• Question: What was the hardest job you have had to do as an engineer?

    Asked by Eve to Ashley, Catherine, John G, Laura, Ray on 13 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by 477enea26.
    • Photo: Ashley Culbert

      Ashley Culbert answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      Physically the hardest job I have had was to crawl around the boiler in edenderry power monitoring tube condition.
      Technically my hardest job has been to carry out a feasibility study for building a biomass fired heat and power plant. That was complex as I had to a thermodynamic design of the plant and then carryout the financial viability of th plant.

    • Photo: John Ging

      John Ging answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      Align 4 laser beams to 4 laser detectors simultaneously.
      Sounds easy but the problem is that you cant see the laser beams and they are exactly the same size as the detector. Its basically a 3D problem for something that’s only 5ooth of a millimetre wide.

    • Photo: Catherine Conaghan

      Catherine Conaghan answered on 14 Nov 2014:

      I used to work for a company that had huge cold rooms (basically like giant freezers) and one day I had to measure every room in the building, the rooms were -18C. I thought my feet were going to fall off. Imagine putting your feet in a freezer for a new minutes x 10. I did it eventually with some cups of tea in between, but told them I would never do it again!

      Most technically difficult was a part of software that I developed that took 30 hours to run and i had to get it down to 5 hours – it took so much time to get it right, but I got there in the end!

    • Photo: Laura Tobin

      Laura Tobin answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Build a solar cell testing station. It sounds easy but it was hard. I was on a limited budget, I had to build some of the equipment myself, I had to get lots of machines talking to each other, write a program to control them all and to make a special holder to hold the solar cells. The last part was a nightmare as all the solar cells are different sizes. It was very frustrating but totally worth it once I got it all working.

    • Photo: Ray Alcorn

      Ray Alcorn answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Spend a full 36 hour shift offshore getting something to work.. no sleep, much coffee and a couple of pizzas (delivered by speedboat)

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