A Mike Life – The Life of Mike!

At the water plant

// March 3rd, 2009 // family

So I always talk about my job, but I never get to actually show people what we do there. This video is kind of the fun part, the ending portion where we get to test out all the programming we’ve been doing for months to prepare for actual installation.

If you don’t know what I do for a living, I basically help build systems to control things like water treatment plants. We get the requirements up front, build the system and then install it out in the actual plant, do live tests to ensure everything works and then it’s good to go!

Now, I specifically work on the user interface side of things (HMI), whereas some of my co-workers do the actual control side which is called a PLC. What this video is testing is really the PLC side of things…making sure it runs the system like it’s intended.

This video below is just a little clip of us testing our control of a water filter. If you want to know what you’re seeing, read the text below, or just skip to the video. It may bore you, but it’s fascinating to me to see things actually WORK. We do so much of our work in an office, that taking it out to the field and seeing things function as they are supposed to is the most fulfilling part of my job.

What you are seeing:

This is a water filter. One of 8 giant water filters. Normally the water flows in from the white troughs you see in the video and spills over their tops and is filtered below through the anthracite media. So it drains downward.

Well, the video is a backwash. Normally the anthracite will get full of the dirt and crap it filters out, so now and then you have to “shake it up”, which means you aerate it, and then flush all the dirt upwards into the troughs, which spills it out below into the channel and then flows out to a holding basin. A valve in the line tells it to go there, not to your drinking water supply for Gilbert and Chandler residents

So what you are seeing in the video is the reverse of how a filter normally works. This is the cleaning process. It’s called “backwashing” the filter.

Hope you enjoy it…although it may bore some of you

(you also will see a little pan of the plant, just to see all the construction going on. Oh, and a brief shot of me with a hard hat on!)

(oh, by the way, this was done with our new FLIP HD video camera we have and I am really, really happy with the quality. Such a great camera for so cheap.)