What should be checked during engine-room watchkeeping rounds?

A good engine-room round is a systematic comparison of what you see, hear, feel and read against what is normal for the current load, not a walk past gauges sitting in the green. Walk the plant in the same order every time so nothing is skipped, and know the normal figures for the present engine load and sea temperature, because normal at full sea speed is not normal at manoeuvring.

The core checks on each round include:

- Main engine: exhaust temperature on each unit and, more importantly, the deviation between units; jacket water outlet temperatures, typically controlled in the region of 80 to 90 C; lubricating oil pressure and temperature; scavenge air pressure and turbocharger behaviour. - Generators: load sharing, temperatures, and any change in sound or vibration. - Boiler: water level, steam pressure, burner condition and combustion. - Purifiers: separating cleanly, correct feed temperature, no overflow to the sludge tank. - Tanks: settling and service levels, sump levels, and the jacket water and fresh water expansion tanks. - Bilges and bilge wells: any rise means a leak, and it should be found, not just pumped. - Air compressors and receivers, steering gear and its alarms, and the readiness of standby and emergency equipment.

Use your senses deliberately. A change in note from a pump, new vibration, a hot smell, oil mist, a weep from a fuel pipe onto hot lagging, or haze in the machinery space are all warnings that appear before any alarm. Oil-soaked lagging in particular is a fire waiting for a source, and should be renewed, not wiped.

Finally, make the round count on paper and over time. Log abnormalities with the actual reading and the time, not just a tick, and compare against previous watches: a jacket temperature creeping two degrees a day, or a slowly rising differential across a filter, is a failure announcing itself. Escalate trends to the duty or chief engineer early rather than waiting for the alarm, and hand over anything unusual explicitly at watch change. On UMS ships the same discipline applies to the pre-departure and pre-unmanned checks, because the round you do before the engine room goes unattended is the one that decides whether the night stays quiet.