Dirty works after long Christmas weekend

After return from Christmas Long Weekend, the task awaiting me was the dirty work- Exhaust line cleaning.

Returning Singapore after Long weekend 圣诞长周末结束归新

In fact, my machines started to give me problem when I was still in Kuala Lumpur , having holiday with friends and family-- blame the technology Whatapps which bring each other closer, including colleagues and bosses :( . Need to coordinate the works remotely in Whatapps even I was at another country.

So the first day return from Christmas holiday , was just continuing the works that I did most coordinating over the Whatapps during my absense.

Let me explain a bit on the work, it's called Exhaust Line Cleaning . Because our machine used pump to suck away all those unused gases and byproducts, so overtime, these byproduct will accumulate in the pumping and choke the whole line. So we need to clean the exhaust line time to time when our exhaust pressure drop to danger level-- meaning no suction .

The work started with dismantling all those heavy pipeline on top of pumps. And we hiring cleaning vendor for this job, what my role was coordinate the work and production down time. But I have to stay at the scene in case some safety officers came and audit and challenged any wrongdoing.

After dismantling those heavy pipe down, some of them will use a long metal stick to dig inside the pipe to clear out those byproduct. At this time , the dust will fly over everywhere and you will need to wear respiratory mask for safety purposes.

You will not be 100% remove away all those sticky chemical byproduct, below is the best level they can achieve , then the exhaust line will be hanged up again for assembling back.

These are all these exhaust piping connection, individual machine pump will connect to 1 big main exhaust duct and get sucked away.

So as semicon engineer, we will have to always schedule these exhaust line cleaning timely and 1-by-1 not disturbing the production output. This is quite a challenging works as no one will have any idea how much these by-product will accumulate in the pipe, and the reaction time is always lacking because the line will just choke fully over 1 day where these cleaning vendor not able to support in time-- > how to support you 24/7 just to wait your call ?

Continuous efforts still need to put in place for better management for this task.