# Steel mills



## Big John (May 23, 2010)

Paging _Al Smelter_. :whistling2:

There are PLCs and a whole mess of other industrial electronics. They're also fantastically dirty. But most of what I know about them comes from watching Youtube videos of the workers screwing up:


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## ce2two (Oct 4, 2008)

I once worked in a metal spining company, the air was thick with oil i lasted 2 months..


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## derekwalls (Dec 18, 2012)

I work at a steel mill and we deal with ABB drives and almost exclusively Allen Bradley PLC's. The electricians just hang out in the break room all day but sometimes have to troubleshoot a drive, tinker with some ladder logic or at worst get up in an overhead crane and troubleshoot.


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## derekwalls (Dec 18, 2012)

Oh yea as John said they are incredibly dirty. The worst kind of grease, mill-scale and grind dust all mixed into one just inches thick all over everything. Don't forget the glycol either that crap doesn't come off for nothing


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## JRaef (Mar 23, 2009)

I worked at the old USS (now Posco) mill in Pittsburg, CA for years when I started in this business. Yes, there are PLCs, VFDs, instrumentation, lots of control panels of every sort. In fact that's the majority of the work now days, unless the mill is expanding, and that doesn't happen much any more in this country. But from an Electrician standpoint, most of the work will be maintenance and troubleshooting of hardware. Modern mills now have a separate controls systems department dedicated to the PLC/DCS systems and software, they are incredibly complex and critical. The electricians are going to be responsible for hardware and wiring, but not programming or software any more, at least not in a large mill. AC and DC drives will likely be your responsibility though, the "bit twiddlers" can't handle what they call "high voltage", which for them means over 24VDC! It's a decent gig, I learned a lot there, much of which I have used for the rest of my life.


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## elektrik64 (Aug 18, 2014)

Yea I worked at Uss-Posco also couple years ago and there is plc's and vfd's. You get to mess with the plc's for troubleshooting, but not any programming.


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