Problems We Could Only Work Around [/ˈprɑbləmz wi ˈkʊd ˈoʊnli ˈwərk ˈəraʊnd/] n - Not every problem admits a fix. Some are baked into the building, the grid, or the vendor, and sit well above what a hands-on engineer may alter. The honest skill there is not solving them; it is recognizing that they cannot be solved at your level, and contriving a workaround that keeps the site safe and useful nonetheless.

This page stands as counterpart to Field Notes, which gathers the problems that did yield to a small fix, and to Things That Did Not End Up Working Out, which gathers promising notions that failed in practice.

The Records

• When the Fence Would Give No More [/ˈwhen ˈthe ˈutiliti ˈkouldn’t ˈgive ˈus ˈmore ˈpower/] n - the facility was capped at the fence, and growth had to come from the demand side.
• The Harmonics We Had to Live With [/ˈthe ˈharmoniks ˈwe ˈhad ˈto ˈlive ˈwith/] n - a power-quality ill we could contain but never remove.
• A Room Built for Air, Asked to Run Water [/ˈa ˈroom ˈbuilt ˈfor ˈair, ˈaskɪd ˈto ˈrun ˈwater/] n - an older hall stranded by its own design as densities climbed.

Each of these bears upon the systems it constrains: Where the Grid Comes In, The Current That Comes in Threes, and Direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Together they account for the larger wagers recorded in The New Buildout.