Transcript
The Initialization Step
Every recorder before the Seeker+ would start with initialization, where you would choose your measures, your averaging interval, and your capture thresholds. This is how a Tensor, Seeker, Guardian or Bolt has tailored your recording to do their job. If you have a saved preset, it makes it super easy because you could just reuse the same preset every time.
The one issue that this has when you run into power quality problems is that the settings depend on what the circuit will do. If your interval that you end up choosing is too coarse, your event is just gonna kind of average into the background and you won’t really be able to see it. If your interval is too fine, then your storage is gonna fill up before that event recurs.
Especially with waveforms, if your thresholds are too tight, you’re gonna get thousands and thousands of uninteresting waveforms. And if your threshold is too loose, you’re not gonna get any at all. Typically, if you have a lot of experience and you have rule of thumb, you can kind of land it close enough, but the Seeker+ takes that all out of the equation.
The Seeker+ Approach
The Seeker+ doesn’t actually take any recording settings at all. You just have your defaults that it sends, and it will record everything that it’s capable of recording at every resolution that it supports from the moment it starts. There’s no settings file that you have to build. There’s nothing you have to upload. You don’t have to sit through and click a bunch of settings and just kind of decide what you want. You just press a button and it’ll go.
Starting a Recording in PQ Canvass
If you’re signed into PQ Canvass, you can go find your device. We’ve gone to the Devices tab, and we’re gonna go ahead and find our online devices, and we’re gonna click on our Seeker+ here. The important thing here is that the Seeker+ has to be online in order for you to do this, because it’ll send a message to the Seeker+ saying, “Go ahead and start a recording.” It has to be online for the Seeker+ to receive that.
This is the quick access view, and if you click on Recordings, and then you click New Recording, this is the new Seeker+ recording page. You can see at the top it says, “This device doesn’t need any initialization. It will start recording immediately using the device’s default settings.” And then you can go ahead and just click Start Recording. And there you go. Now it’s off and running and it’s recording, and we didn’t have to set up any settings or anything like that.
What the Seeker+ Records
The Seeker+ records everything, but I think it’s important that we clarify what everything means. In terms of measures, it records every measure set that the platform supports on all four channels. That’s your RMS voltage, current, power. The full list of measures are in the white paper if you’re interested in reading through it.
Some of the headliners, though: it does get harmonics through the seventieth phase angles. You’ve got interharmonics, and you’ve got three-phase quantities, and you’ve got some single system values like frequency, Rocov, voltage and current imbalance, and internal temperature.
Each measure is recorded at its own native rate, and it’s retained through every coarser aggregation tier above it. So you’ve got half cycle, full cycle, twelve cycle, one second, three second, ten minute, and two hour. Two hundred, three second, ten minute, and two hour are the exact IEC sixty-one thousand intervals for the compliance. Everything that you would need to do compliance work is already configured without you having to do anything.
Also worth mentioning, you’ve got super harmonics. You can do two kilohertz to one-fifty kilohertz, and that is a factory option. But a unit without super harmonics will record the rest of the measure set normally.
Waveform Trigger Defaults
All four of the waveform capture triggers are enabled out of the box, so there’s nothing you need to do to set that up. Each watches for a change from one cycle to the next, not necessarily a level. You’ve got:
- A three percent step in RMS voltage
- A five-volt step in RMS voltage
- A five percentage point step in voltage THD
- A step in RMS current
The current trigger is in amps, so you’d have to read it against the clamp in use. Seeker+ can take clamps from a 100 Amp TLAR to a 5000 Amp Flex CT, and the same number of amps can mean very different things for each. This is definitely worth confirming for the circuit that you’re on.
Once these fire, you get three cycles before and nine cycles after in your waveform capture, so you can compare back and forth. You also get a periodic capture. Periodic capture is also on. It just takes a reference waveform every fifteen minutes regardless, so you get a baseline to compare not just the events.
You also have transient capture. That’s a factory option. And if you’ve purchased that, you’ll get it on all four channels at one thousand volts per channel.
Working with Recordings in PQ Canvass
This is the same tab that we just finished starting our recording. If we go back, we can go to the recording list that’s on the recordings page. Here are all of our recordings for this Seeker+. The naming convention is gonna be Seeker+_serial number_ the date. And if you have multiple on the same date, it appends the parentheses one, parentheses two for the first and second recordings after that.
Here we can go ahead and click on our recording. This is the standard header report that you would see for any recording that you have on PQ Canvass. One of the things that we talked about is how you can choose your interval whenever you’re ready to analyze.
Right now, here’s your RMS voltage graph. I have it set to 1-second interval right here at the bottom. You can actually change that. If you click this drop-down, you can choose all your different intervals that you wanna take a look at. You can look at half cycle, and that’s gonna be obviously a little bit more condensed because the interval is smaller. Or you can look at something like 3-second where your points are gonna be a little bit further apart.
Waveform Captures
Here’s another recording that we did a little bit ago. Click on Waveform Capture here. You see this 14, that means you’ve got 14 waveform captures. You can see your periodic captures every 15 minutes. There’s one at 2:45, 3:00, 3:15, 3:30, and that’ll capture every 1/4 hour as long as you’re recording.
You can also see what triggered it. You’ve got the RMS voltage percentage here, and that’s 351.6%, 14% , 18% all the way down. And then you can click on that to view your waveform.
Transient Capture
Right underneath, this recording didn’t have any transients, so it says zero. But if you had some, here’s an example. You’ve got your transient capture reports. You can see the trigger channel, the duration, the timestamp, and you can see the cycle.
Recap
For the Seeker+, it’s literally just one button and it’s super, super simple to do. The only prerequisite is that your meter has to be online. It gets the full measure set every tier from half cycle to two hours, and that full list is in the white paper if you wanna take a look at that.
You’ve got your four capture triggers plus a 15-minute baseline to look at so you can compare your events to just a standard waveform. It is streamed to PQ Canvass as it goes. So you can check on it, and you can come back half hour later and you can see more data coming in as it’s going.
Q&A: Using the Seeker+ Without Cellular Signal
We’ve got a question that says: What if you installed the Seeker+ in an area with no or spotty cellular signal? Would you be able to use it to record? The answer is yes. You do not have to have a cell signal or an Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection to use.
We also have iOS software called PMI View, and we are about to release the same application on Android. And we have a Windows desktop application called PMI View as well. You can use those to do the same thing with PQ Canvass, where you can start the recording, place the recorder, let it record, and then you can go out to the field and use Wi-Fi or USB and download the recording with the software and then use PMI View to upload that directly into PQ Canvass where you can do the analysis.
Closing
Thank you everyone 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 afternoon.