Stave Falls Dam - Detroit Electric car 1912 - Stave Falls Powerhouse - District of Mission, BC - June 15, 2008.

This 1912 Detroit Electric is owned by the Province of BC and is in the custody of Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association. It runs on 96 volts consisting of 16 x 6 volt lead acid batteries (original equipment was nickel iron but 60+ years of operation the nickel cases were getting pinholes and could not be rebuilt). It uses a DC series motor with about 15 horsepower and a 5 speed direct drive. Top speed is 30 Km/Hr and has a range of over 80 km. It was built by the Anderson Electric Car Company, Detroit, Michigan.

The Anderson Carriage Company began building carriages and buggies in Port Huron Michigan in 1884. It moved to Detroit in 1885. In June of 1907 they began the production of their Detroit Electric. In 1911 the firm changed its name to the Anderson Electric Car Company. In 1919, the name was again changed, to Detroit Electric Car Company.

The car's appeal was mainly to women drivers and doctors, both of whom desired the dependable and immediate start without cranking. Remember, doctors made house calls in those days.

Notable people who owned Detroit Electrics included Thomas Edison and John D. Rockerfeller, jr. Clara Ford, the wife of Henry Ford never drove a Ford, but a 1914 Detroit Electric.

Motor: 22hp DC brushed, by Detroit Electric, similar to elevator motors of the day.

Transmission: Single speed rear axle.

Controller: Drum contact controller, resistor start, multi-winding motor, five speeds forward, one reverse.

Charger: Delta-Q QuiQ 48v, PFC

Features: Tiller steering Lever, tall cabin to accommodate top hats

Weight: 1000 kg estimated

Max Speed: 50 km/hr

Range: 90 km

The powerhouse, dams and associated technology here at Stave Falls clearly illustrate the key phase, from 1895 to 1915, of hydroelectric development in Canada. During these formative years, technological innovations such as the advent of the disc insulator made it possible to transmit more electricity over longer distances. These advances allowed remote sites like Stave Falls to be developed, enabling the nation to tap into its tremendous waterpower potential. With much of its original equipment still intact, this installation provides a window into a crucial period in the electrification of Canada.

The Stave Falls generators produced electricity at 4,400 volts. Electricity then traveled through a circuit breaker, located at the front of each generator, and on to the unit Transformers. Unit transformers raise, or step up the voltage from 4,400 to 60,000 volts and fed it to the switchyard. By raising the voltage, the transformers help the current to travel a long distance along transmission lines to substations.

At the substations the power is reduced, using step-down transformers, from 60,000 volts to anywhere between 4,000 and 25,000 volts. This is a level suitable for factories and other large industrial buildings. Electricity needs to be reduced one more time for people to use in their homes.

For each Stave Falls generating unit, there was a bank of three oil-insulated, water-cooled transformers. The exception was unit 4, which had a single 3-phase transformer in the switchyard outside. All the transformers at Stave Falls were built by the Canadian General Electric Company.

The Stave Falls powerhouse has been part of BC Hydro's generating system for 90 years. The large machines you see below you in the Generator Hall are the generators and turbines, which created electricity from the power of falling water. They stopped running in 2000 when the new Stave Falls generating station was completed.

Although the technology in the power house is nearly 100 years old, you will see similar systems in newer generating stations. The difference is that everything is more efficient these days, so more power an energy can be created with less water.

As we move through the Generator Hall, imagine how it must have been for the floormen and operators who worked here. There was always plenty going on; as well as hourly checks on equipment, they had to mop the floors, clean windows and polish all the brass. The building was impeccable. An apprentice who worked here described "shiny brass along the front and everything so clean, so nice. It was a sight to behold."

Floormen

Every hour the floormen had to check the machinery parts, belts, oil leaks and circuit breakers. They also had to open the spill gates, close the head gates in front of the penstocks, and isolate and drain the machinery whenever maintenance was needed. Mechanics, electricians, welders and other trades people did the actual repair work.
The floormen had no formal electrical education, just on-the-job training. They carried notebooks containing step-by-step instructions for the more complicated procedures, and you can still see some of the instructions they wrote on the machinery. Formal apprenticeships began in the 1950s and 1960s. The younger employees trained at schools like the Vancouver Vocational Institute, so they were well educated in electricity. Many of the floormen went on to become tradespeople.

