few weeks have been full of the usual little things like installing receptacles and installing engraved cover plates. As things wind down in the Operating Rooms I've been working on the next phase of the construction at the Hospital - doing demolition work on the next floor up. It couldn't be more different from the detail work I've gotten used too! That said, there's always some fun in tearing things apart!

I'm also just starting a new phase in my class work with the JATC. Book II throws you into AC - Alternating Current - and introduces things like multi-phase systems, transformers and generators. After the relative simplicity of Direct Current in Book I it's like a whole different world. Very interesting but complicated! More on Book II as I work my way through it!

The final new phase in my life is my transfer, which comes up on June 7th. The JATC transfers its apprentices every year to make sure that they get experience at multiple companies doing multiple kinds of work. It's great as far as providing me with a wealth of experience when I come out of my time but it's always a bit nerve wracking walking into a new jobsite and having to prove yourself all over again. I'll find out tomorrow where I'm going. In the mean time I have AC Theory and the National Electric Code to study for class tomorrow.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Starting Book Two

It seems like just a few days ago that I became the 'First Year Blogger' and I'm already moving on to Book Two.

As a whole, the first year of my apprenticeship has flown by. I'm twenty percent finished with the apprenticeship and a third of the way through day school. In the last year I've learned an incredible amount, both in the classroom and on the job.

Looking at the beginning of Book Two next week is a little bit intimidating. All of the journeymen and upper-year apprentices I talk to on the job say that going from DC theory in Book One to AC theory Book Two makes Book Two one of the toughest years in the apprenticeship. Along with that, though, comes the rather reassuring knowledge that most of the people that make it through Book Two complete the apprenticeship.

Hopefully since I will be able to blog Book Two from the beginning you should be able to get a better idea of how it goes.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

It's been a while...

It's been quite a while since I've posted here. There are two reasons.

Reason one is that work has been incredibly busy. First a bit of background: I'm working on four new operating rooms and an MRI room in a hospital expansion. Each of those operating rooms has four operating booms coming down from the ceiling. Each one had been piped for the power circuits and the data requirements in the drawings. A few weeks ago revised drawings came out from the company handling all of the data requirements for the equipment on the job. In addition to the conduit we had already run about half of the booms would require two 2" pipes and a 1-1/4" pipe from the that boom to a new trough mounted in the wall in the sterile corridor.

This wouldn't have been a big deal except that the new trough in the wall (one for each O.R.) and all of the pipe had to be run after the walls had already been dry-walled, the air curtain duct work was up and the bulkheads built.

All of this was change order work so it made my company happy - they can charge time and materials - but it meant that we ended up way behind and we've been working weekends to get caught up.

Reason number two for my lack of posting has been that I've been working hard to finish out Book One of my apprenticeship strong. The final sections of the first book are on voltage, current and resistance in combination DC circuits. It's not exactly the hardest thing in the world. Like everything else we've learned, it's built on the concepts we've already covered. But the process to solve combination circuits is long and involved. Each step is an opportunity to make an error which would throw the entire calculation off. All the studying paid off, though, and I just finished up my last test in Book One this week. I have a CPR class next time and then it's on to Book Two.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

It's a whole other language...

One of the first things that hits you when you start in the electrical industry is all the new terms that everybody else throws around that have absolutely no meaning to you. 1900, 11B, device ring, MC connector, stub 90 and the list goes on.

It doesn't take you too long to start to get a handle on all of this - mostly because you get plenty of practice when everybody's sending you down to the materials room to pick up a box of whatever they need. Pretty soon you can let the foreman know that there are no more 11B single gang 1-1/2" raise mud rings left on the job and actually know what the object you just described looks like. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one that has trouble keeping 'connector' and 'coupling' straight, though.

I'm half a year into my apprenticeship and I still run into names and lingo that are new too me.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Sweeping, cleaning and organizing.

If there's one thing that bites about being a first year apprentice it's all the time you spend sweeping floors, cleaning up and organizing materials. The reason, of course, that new apprentices often do those jobs is because they don't know how to do a lot of other things. (And because an apprentice's hourly rate is low. No need for a journeyman to spend the company's money at twice the rate to get floors swept!)

Six months into my first year I've learned that what your foreman thinks about apprentices is just as important as how much you know when it comes to work assignments. The sub-foreman I'm working under right now is great. I've shown that I'm capable of doing a lot of things and he lets me do them. He'll give me assignments to run pipe just like anybody else and let me get it done because he knows I can. He'll give me the plans and let me and the brand-new R-worker pull wire. I get to do things like this without anybody standing over me because I've shown I'll get it done.

I'm not saying I never sweep or organize materials or walk the whole jobsite looking wire scraps. It's just that I only have to do those things when there are a lot of wire scraps laying around that need to be cleaned up, the material area is a mess or the floors are dirty - never as busy work.

Not everybody you'll work under is like that. Some foremen and sub-foremen out there think the only thing a first year apprentice is good for is menial tasks. Again, I MORE than happy to do things like sweeping and cleaning when they need to be done. But let me say straight out, being told to walk around again looking for trash that electricians made after you just spent an hour doing that, finished up and went to your boss to ask for something else to do is annoying.

As a first year apprentice you have to learn not to let that kind of thing bother you. You work hard and pay attention so that you can impress the people that are willing to let you go as far as you can, skill wise. For the few out there that don't have any interest in seeing what you're actually capable of the best you can do is just do what your asked to do and remember that in a few years this won't be the problem.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Tools of the Trade

If you asked electricians what the most valuable tool in their tool box was the most common answer would, by far, be their Kleins.

After last week, I'd offer a different answer. The most important piece of equipment any electrician can have is a reliable car or truck. In a week where the Federal Government was closed, every school district in the area shut its doors and when most private businesses closed up shop I was at work every single day.

My employer certainly would have understood if I had called in (and you MUST call in) to say that I couldn't make it because of the snow but the expectation is always that you show up for work. And in a profession where if you don't work you don't get paid, being there every morning at 6am is important.

Monday, February 1, 2010

I'm the new first year apprentice

When I was approached during class on Wednesday to be the blogger for my class my first thought after saying 'yes' was 'what the heck am I going to write about?' That Friday I ran into a guy on my job site who was finishing his very first week in the trade. It made me think of my first week in the trade, so I thought I'd post that.

I'd finished up the application process (I'll post something about that soon) and had gotten a call from the Apprentice Coordinator at the JATC to come down to the Hall. He had me an assignment. He called up my brand new company and told them I was on my way. I drove over to their shop and did the necessary paper work. I watched the safety video and got the name of my foreman. I called him up to find out where I was showing up the next day.

I walked into the hospital I would be working at early the next morning with brand new boots and a tool bag full of shiny new tools. I did some more paperwork for a hospital name tag and was given a hardhat. My foreman then took me into a nurses station and recovery area that was being renovated.

I had spent a few years fixing cars for a living so I had a pretty good idea how my new tools worked but I was walking into unknown territory. I knew just enough about the electrical trade to know that I knew nothing at all.

Honestly, it was all rather intimidating.

Once I got going, though, it was great. I spent the first few days pulling wire through conduit. (You'll do a lot of that when you start out.) Each day, though, I got to try something new. People explained things to me and I figured out my role.

In the six months since that day in August I've learned a ton - at boot camp, in class and on the job. I'm already a much more useful electrician's apprentice than I was that day. The time has flown by.

In my next few posts I'll try to talk a little bit about how I got into the JATC program and what school is like, but for now I'll leave this as my introduction.