Transcript

Introduction

Hello. Thank you for joining today’s Ask a Pro Webinar. My name is Matthew Kahana. I am a software engineer here at PMI. Today we’ll be covering our white paper on power quality for the non-PQ professionals. It’s something that’s really important, but something that not a lot of people think about, so I’m glad to share some knowledge on it.

Electricity Is Like Water

I often think about electricity as kind of analogous to water in some ways. When you turn on the faucet, you expect clean water to come out and you expect it to have good water pressure. You expect it to never be just drips coming out, you expect it to be coming out full force.

And it’s the same thing for electricity. You flip a switch, you expect the lights to turn on, and when it doesn’t, something’s wrong. But there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s not always the case that the lights are on and everything must be fine. There’s a lot of problems that you can encounter.

Common Power Quality Problems

Some obvious ones: flickering lights, restarting computers. But some less obvious ones, including equipment using more power than they should or running hotter than they should, which can also degrade their components over time and costs a lot of money, not only in increased energy bills, but also in labor costs in trying to fix the equipment.

It can also cause some intermittent problems that aren’t always the easiest thing to spot. You may see something happen every once in a while and you think you’ll just fix it this one time, but it turns out the real source is an underlying power quality issue.

What Causes Power Quality Problems

There’s a lot of different things that can cause power quality problems, most common ones being weather conditions. If an animal touches the line and gets shocked, it might cause a flicker in your lights. But what’s also interesting is that other customers affect your quality as well, and also your own equipment can affect the quality of your power as well as other people’s power.

We’re all connected to the same grid, all getting electricity through the same ways, so if somebody’s causing a disturbance on one end, it’s gonna affect everybody else on the other end as well.

Power Quality Importance Is Growing

Power quality importance is growing. It’s not something that’s ever gonna go away, especially nowadays as more complex electronics, electric vehicles as well as solar and wind power, generating power in new ways, it’s something that’s becoming ever-important as we also rely a lot more on these powered devices.

Addressing Power Quality Issues

So if we do have a problem, what can we do about it? Well, the first step in addressing these things is monitoring. You can’t fix what you can’t see. A lot of the problems, like we said, are unnoticeable. They can be passed aside as some other issue. So it’s really important that you have some way of monitoring your power quality and seeing if there’s anything wrong.

We have a lot of power quality monitoring devices that can be hooked up to PQ Canvas that allows you to capture events and store and analyze the power quality from those devices. It’s a great way to monitor power, it’s a great way to find out if anything is wrong.

The next step is diagnosing. You can have an issue and it can have a lot of different causes, and it’s kind of hard to narrow down what cause is directly related to that issue. That’s something else that not only PQ Canvas can help with, but our new Merlin AI assistant can review those recordings for you and really narrow down to what causes are most likely to be at play here.

And of course, the last step, once you diagnose it, is fixing the problem. Some problems are really easy to fix, like just change your schedule. Don’t run two large machines at the same time. And some fixes are a little harder, installing protective devices or filters, but the problem is really worth fixing in the end, because not only do you have equipment that runs better, but it saves you a lot of money and time.

Power Quality Is a Business Issue

So it’s not just a power issue, it’s a business issue. Bad power quality might go unnoticed, but you’ll see it in the bottom line, you’ll see it in time spent fixing devices, you’ll see it in the lifespan of those equipments. So it’s really important to think about it and make sure you’re on top of it.

Thank you for attending today’s webinar. If you have any questions, you can reach us anytime by calling 800-296-4120 or emailing support@powermonitors.com. Thank you and have a good night.