Operator

The operator was in charge of the station. He sat upstairs in an office, and controlled the machinery from the control panel at the east end of the hall. He communicated with the floormen by hand signals, as it was very noisy in the generator hall.

Every hour the operator had to read the meters and record the power produced by the system. He also kept careful records of maintenance done and any problems encountered. At the end of each shift, it was the goal of every operator to be able to sign off in the logbook that he was leaving the "station normal".

In 1916, the Chief operator at Stave Falls earned $130 per month - very good wages in those days.

The Power of Water;

Flowing water is a natural source of energy, but it is difficult to control. It was a balancing act, especially in the winter when heavy rain and wet snowfall raised the level of Stave Lake.

The Stave Falls operator carefully recorded the weather, temperature, precipitation, water level and barometer readings daily and phoned them into the Vancouver Control Center. Occasionally, workers had to open the sluice gates and let water escape before the lake level got too high. There was no emergency warning system in those days; instead, they let out a small surge of water before the "full spill" to let people downstream know it was coming.

"It was an impressive sight to see that kind of water go through there... if logs came through, if a whole tree came through, it was hair-raising." Roger Bruder, apprentice 1965.

There were 36-meter long steel racks along the dam to trap the driftwood and trash so it wouldn't block the penstocks and exciter inlets. The 'Boom Man' gathered up the debris and towed it to a catch-boom in the upper river, where it was stored until it could be sent down the river safely. Men were also contracted to burn the wood in a large burner on shore.
By 1913, Stave Falls was supplying power to 1,157 customers.

From the generators, the electricity flowed through cables to a transformer bank. The transformers raised the voltage from 4,400 volts to 60,000 volts to help the current travel long distances along the transmission lines.

As the oil in the transformers was repeatedly heated and cooled it would get contaminated with sediment, sludge and dirt. A man would come in regularly with an "Oil Machine" and filter the oil to keep it clean.

In December 1917, freezing rain snapped all the power lines in the area. Everything was covered in two or three inches of thick ice. The main street of Mission looked like a no man's land, with the power lines flat on the road surface encased in ice. It took the crew months to restore electrical service to the Fraser Valley.

Automation:

For decades there were shift workers at Stave Falls power house keeping the machinery running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

After the operating station became semiautomatic in the 1970s, a lot of the daily operations were handled remotely from the main control center in Vancouver. On-site operators weren't needed any more. Instead, a service crew worked on day shift, and at night a crew would be on call if there were any problems.

Standing up at the main control board, the operator had full view of every piece of moving machinery.

The control board housed the indicating and recording instruments for the generating units and transmission circuits, and controlled the outside switches. It was conducted from a huge slab of black marble by the Canadian Westinghouse Company in Hamilton Ontario.

The control board layout was purposely made as simple as possible. There were six 4,000 volt main switches and four 60,000 volt oil switches. All the high-tension wiring was enclosed in fireproof cells made of concrete slabs.

"With a purring whirr, the turbines and the big generator... started revolving swiftly and smoothly. Then the attention of the electrical experts was turned to the recording instruments on the marble switchboard a short distance away, where, as the speed of the generator increased, the indicators on the delicate volt meters and ampere meters slowly moved around and indicated that, with the exception of a few minor adjustments, the machine was working perfectly. The officials and experts breathed a sigh of relief...." Coquitlam Star, May 8, 1912.

The Intake Dam is about 60 meters upstream from the Stave Falls Powerhouse. It originally supplied the four penstocks and two exciter penstocks. The present Dam was expanded to include the fifth unit, and a roadway was built along the top. Blind Sough Dam was built in 1922 at the mouth of an old river overflow channel. It was used as a spillway when heavy rains or snowmelt raised the water levels and the lake became too full.

The Penstocks carried water from the reservoir to the turbines in the powerhouse. At full capacity, about 2,800,000 liters of water went through the penstock every minute.

The penstocks for units 1 to 4 measured 4.2 meters in diameter, and were 45 meters long. The heavy steel plates of the penstocks were 19mm thick. They were shipped from Scotland via the Suez Canal, then punched and rolled at a steel works in Vancouver. At Stave Falls they were laid into channels cut into rock.

