Another stupid part of this: used cooking grease has positive market value! Quite a few companies, even in expensive places like Palo Alto, will happily supply you, for free, with barrels and such to hold your grease, and they'll come empty them when they're full, and I think you can even often negotiate to get paid to give these companies your grease.
It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodities.
(The economics work out at restaurant scale but not necessarily at household scale. If you deep fry a lot at home, you might be responsible for transporting your own grease to someone who wants it.)
Love how many people were called over to provide expert advice on figuring out why diners couldn't enjoy the lovely outdoor seating without an adult on their nostrils.
Maybe I should get my eyes checked because I was like I don't see it, looks like what I meant to write to me. It took the other commenters for me to finally see it. Ah yes assault not adult there...
Minor nitpick, transformers are sized in volt-amps, not watts. Apparent power is measured in volt-amps and actual power is measured in watts, the ratio between the two is the power factor.
Plus, “one mega volt-amp” sounds way cooler than “a million watts” :)
It may have been a 1MVA transformer with a 480V three-phase secondary, that’s the properly sized transformer, but the utility may have undersized it at 500kVA based on calculated load.
That transformer was already oil-cooled, so adding a couple thousand extra gallons probably didn’t hurt the transformer too much lol.
Fun fact: I learned yesterday that that expression was popularized in English only as recently as 1991 by none other than Sadam Hussein when he referred to the Gulf War as “the mother of all battles”. At least that’s the story. Apparently it was a bit of a meme in the early nineties, so this post may be referencing it more or less directly. Hussein was of course referencing the Quran.
That was back when Altavista, the first search engine, was in downtown Palo Alto.
Brian Reid was behind that. It was intended as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU. They wanted to show
that a large number of little machines could do a big job, which was a radical idea at the time.
They were leasing an old telco building, on Bryant St. behind the Walgreens on University Avenue. The telco had moved to a larger building nearby when they went from crossbar to 5ESS, leaving behind the very tall racks typical of electromagnetic central offices.
That's where the modern data center began. Before this, data centers were raised floor operations. This one was racks and racks of identical servers, with cable trays overhead. This was the first one to look like a telephone central office. Because that's what it was before.
The building is still some kind of data center. For a while, it was PAIX, the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, the peer meeting point for west coast ISPs. Equinix has it now; it's their SV8 location, offering colocation services. Small by modern standards, but close to the early HQs of many famous startups, including Facebook.
The grease problem was written up in the local newspaper, back when Palo Alto had one. Palo Alto Utilities (the city owns its power company) got the report, and quickly realized someone was dumping grease into their transformer vault. So they put someone on stakeout, watching all night. The offending restaurant employee was caught. The restaurant was fined and billed for the cleanup.
In 2006, there was another grease dumping incident in a transformer vault a block further north. This one did result in a grease fire.[1]
Palo Alto Fire Department has a CO2 truck, and dumped enough CO2 in to put out the fire. Power was out for most of the night.
Having worked in food service, I learned that restaurants are low-margin businesses that will cut every corner they can. Paying to have their grease taken care of when there's a convenient drain out back is a non-starter. It wouldn't be surprising if they also never cleaned their ventilation hoods or the grease trap in the drains. When you see a mention of a restaurant fire (that isn't arson), it's likely because of dirty hoods.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 38.1 ms ] threadIt gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodities.
(The economics work out at restaurant scale but not necessarily at household scale. If you deep fry a lot at home, you might be responsible for transporting your own grease to someone who wants it.)
Plus, “one mega volt-amp” sounds way cooler than “a million watts” :)
It may have been a 1MVA transformer with a 480V three-phase secondary, that’s the properly sized transformer, but the utility may have undersized it at 500kVA based on calculated load.
That transformer was already oil-cooled, so adding a couple thousand extra gallons probably didn’t hurt the transformer too much lol.
That was back when Altavista, the first search engine, was in downtown Palo Alto. Brian Reid was behind that. It was intended as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU. They wanted to show that a large number of little machines could do a big job, which was a radical idea at the time. They were leasing an old telco building, on Bryant St. behind the Walgreens on University Avenue. The telco had moved to a larger building nearby when they went from crossbar to 5ESS, leaving behind the very tall racks typical of electromagnetic central offices.
That's where the modern data center began. Before this, data centers were raised floor operations. This one was racks and racks of identical servers, with cable trays overhead. This was the first one to look like a telephone central office. Because that's what it was before.
The building is still some kind of data center. For a while, it was PAIX, the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, the peer meeting point for west coast ISPs. Equinix has it now; it's their SV8 location, offering colocation services. Small by modern standards, but close to the early HQs of many famous startups, including Facebook.
The grease problem was written up in the local newspaper, back when Palo Alto had one. Palo Alto Utilities (the city owns its power company) got the report, and quickly realized someone was dumping grease into their transformer vault. So they put someone on stakeout, watching all night. The offending restaurant employee was caught. The restaurant was fined and billed for the cleanup.
In 2006, there was another grease dumping incident in a transformer vault a block further north. This one did result in a grease fire.[1] Palo Alto Fire Department has a CO2 truck, and dumped enough CO2 in to put out the fire. Power was out for most of the night.
I used to live within walking distance of there.
[1] https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2006/03/12/grease-dumpin...
Just a Drop in the Bucket (1994) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437905 - March 2019 (23 comments)