Hot Washing Insulators 500 KV line Live

[AudioShockwav]

Last Summer I was driving home, and ran up on a PG& E crew Washing Insulators on A High Voltage Power line.
They were driving along the side of the road, and one guy using a platform on top of the rig was using A high power washer to clean dirt, and bird droppings off of the insulators that hold the power lines.
In one Vid, the Pilot of the Chopper is talking and notice he says something about not getting contaminated water, or it would be deadly.
In the next Vid, the guys are sitting on the tower and using what they call "low conductivity water" to wash with.
Note that these are "live lines"
Have a look.

'Hot-Washing' the Insulators of a 500,000 Volt Power Line! - YouTube

http://www.mitsacy.com LIve Line Washing - suspension string 2 men on tower - YouTube

Transmission Line Hand Wash - YouTube

Hotline Washing Insulator.flv - YouTube

Typical wash of 230,000 volt line that is energized. Note: Demineralized water good for million volts on this day.

I know this goes against everything that we have been taught about water, but "pure" water in not a good conductor of electricity.
I used to do water testing on Boilers, one of the things you do is a test that is for Soft water.
It is very bad to run Hard water into a Boiler, because as the water boils off, it leaves behind all the things that water carry's with it.
In fact, it is a very good practice to try to return all of the water that is used in a Steam system back to the boiler as condensate because condensed water ( or Distilled water) is about as pure as you can get.
Minerals, salts, metals, cations or anions dissolved in water deposit on the tubes inside the boiler and cause "scale"
This will in turn will cause damage to the Boiler.
One of the instruments used to test water softness is called a "TDS meter"
or total dissolved solids meter.
The way it works is to measure the Electrical Conductivity of the water. There are a number of scales used in EC, most commonly micro-Siemens (µS) or milli-Siemens (mS).
Distilled water is very low on the conductivity scale.



73
Jeff

 

[Captain Kilowatt]

It still kind of freaks you out watching them spray water on those lines doesn't it? You are of course 100% right about distilled or deionized water being a very poor conductor. It is in fact dissolved minerals that make water conductive. Despite knowing that I still don't think I would want to be on the other end of the hose. :laugh:

 

[AudioShockwav]

Yes it does, when I first seen the truck and the guy spraying the poles i freaked....but as I thought about it I figured out what they were doing.
We all know how the first rain of the season often causes power outages and that is because of dirt and other stuff building up on the insulators.
Thought you guys might get a kick out of the Vids.

73
Jeff

 

[gamegetter]

I bet they carry a hefty life insurance policy?

 

[Mudfoot]

I'd like to have his paycheck.

 

[74IN]

Those high lines outside of high pollution areas really seldom need cleaning.

I used to do that and we used lime. Simple line marker calcium carbonate. 80 grit.

The only places I worked were where the environment had very high airborn particulate pollution.

The steel mills here in NW IN and SE IL. Also ARMCO steel in OH and other places.

Other places were cement factories that had alot of dust floating around.

Then we cleaned with kiln dried ground corn cobs (really) and recoated with silicon grease cut with gasoline . The grease trapped the dust in the dielectric grease. When it got saturated and dried we knocked it off with cobs and recoated.

This is who I worked for in the 80's, early 90's and lastly in 1999.

Insulator cleaning - YouTube

He is cleaning bell insulators on a switch.

When I worked there we didn't have all that gear. Street clothes. I guess OSHA did that.

In this vid, you can see how dirty the insulators are. The lime cleans the thing from dark brown to white.

Insulator cleaning - YouTube

Some work was on the ground but most was not.

We called the wands sticks. They were fiberglass tubing that we assembled with epoxy glue. For use on towers we had to use what we called a hook. To get to the far side of a sting of insulators we used a 'Hook". A hook was a piece of 1/4" steel tubing that we would bend into a "J" and attach to the end of the stick. The stick had a threaded and glued in 1/4" nipple. You had a ball valve to turn the stick on and off. When using a hook, you had to first put it behind the insulator string or it blasted you in the face.

The highest towers we did were 230' high at the channel between Inland Steel and J&L steel. They went over a EJ&E train drawbridge. I think Inland is now Mittal and I don't know what J&L is now.

 

[74IN]

The only time a person died when I worked for them was from a dumb accident.

We were painting a substation in an Armco (I think) steel plant in Butler PA. Butler is the only place I have been that has two Main Streets. You can go to the corner of Main and Main.

I was running an airless sprayer in the high areas, they were 25KV. Scary but not bad.

A bud came from IN started in the lower voltage area (6900V) with a mit.

Quality of finish was not of concern. A mit fit on the hand and is like something you would wash a car with. Dip it in the paint and smear it on.

He was told to only paint as far as he could reach and then ask for another place to go.

He disobeyed that and climbed a stepladder. Then he climbed the steel.

He must have lost his balance and fell. When he did that, he grabbed onto a line that looped under the steel. That was it. Went into his hand and exited where he was sitting in an "X" in the structure. His taint.

Fell and broke his arm, landed between the leg of the structure and a retaining wall of flagstone.

We drug him out and I felt for a carotid pulse. No more than 20 or 30 a min.

26 years old, second day on the job and died from over confidence.