Crown Vantage Powerhouse - Water Treatment & Misc.
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At power plants, a lot of work goes into treating and preparing the water that is to be used in the boilers. This section of the plant contains the equipment that is used for doing this.

Such as this "Hot Lime Softener." When we obtained our previous tour of this power plant, the water treatment equipment was one of the few systems still running, and it sure did generate a lot of noise and heat.

The Hot Lime Softener is rather tall.

I suppose these pipes carry the water and chemicals around to and from the various pieces of equipment.

There is a small laboratory type room next to the Hot Lime Softener, which contains, among other things, the "Water Purity Analyzer" shown in the picture.

It also contains a lab bench, and a list of pager and phone numbers, presumably of people who worked at the plant.

A laboratory room seems like a funny place to put switchgear, but there it stands nonetheless.

In the space below the Hot Lime Softener, one finds an insulated tank of some kind.

Here, Sean pauses to inspect something downstairs, while I gaze once again at the upper workings of the Hot Lime Softener:

This tank bears a striking resemblance to a couple of the tanks in the powerhouse of the Allied paper mill.

These tanks are insulated so as to avoid heat loss from their contents. Typically, water about to be fed into a boiler is pre-heated with what would otherwise have been waste heat from either steam condensates or boiler exhaust gases. The goal is to get as much heat/energy as possible out of the fuel you burn, that way you don't have to pay for as much fuel.

My guess is that those pipes were designed to carry hot feedwater.

Yeah, well, I wouldn't want to go in there without a permit (and some lockouts) either.

I'm not really sure what this thing is.

I guess we're not supposed to operate whatever that pipe is connected to anymore. So the saying, "Dr. Dre, don't just stand there, operate!" doesn't apply in this situation.

Under the turbine room now, this appears to be the feed or exhaust steam pipe for one of the turbines.

That's an interesting pipe, with those springs or shock absorbers or whatever they are sticking out of it!

I guess the idea of a turbogenerator falling through the floor didn't appeal to everyone. Hence, these substantial looking arches.

I don't know if those are condensate pumps, or pumps of some other variety. They look like they're in pretty nice shape though.

That is one of the nastier looking sump-pump wells I have seen. I'm sure glad they didn't just pump that straight into the ground or the river or anything like that. Oh, wait...

This apparatus was humming away when we were there.

It looks like this is where they once loaded the coal off the train and into the plant. This particular plant had converted from coal to natural gas many years ago.

The coal pit's drain seems to have fallen into a state of disrepair.

Some plants are taking over the coal pit walls.

And a small bog seems to have formed in the bottom of the pit.

I think that is one walkway from which I will "Keep Off," thank you very much!

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