Comment by cmos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmos | Hacker News Reader

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It was 1992 and I was a high school senior. My teacher got me a job at the local DPW in the electical department. I was to work in the warehouse under a guy named Al who was an old timer and lost his hand in a forklift accident 30 years prior. My job was to clean the warehouse, and when I was done Al told me to 'go hide somewhere' which I did, at the top of the shelves 20' in the air, which I had also cleaned. This got boring and so I wandered into the main office where people were huddled over a computer. They were doing a mail-merge with quick basic to inform customers that their power would be out, and it wasn't working. I looked over their shoulders and it was exactly what I had been doing to send out mailings to companies for free stuff as I had read in Radio-Electonics magazine. I fix the problem, and the Chief Engineer said 'come with me' and takes me to the (air conditioned!) sub-station and into an even colder computer room where they had just setup the SCADA system to control the towns breakers and monitor the power. Nobody knew how to program it, so he pointed to a 3' pile of manuals and said this was my new job. By the end of the summer we saved the town millions by siphoning power from the local college at peak power demand. I still hung out with Al, and helped him in the mornings. The linesmen still made fun of me, even more so when I accidentally turned off half the towns power for 15 minutes.

This is pretty much exactly how I got my first job programming. The only student job I could get at college was working for the HVAC department: organizing filters in warehouses around campus, taking out the trash, etc. I got a very similar "go hide somewhere" from one of my bosses at the time, and so I started reading about the control system(s) HVAC used.

Eventually word got out to the controls department that some student worker knew a ton about the controls system, and I got moved there. They had an issue that they wanted to know the forecasted weather, so we could get the central plant going before demand started kicking in, and the vendor kept telling them custom development was coming in a couple of years. I ended up writing a server for BacNET/C that did it for them, and it ran under the desk for years.

This is a fantastic story. Your capitalization of BACnet and your use of /C confuse me. BACnet IP? BACnet MS/TP?

I assume you didn't write a BACnet stack from scratch so I'm very interested in what the "server" was running.

> saved the town millions by siphoning power from the local college at peak power demand.

I'd like to hear more about the details of how this worked. Did the college have its own power source like a research reactor? Was this technically legal or in some part of a grey area?

I think it is more common than you are expecting. The University of Connecticut has its own co-gen plant on campus. It has capacity to power the actual school facilities, not just research.

https://fo.uconn.edu/departments/facilities-energy-services/...

I think cogeneration (cogen) plants are fairly common for colleges / universities. In addition to generating electricity for the camps, they often generate heated and chilled water for building heating and cooling purposes. That water is pumped throughout the campus and into the HVAC system for individual buildings. I've worked for two of the larger universities in my state and both were largely dependent upon the local cogen plant for all of these services.

A lot of universities have their own power plants, especially of a certain age. The U of M in Ann Arbor has a plant and uses the waste heat to keep the relevant sidewalks free of ice and snow in the winter.

We could always see where the steam tunnel broke from the sidewalk and went into the building because there was a patch of bare grass growing in the heat the steam gave it underground.

Yep.

The steam tunnels were somewhat notorious for awhile there, played a role in the Dungeons and Dragons chapter of the satanic panic of the 80s.

Still, there were always a couple ways to get in. Fond memories.

> Did the college have its own power source like a research reactor?

Not the person you're replying to (and never directly involved in electricity generation), but my university just had it's own small power plant: https://www.fs.utoronto.ca/utilities-and-building-operations...

I assume it was a mix of historical coincidence and a solution for less-interruptible power supply for the labs, but I'm not really sure.

University of Toronto had a research reactor back ~20 years ago: a "slowpoke" reactor.

I don't believe it generated incremental energy, but it was used for irradiation.

I worked there one summer and enjoyed it immensely!

The university I attended had large smoke stacks that old maps said belonged to the power plant. I never saw anything come out of them, so I assume by the 90s they had switched to using city power, but I wonder now if it was common for universities in the old days to have their own power plants?

The land grant universities were often in the middle of nowhere. I imagine not uncommon.

This is one of the best things that I've read here. It's awesome that you got the opportunity, figured it out, saved energy and money, and still helped out on the physical work. Unrelated, Woods Hole does great work.

Such a fun story. I’m glad you and Al still hung out.

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