Notes from the plant floor
Practical write-ups on the faults, fixes and judgment calls that come with keeping industrial control systems running — from real work on real plants, not the textbook.
Three field guides worth reading first
The longest, most complete write-ups on this blog — one per sector where the faults follow a recognizable pattern.
Getting More From a Crushing and Screening Plant Through Controls
Most of the crushing and screening plants I get called out to are not short on horsepower. They are short on hours of good running. The crusher spends part of…
Read →Control Systems in Material Recovery Facilities: A Field Guide
A material recovery facility (MRF) is a long line of machines that only pays when all of it runs at once. One jammed transfer point, one sorter that keeps…
Read →Keeping Control Systems Reliable in Composting and Anaerobic Digestion Plants
Most control problems at an organics site do not start in the control panel. They start in the air. Hydrogen sulfide (H2S), ammonia (NH3), water vapor coming off…
Read →Browse by type
Why Your VFD Keeps Tripping: Reading the Fault Code
A drive doesn’t trip to annoy you — the fault code tells you what it caught. Overcurrent, overvoltage, ground fault, overtemp, overload and comms, and how to confirm the cause before touching a setting.
Read →Chasing the Intermittent Fault: A Field Method
The worst fault to chase is the one that clears before anyone reaches the panel. You can’t fix what you can’t catch — so the whole game is setting a trap the fault trips for you.
Read →Conveyor Belt Drift and Nuisance Trips
The protection devices get blamed and desensitised, when they’re usually reporting a real mechanical problem. How to tell the difference and fix the right thing — not widen the switch.
Read →When the Plant Network Drops: Diagnosing Comms Faults
Dropouts get blamed on the PLC and the software. Almost always they live on the wire. Read the port counters, work the physical layer, and find drive noise before you swap hardware.
Read →Is It the Sensor or the Process?
Is the instrument lying, or is the process genuinely doing what the number says? Getting it backwards wastes days. Cross-checks, 4–20 mA loop tests, drift versus step, and the honest limit.
Read →Getting More From a Crushing and Screening Plant Through Controls
Most of the crushing and screening plants I get called out to are not short on horsepower. They are short on hours of good running. The crusher spends part of…
Read →Control Systems in Material Recovery Facilities: A Field Guide
A material recovery facility (MRF) is a long line of machines that only pays when all of it runs at once. One jammed transfer point, one sorter that keeps…
Read →Keeping Control Systems Reliable in Composting and Anaerobic Digestion Plants
Most control problems at an organics site do not start in the control panel. They start in the air. Hydrogen sulfide (H2S), ammonia (NH3), water vapor coming off…
Read →Adding a Sorter or Screen Without Stalling the Lines You Already Run
Cutting a new machine into a live sortation system is mostly about protecting what already runs, not about the machine on the truck.
Read →When Your Line Throws 400 Alarms an Hour, Operators Stop Reading Them
An alarm system that cries wolf a few hundred times a shift trains your best operators to ignore it, and that is exactly when it fails you.
Read →The Money in a Lift Station Is Hiding in the Control Logic
The pumps at a lift station are usually fine; it's the logic deciding when and how hard they run that quietly runs up the power bill and grinds the mechanical seals to dust.
Read →Your Old PLC Is Dying. The Logic Inside It Is the Part You Can't Reorder.
When you replace an unsupported controller, the hardware is the easy part; the twenty years of process knowledge buried in the program is what you can actually lose.
Read →Why Your Batch Weights Wander Even When the Recipe Never Changes
The recipe hasn't changed, the operator hasn't changed, and yet your cement, aggregate, or additive weights keep drifting outside tolerance — here's where the accuracy actually leaks out.
Read →The Fault That Only Happens on Tuesdays: Chasing Intermittent Network Dropouts
When a remote rack drops for half a second and everything looks fine by the time you get there, the problem usually lives in the network, not the field wiring.
Read →Where the hidden hours go on a high-speed packaging line
Before you quote a second line, find the capacity already sitting inside the one you own.
Read →Who do you actually call when the control system is misbehaving?
The original equipment maker isn't always the answer, and neither is an independent. Here's how to tell which one your problem actually needs.
Read →Crushing Plant Throughput: More Tons From the Plant You Own
You did 380 against a 450 nameplate and nobody knows where the tons went. On most plants they're lost in feed control and surging, not the steel.
Read →Chasing Ghosts: Diagnosing Intermittent PLC Faults
The line trips at 4 a.m. and clears before anyone arrives. Come-and-go faults on wet, corrosive plants are rarely in the code — here's how to corner one.
Read →Got a plant that isn't behaving?
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