I learned a lot about the integrity of material in my 15 yrs as a night troubleman.
CenterPoint Energy/ Reliant / Houston Lighting and Power in Houston went to Chance switches about eight years ago... Prior to that they were using Kearneys... I loved the Kearneys... I could hang a Kearney door blindfolded... They almost always opened when they operated... In the middle of the night you could weld a door shut to save it for daylight... About the only problem they had was that after a lot of faults a small piece of the brass tip where the barrel contacts the top of the switch, sometimes breaks off... I carried new barrels on the truck and we were back in bussiness... When the Chance switches failed, rarely did a new barrel fix it... The switch had to be replaced... The Kearneys last forever too... Thus they can command the price they do... They are good switches... How much does it cost to send a lineman up the pole to replace a chance... not to mention the lost revenue from the meters not spinning...
The Chance barrells are bastards to hang.. the horns that hold the door are made of crap... they warp under heavy load... they get bent easy before installation... when they blow, sometimes the barrell just jumps up and down and stays closed... If ya got a good fault on the cable or line, the barrell will then start tracking over, small at first then grow a fire till the barrel melts apart and operates the circuit, catches the pole or fire or burns a building down in the process... sometimes when the barrel does open in a fault, and it flips down hard it swings out of the saddle and comes down after the lineman on the end of the long stick... How do I know? I been the lineman on the end of the longstick...
.... On top of the door they got two differant kinds of metal with a little dowel pin that runs thru the whole mess. In the midde of the two pieces of metal they got a crap spring that is the cause of most of the problems with this switch... In manufacturing it sometimes gets wedged in there a little cocked which messes with how tight the door is held in... The metal in the springs on some is harder than on others probably from lack of quality control.. But in any event they are crap and when the get heated up one time from fault current or heavy load they turn blue and the integrity of the metal is defunct... It is At this point when they don't open after the fuse melts... The metals expand and contract at different rates causing all the stuff on top of the switch to warp... I complained to anybody that would listen when we first started using them; imagine that, but to no avail... The answer I got, was that this switch was one third the price of the Kearneys... Made in Mexico by slave labor don't ya know... The design from the get go is bad... Then add to that slave labor putting it togather...
My brother is a buyer for a large plumbing company... a company invited him to Mexico to take a tour of their factory... During the tour it was explained that quality control integrity was maintained by always having more experienced hands working with scrubs at maintained ratios. The color of their smocks indicated their level of experince... Green being the least experienced... as this was being explained my brother looked around and noticed that out of the hundred guys in this section there were only two without green smocks... He commented to the fella running the tour, that they should at least break the experienced smocks out when the tours of American buyers are run thru...
After about three years of using these things the company outlawed them on Cap Banks... and we went around and replaced all the chance switches that had been installed on the caps...
Just curious... How do the Kearneys fare in the ice?
Last edited by CenterPointEX; 04-04-2006 at 09:46 PM.
2Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial matters? 3Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! 1Corinthians 6