Dirty Power Quality • Poor Power Quality • JM Test Systems

Is dirty power dirtying your profits?

In today’s manufacturing facilities, it is extremely common to find that there are large amounts of machinery that depends on high quality, clean electrical energy to keep it operating. Plant managers and technicians are often tasked with making sure this machinery is running at optimum levels to keep operating costs down. Wasted energy, downed machinery and dirty power can suck up your profits almost instantly. There is a very good chance it is happening on a piece of equipment in your facility at this very moment.

Poor power quality is a double-edged sword, as it not only can ruin the machinery that it is supplying power to, but it will also raise your energy costs as you are having to use more power to run the same amount of machinery. While power quality can easily be overlooked when doing maintenance or repairs on machinery, it can be the culprit in a number of different ways. When equipment goes down you are facing slowed production rates, diagnostic costs, repair or replacement costs and the labor to repair or replace the equipment. With today’s power analyzers, there is essentially no reason to introduce poor quality power to your high-quality machinery. Through verifying that you are using good power you can expeditiously raise your efficiency and simultaneously lower your downtime and expenses.

It is simple to think that when you plug something into the wall that you are receiving power from that receptacle; but it is imperative to remember that the power is going from a power generation plant, transmission lines, an electric meter and then finally to your own individual wiring at your facility. This leaves a lot of options open for power to be less than ideal by the time it arrives to your equipment. Disruptions in your power quality can span from voltage, current, frequency, dips, transients and harmonic distortions; all of which can be detrimental to your machinery and production as well.

While it is possible for power to be muddied along the way to your facility, most problems with power are generated from the facility where the equipment is. Weather can be an influence in your incoming power, but a much larger majority of power problems arise from poor wiring and grounding, as well as overloaded circuits.

In an ideal scenario, all equipment would run at maximum potential and no machinery would ever encounter a downtime event. When a piece of machinery goes down or prematurely fails and its life cycle is cut short, it may be time to look at your power quality. Every time a facility installs a new piece of machinery or removes a piece of machinery, there is an opening for a new cause of dirty power.

Power quality meters come to the rescue in cases such as this. They can quickly diagnose AC voltage and amperage and assemble its findings into a waveform. Pretty much all of today’s power analyzers measure multiple phases simultaneously to give an accurate representation of the whole system that is in question. Most meters have a large color screen to show you your waveform in real time. With the proper knowledge of interpreting waveforms, it takes almost zero effort to find where your problem arises. Don’t forget, it is imperative to retest your equipment with the analyzer after your repairs to be certain that the problem is properly repaired and the previous problem at hand is now nonexistent. Today’s technology allows the user to select sample rates and testing duration. Sample rates can be anywhere from once per second to once every fifteen minutes and you can set the parameters up right on the screen of the device itself. Keep in mind that the quicker your sample rate is set to, the less duration of a recording you can store. Essentially, every time the logger takes a sample it will store it in its memory to assemble onto a graph when your testing is completed. More storage points will fill the memory faster. Typically, you can expect a one second sample rate to log for three hours and a fifteen-minute sample rate to fill the memory after fifteen weeks. A fifteen-minute interval is sort of the industry standard and it is the average time specified in the NEC 220 for a load study.

When looking for your power quality meter don’t forget to ask yourself some basic questions and what exactly you are looking to achieve with your meter. If you need direction or assistance in picking a meter for rental or purchase, don’t hesitate to give us at JM Test Systems a call at 1-800-353-3411 x 4052 and we will be happy to put you on the right track to eliminating problems that stem from poor quality power.