Initially, six-meter square radial gates closed and opened the penstocks. When the dam was raised, these gates were replaced with vertical lift plates and the original were installed in Blind Slough Dam. They are still in use today.

There are two smaller penstocks on the righthand side. They supplied water to the simple Francis turbines that powered the exciters.

Unit 5 Penstock.

Installing the fifth penstock in 1926 for unit 5 was a complex job. The Penstock intake had to be set in the Main Dam since there was no room left in the Intake Dam. The engineers then had to thread it under the exciter penstocks, over the top of the four existing ones and down into the powerhouse. For this reason,it is nearly twice as long as the others.

The unit 5 penstock was up to six meters in diameter, making it one of the largest steel penstocks in the commonwealth at the time.

Turbine:

The most important part of a hydraulic turbine is a rotating wheel, called a runner. It has a series of curved, slanting blades like the blades of a propellor that turn when the water pushes them. As the runners spin, they rotate a shaft that turns a huge electromagnet in the attached generator. The runner is enclosed in a casting so every bit of water must pass through the blades.

This 150-tonne turbine is a double horizontal Francis type, built by Escher Wyss Company in Switzerland. It is called a horizontal turbine because it is lying on its side. Although verticle turbines were becoming more popular around the time Stave Falls began operating, horizontal ones were easier to maintain.

The Turbine has two runners, which is why it is a double type. Nowadays we have the technology to build larger turbines with single runners which are more efficient, but in 1910 this was the best way engineers knew how to build them.

"The machinery to be installed in this large plant will alone cost about $250,000 and will be the best that we can be procured. With the possible exception of the machinery for the power plant at Niagara, it will be among the largest ever built." - Columbian, August 13, 1910.

Generator:

A generator uses wire and magnetic fields to make electricity. Wire coils (called windings) are fixed around the outer rim, which doesn't move. This is a stator. A rotor, with another set of wire coils called poles, is turned by the turbine. Direct current (DC) from the Exciter flows through the rotor and magnetizes it. When a magnet is rotated within a stator coil, it makes the electrons in the coil move back and forth, which generates an electric current.

The generator can't work without the turbine, so it is called a unit. Supplied by the Canadian General Electric Company, generating units 1 and 2 were in service by December 1911, and unit 3 by 1916. However, unit 4 was delayed when World War I began. The unit remained stored in a warehouse until it was finally installed in 1923.

As in most power plants, the generators produce alternating current (AC). These generators were capable of producing 13,000 horsepower at 4,000 volts and 60 hertz (cycles).

Governor:

Because of the amount of power required from the Stave Falls system varied, governors were needed to control the power output of the generators. The governor is the 'brains' behind the generating unit.

When the generating unit first starts up, the governor controls the amount of water passing through the turbine to bring the turbine and generator up to a constant 225 revolutions per minute. It does this by opening and closing a set of gates called "wicket gates". Once the unit has reached that speed, then the circuit breaker closes and connects the generator to the power lines.

After that, the governor continues to control the amount of water passing through the turbine - mainly to vary the power output. The governor can also safely shut down the unit in case something goes wrong.

Each generating unit had its own governor. The unit could be controlled from the governor its self, or from the main control panel upstairs. In the 1970s when the power plant became semi-automated, adjustments could be made directly from the Vancouver Control Center.

The Escher Wyss Company of Switzerland built the governors.

Generating Unit 5;

In 1922, with the potential for added water supply from the Allouette Lake tunnel, BC Electric decided to increase the capacity of the Stave Falls plant. In 1926, they installed a fifth generating unit to create an extra 17,500 horsepower.

The unit 5 turbine was also a double Francis type, like the other four units, but it had a spiral case that evenly distributed the water to the runner. This is a more efficient design than a pressure case, which is what the other turbines had.

There were a number of problems when unit 5 was first installed. For example, air kept getting trapped in the turbine. As the water pressure increased, a column of water would shoot the manhole covers nine meter into the air.

The turbine and governor were supplied by the Canadian Allis Chalmers Company. The Canadian General Electric Company supplied the generator, exciter, transformers and other electrical equipment.