84
I see the server room of my last job wasn't that bad at all.
Funny...mine when the other way...this isn't that bad at all. Just a lot
Am I the only one considering the amount of copper in this room? Is this the Detroit in me run amuck?
That was my first thought. Unless some of these runs are fiber there's a ton of copper. Generally you don't see "wire" and "abandoned" in the same photograph.
So much effort goes into things so temporary.
I'm surprised no-one has stripped out all that wire for scrap.
Imagine troubleshooting that.
Oh this here is my shit. You should see some of the steel mills we've worked on. Panels so old they just screwed them right into the stone walls, live busbars bent and snaking around in open air, fuck all for controls. Love it.
I can only imagine the particular smells in that tunnel…
Coal?
Please sir can I see some more?
It's giving me Eldritch horror vibes.
There are generations of tech stacked on top of one another.
It was probably abandoned because the internet went out in one of the rooms and they figured itd be easier to build a new plant than deal with this mess.
Any RAM in there that's salvageable?
Why does a power plant need that much circuitry in the first place? I get that it's probably super-old and probably built back when you needed a whole server rack for the equivalent compute of a pocket calculator (and also it's relatively bulky because it's a lot of relays for switching high-current stuff), but still, a coal power plant shouldn't be that complicated, right?
It's about IO not compute. The controllers for plants like this aren't very complicated but they can have many thousands of signals going to/from them. For a ~500MW plant I'd expect somewhere between 2-5k IO, more if it's nicely automated.
Automation engineer, have worked on power plants.
Who would win? An over-stuffed cable tray, or 4 twisty bois?
What? The IO is digital inputs and outputs, analog inputs and outputs.
Then there's power distribution and 24v DC device power (or 120v depending on application and often age), relays, contactors, timers, VFDs, etc. This is what the world runs on. Networking cables like that Ethernet are still part of it but a pretty small part. They just get plugged into all the PLC racks and any other device that needs it. Some of what I described can be replaced with automation and code, but only the very old legacy devices a lot of these old plants and mills still have around because they're still functional..
My point (if you can call it that) is that you can have remote racks and cut the total footage of wire by 75%
Having less compute may mean even more cables: rather than having data sent over one cable then decoded, each line is either on or off, controlling: something.. (there could be signals here just contemplating). In modern stuff the logic is condensed, with data running between, in effect these older systems were one distributed logic unit. Probably over simplifying hut think of an old motorcycle, many cables, because you have to run power and ground back and forth all the way from switches to lights motors etc and back again.
Right, but even taking that into account, how many control signals could the thing possibly need?
If I enumerate every possible signal I can think of that a coal plant might need (boiler temp, fire temp, turbine speed, water flow, fuel hopper door control, etc.), and then arbitrarily multiply by an order of magnitude, my estimate is still lower than the number of wires I see in the pic.
I'd take each of your metrics and multiply it by 10, and then multiply it by another 10 for everything you haven't thought about, then probably double it for redundancy.
Because "fire temp" is meaningless in isolation. You need to know the temperature is evenly distributed (so multiple temperature probes), you need to know the temperature inside and the temperature outside (so you know your furnace isn't literally melting), you need to know it's not building pressure, you need to know it's burning as cleanly as possible (gas inflow, gas outflow, clarity of gas in, clarity of gas out, temperature of gas in, temperature of gas out, status of various gas delivery systems (fans (motor current/voltage/rpm/temp), filters, louvres, valves, pressures, flow rates)), you need to know ash is being removed correctly (that ash grates, shakers, whatever are working correctly, that ash is cooling correctly, that it's being transported away etc).
The gas out will likely go through some heat recovery stages, so you need to know gas flow through those and water flow through those. Then it will likely be scrubbed of harmful chemicals, so you need to know pressures, flow rates etc for all that.
And every motor will have voltage/current/rpm/temperature measurements. Every valve will have a commanded position and actual position. Every pipe will have pressure and temperature sensors.
The multiple fire temperature probes would then be condensed into a pertinent value and a "good" or "fault" condition for the front panel display.
The multiple air inlet would be condensed into pertinent information and a good/fault condition.
Pipes of a process will have temperature/pressure good/fault conditions (maybe a low/good/over?)
And in the old days, before microprocessors and serial communications, it would have been a local-to-sensors control/indicator panel with every reading, then a feed back to the control room where it would be "summarised". So hundreds of signals from each local control/indicator panel.
Imagine if the control room commanded a certain condition, but it wasn't being achieved because a valve was stuck or because some local control over-rode it.
How would the control room operators know where to start? Just guess?
When you see a dangerous condition building, you do what is needed to get it under control and it doesn't happen because...
You need to know why.
Wow learned a lot from this makes the exploring abandoned power station videos more fun, thanks!
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
84 points (100.0% liked)
pics
28162 readers
136 users here now
Rules:
1.. Please mark original photos with [OC] in the title if you're the photographer
2..Pictures containing a politician from any country or planet are prohibited, this is a community voted on rule.
3.. Image must be a photograph, no AI or digital art.
4.. No NSFW/Cosplay/Spam/Trolling images.
5.. Be civil. No racism or bigotry.
Photo of the Week Rule(s):
1.. On Fridays, the most upvoted original, marked [OC], photo posted between Friday and Thursday will be the next week's banner and featured photo.
2.. The weekly photos will be saved for an end of the year run off.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://mastodon.world/about
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS