According to the Bonaire Reporter, each of the units can generate a megawatt. Four of the units are running now, and we can hear them quite clearly from our house. But the are running smoothly and are nowhere near as obnoxious as the big old ones the burned up.
There should be enough power now, to meet Bonaire's peak demand, so hopefully scheduled power outages will be a thing of the past. These rented generators, from www.aggreko.com, will be used until the main power plant can be repaired.
The Bonaire Reporter also reported that one of the burned diesels has been written off as a total loss by the insurance company, but that the second one should be usable after extensive repairs.
We certainly enjoyed the peace and quiet while the plant was out of operation, but appreciate the hard work that WEB has done to restore full power to the island.
I have set up our TV room / home theater with a third-octave sound analyzer (one of the perks of being a recording engineer) and there used to be a HUGE peak of ambient noise from the power plant at 45 to 50 hz. It actually caused the cement walls to vibrate in one of our rooms, where some sort of resonance was set up. It also pretty much drowned out the subwoofer unless we turned it waaaaay up, which hurt our ears.
These new generators produce background noise centered at about 90 hz and "only" 18 dB above the sound level for the rest of the spectrum. That is still a lot of bass energy, but it is a big improvement, and we are hearing the soudtrack of movies as never before. We just watched The Hunt for Red October, which has lots of low frequency "ambiance" inside the subs etc.
1 comment:
hehe so now you can actually hear the "whales" on the sonar? :)
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