First day


Well, I've had my first day!

Today I had my induction meeting with Diane Archer at 8am at Connectics. The induction covered OSH and supply industry regulations lined up with Connectics' own OSH rules. The meeting took one and a half hours.

After the meeting, I caught up with Phil Duns, the Underground operations manager, who organised me to go to an 11kV joining site near Christchurch airport.

Onsite, I met Chris and Nick, who were working to join a 300mm2 aluminium 11kV 3 phase conductor. The actual join was an engineering masterpiece, which Chris and Nick connected using an instruction sheet that came with a $1500 kit. Precision is paramount, and the guys made it look easy. I asked to have the instruction sheets after, which I pocketed for further reference!

Pics are below, click on them to see them enlarged.

The first stripping

The joiners

Nearly finished

Final product

After we did the join, we went further down the road to a kiosk where we had to terminate the same circuit into the kiosk. I was confused, as the earlier join was aluminium, and the cable we were connecting in the kiosk was copper! The guys showed me another join which had a 300mm2 aluminium to 150mm2 copper join in it, due to Orion's requirement of wanting copper kiosk terminations.
Kiosk termination
After we did this, (or the guys did most of it!) we finished the day. I got sunburnt (the ginga curse!), but had a great time with great guys! If this is what it's going to be like all the time, I'm going to have a blast!

Next post: The end of the first week!




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