The Project Coordinator J. H. Grayson

The Project Coordinator J. H. GraysonTo : The Project Coordinator J. H. Grayson

Good day

My name is Michael, mechanical tester of the H.L. Winman and Associates. Our jobs is to run a series of extreme cold and heat tests on electronics and mechanical switches for Terrapin Control Systems of Palo Alto, California. The tests have been running for four months and will last another two months. Right now we are testing continuously switches for a period of 8 to 14 hours. This test has two parts:

PART 1 - For the first 6 hours each day we increase or decrease temperature in 2°C increments until a predetermined high or low temperature is reached. At each 2° increment we test the switches and record how they perform.

PART 2 - For the remaining 2 to 8 hours we bake or deep-freeze the switches at the preselected temperature. No monitoring is necessary during this period.

Some of the jobs could run until late as 12.30am and we installed electrical timers in the circuit of the oven and freezer chamber which are designed to switch off at the end of the set periods of bake or freeze.

ISSUE

On December 6th when we removed batches 64H and 66C from the oven and freezer the chamber, instead to being close room temperature, were still hot and the freezer still cold. We checked the electrical timers and both were off. Then we notice that the electric clock on the lab wall reads only 3:39; at my watch I read 9:03—a different of 5 hours and 24 minutes.

We called the electric company asking if there were any power outages in our facility where they confirmed that is was. The night before the issue our company lost power around 9.23 at night and it was restored at 2.47am of December 6th and as I remember I started part 1 at 9:55 am and part 2 at 3:55 p.m., and set the timers to run for 8 hours (they were to switch off at 11:55 p.m.)

CONSIDERATION

The implications of the power outage were:

- The batches have had uncontrolled, nonstandard testing and will have to be...