Crown Vantage Powerhouse - Control Room
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We just had to go ahead and authorize ourselves to enter the power plant's control room...

 


...where we found this rather impressive array of control and monitoring equipment.

 


This indicator panel seemed to indicate that there were a lot of problems with the boilers and other systems. Also, the saturated steam pressure looked a little low :).

 


I asked if they wanted me to fire up the plant one last time, but they said no.

 


Sean couldn't get the plant started up either.

 


Hmm, five sets of indicators going up to 20 Megawatts, 4800 Volts, 2000 Amperes. I guess these weren't the circuits that handled the small stuff! I wonder if the two circuits there that read 4800 volts were actually energized. I mean, the lights and some of the equipment was active, so I guess they could have been...

 


There was some pretty nice fiber/ethernet telecom equipment in there, too.

 


There are many controls, chart recorders and indicators in this room, the remainder of which can be viewed by clicking on the link at the bottom of this page, because we're now going to move on to the other end of the control room.

 


At the far end of the control room was another room containing more control gear and a couple of operator computer stations...

 


Such as this dual-monitor SPARCstation 5.

 


And this single-monitor SPARCstation 5. Both of these SPARCstations were mounted next to these other machines called WEStations.

 


The rightmost SPARCstation, WEStation, and related equipment. The WEStations appeared to be some kind of interface between the SPARCstations and the Westinghouse Distributed Processing Family equipment in the cabinets on the other side of the room:

 


These are the Westinghouse cabinets in question.

 


Here are some of the innards of one of the Westinghouse cabinets.

 


And the innards of another.

 


The backup power supply to one of the operator stations still had some juice in it. The computer didn't have any kind of login/password system either, so we were able to access some interesting screens, like the one above.

 


You just don't see things like this every day. Which is too bad.

 


As you can see from the LED bar graph, the UPS' battery was pretty much giving its last hurrah, so we didn't get to operate the computer for very long.

 

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