Had FREEZING & busy shifts yesterday (Saturday)!  

• Magnitude 8.0 EQ during OWL shift (Travis)
• Beckhoff Failure for ~6hrs of DAY shift (Ed & a crew of many others who came in & helped remotely)
• Alignment Restoration Work for end of DAY shift & into EVE shift. (Cheryl)
• ---> And somewhere in here we had a pipe burst in the LSB! (temps have been in the single digits for days)<---

Kudos to the heroic work of the operators, all who came in & to the people who are still here cleaning up the LSB.

A Request for DetChar

The locks for the last 15hrs appear to be ratty/glitchy.  Wondering if the DetChar team could point us to any culprits here.  There's been a thought this could be alignment-related (there was the alignment recovery by Ed & Cheryl after the quake and Beckhoff failure yesterday, and then Travis & I performed another Initial Alignment today.)  We can try another alignment next time we drop out of lock, but wondering if there could be something else amiss causing our glitchy H1 after the flurry of Saturday action. 

I submitted an FRS (6965) for the downtime for this (~14hrs from when Beckhoff issue happened to when we were back to OBSERVING).

Have started getting this verbal alarm.  For first one I went to check TCSy Chiller and topped it off.

But after getting more alarms, I went to check again and it was still full.

Looking at Chiller screen, can see that the Flow Rate is RED & attached is a trend of the last 6-hrs.  Looks like there was a step down in flow rate.  It might be coming back up slowly.....

(I'm also not very familiar with how the TCSy Laser works.  Does it turn on/off normally during locks?)

Have been locked for an hour.  Continue with EY glitches (maybe a little less prevalent than overnight?). 

I went ahead and ACCEPTED the PZT offsets Travis changed due to his IMC locking issues earlier:

• H1:IMC-PZT_PIT_OFFSET:  -650 --> 235
• H1:IMC-PZT_YAW_OFFSET:  6500 --> 6680

TITLE: 12/18 Day Shift: 16:00-00:00 UTC (08:00-16:00 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Lock Acquisition
OUTGOING OPERATOR: Travis
CURRENT ENVIRONMENT:
    Wind: 2mph Gusts, 1mph 5min avg
    Primary useism: 0.03 μm/s
    Secondary useism: 0.30 μm/s
QUICK SUMMARY:
Tagged in with Initial Alignment from Travis (he finished INPUT ALIGN).  Michelson required going to DOWN once.  SRC didn't look right, but taking it DOWN once did the trick.  Now locking up.

Saw renovation crew at LSB when I drove in.  Travis said Bubba/John were at EY per his alog.  

L1 continues to have high seismic noise (ours useism appears to be trending down & winds are calm).

TITLE: 12/18 Owl Shift: 08:00-16:00 UTC (00:00-08:00 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Aligning
INCOMING OPERATOR: Corey
SHIFT SUMMARY:  Up and down all night for various reasons.  After the last lockloss, IMC was having difficulties locking.  I tracked it down to PZT offsets.  Running IA now.  Lots of EY saturations tonight during the locks making for ratty looking range plots.  Hopefully a fresh IA will help with this.
LOG:

See previous aLogs.

15:13 Restoration crew working on mopping up LSB.

15:47 John and Bubba to EY to look at compressor. 
 

PI mode 9 rang up faster than I do anything about. 

Had to accept 2 SDF diffs for CS ECAT PLC2 to go to Observing.  See screenshot.

PI modes 27 and 28 rang up while I was out of the CR.

Lockloss as a few smallish, magnitude ~5 EQs were ringing down.  EQ band on BLRMS was right at 10^-1 um/s, so it doesn't seem like this should have been the cause.  Otherwise, nothing ringing up unusually.

