As rooftop solar, battery storage and community solar projects proliferate, utilities must verify each distributed energy resource meets IEEE 1547 interconnection requirements. PMI recorders capture voltage, frequency, harmonic distortion and anti-islanding behavior during commissioning and ongoing operation, providing defensible data for regulatory filings and interconnection agreements.

Fast-charging stations can draw hundreds of kilowatts in seconds, creating voltage sags, harmonic currents and flicker that affect neighboring customers. Deploying a Seeker or Revolution recorder at the service entrance or upstream transformer lets planners quantify EV charging impact, size infrastructure upgrades and respond to complaints with measured evidence.

Substation engineers use the Revolution recorder to capture sub-cycle transients, high-order harmonics and fault signatures that drive protective relay performance. Long-term feeder deployments reveal seasonal load patterns, harmonic accumulation from non-linear loads and early signs of equipment degradation that would otherwise go undetected until failure. Pair with Merlin™ for automated event classification across your fleet.

When a commercial or industrial customer reports nuisance tripping, flickering lights or equipment damage, utility crews deploy the Seeker to capture a complete power quality profile at the point of use. Every sag, swell, transient and harmonic event is logged, so engineers can determine whether the disturbance originates on the utility side or inside the customer’s facility. Merlin™ accelerates root-cause diagnosis by automatically classifying events.

Large industrial customers and campus operators rely on PMI recorders to audit electrical systems, verify utility service quality and document harmonic contribution under IEEE 519 guidelines. The Bolt and Revolution are commonly deployed at service entrances, main switchgear and critical loads to build a complete facility-wide picture.

Power quality monitoring is the continuous measurement and analysis of electrical parameters such as voltage, current, harmonics, sags, swells, flicker and transients to ensure a stable, reliable supply of electricity. Utilities rely on power quality analyzers and recorders to detect disturbances before they damage equipment or disrupt service.

Poor power quality is caused by aging infrastructure, non-linear loads from sensitive electronics, distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar and battery storage, electric vehicle charging, lightning strikes, switching operations and faults on the distribution system. Each introduces voltage sags, harmonics, flicker or transients into the grid.

IEEE 1547 is the standard for interconnecting distributed energy resources with electric power systems. It defines voltage, frequency, power quality and anti-islanding requirements that DERs must meet. Utilities use power quality recorders like the PMI Bolt and Revolution to verify IEEE 1547 compliance during interconnection testing and ongoing operation.

Electric vehicles and distributed energy resources create bidirectional power flows, inject harmonics from their inverters and cause voltage fluctuations during fast charging or intermittent generation. Monitoring these impacts requires high-resolution recorders that capture sub-cycle events that lower-resolution meters miss.

A power quality analyzer is typically a handheld instrument for short-term troubleshooting. A power quality recorder is designed for long-term deployment, continuously logging voltage, current and disturbance data over days, weeks or months for trend analysis and compliance reporting. The PMI Seeker bridges both roles.

Merlin™ is PMI’s AI-powered power quality analytics platform. It automatically identifies, classifies and diagnoses disturbances captured by Bolt, Seeker and Revolution recorders, cutting the time engineers spend manually reviewing events and surfacing root causes faster. Merlin™ works across your entire fleet, learning from every event you capture.

Sampling rate requirements depend on what you need to capture. Standard disturbance monitoring works at 256 samples per cycle (Bolt), while high-resolution transient analysis benefits from the 4,166 samples/cycle of Seeker or the 16,666 samples/cycle of Revolution. Higher sampling rates capture faster transients and higher-order harmonics that lower-resolution meters miss.