TITLE: 12/18 Owl Shift: 08:00-16:00 UTC (00:00-08:00 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Observing at 71.0922Mpc
OUTGOING OPERATOR: Cheryl
CURRENT ENVIRONMENT:
    Wind: 8mph Gusts, 7mph 5min avg
    Primary useism: 0.08 μm/s
    Secondary useism: 0.38 μm/s
QUICK SUMMARY:  Walked in to a locked IFO.  Right as my shift was starting, we were dropped out of Observing due to TCS_ITMY_CO2 Guardian node.  It said it was trying to lock the laser.  As I was starting to investigate the cause, it fixed itself.  We are now back in Observing.
 

State of H1:

• SDF kicked out of Observe, Travis diagnosing
• input power is low at 25.5W, and EOM PD on the PSL showed a drop too
• a2l coherence is high

EQ1:

• Time: Sun Dec 18 06:15:47 UTC 2016
• Location: Southern East Pacific Rise; LAT: -34.9, LON: -107.8
• Magnitude: 5.1

• Starting time of event on BLRMS: 6:36UTC
• Lock status, did H1:
• no effect: 6:36UTC

EQ2:

• Time: Sun Dec 18 06:39:43 UTC 2016
• Location: 127km W of Panguna, Papua New Guinea; LAT: -6.3, LON: 154.3
• Magnitude: 5.8

• Starting time of event on BLRMS: 6:30UTC
• Lock status, did H1:
• glitch: 6:30UTC

EQ3:

• Time: Sun Dec 18 07:13:08 UTC 2016
• Location: 108km W of Panguna, Papua New Guinea; LAT: -6.4, LON: 154.5
• Magnitude: 5.1

• Starting time of event on BLRMS: 7:24UTC
• Lock status, did H1:
• glitch: 7:24UTC

State of H1: unlocked, recovering

Activities:

• NPRO noise eater reset - Darkhan
• water pressure in OSB is very low - Bubba is hear to look at it
• currently starting an Initial Alignment

1215 hrs. local -> Kyle on site to check on 80K pumps

Local temperature are dipping into the "single digits" which means now is an opportune time to investigate if our old problem of over-filling or under-filling of 80K pumps will result from frozen LLCV valve stems is going to be a problem.  Recall that in the past this had occurred but could not be confidently attributed to water freezing in the old pneumatic actuators or from water freezing in the valve stem from having got past too loose packing nuts. Or, both for that matter.  Chandra R. and John W. had replaced the pneumatic actuators with electric (water tight) ones last spring so now is the first real world test.  Initially, I'm on site to verify that the recently elevated exhaust pressures on CP3 and CP4 weren't the result of continuous overfilling -> Inspection of the Y-mid's CP3 and CP4 showed neither was overfilling and both are fine for now (remnant standing LN2 in lines from yesterday's overfill?).  

By dumb luck, I found that CP6 was indicating a frozen valve stem while I was on site - "Go figure!" -> As found, the local actuator pointer was showing ~30% open and the actuator motor was making noise.  The PID output was "railed" at its programmed minimum of 20% open.  I had John W. (he and Bubba also on site for separate instrument air issue) switch CP6's level control to manual 50% open -> the motor then went quiet and it stroked open to 50% as per the pointer.  Next, I had him change the value to 0% open and the stem stroked closed smoothly until stopping at about the 30% open value (as indicated by the local pointer).  I then tested the valve stem packing nut and found that it was completely loose, i.e. no thread engagement.  So, even though the local heat tape is wrapped around most of the exposed valve stem, was energized and working, water which made it past the ineffective packing washer was able to freeze nonetheless.  This is because this area is about 2" away from the closest heat tape wrap ->  I heated up the frozen area with a heat gun and lightly engaged the packing nut.  I then had John W. alternate between 100% open and 0% open to demonstrate that the valve could stroke through its whole range smoothly etc..  I setup and am leaving a heat lamp to prevent this unit from refreezing (which it would do, now that water is past the packing washer) and had John W. reduce the Beckhoff PID minimum to 15% open down from its as found value of 20%.  

 1535 hrs. local -> Kyle leaving site