Power Up to Provide Quality Power

When opportunity knocks, sometimes it needs to be loud and persistent before you take notice. Consider that knock providing “clean” or quality power to your customers. It could be the answer to making maintenance contracts a viable source of income.

“It’s already starting,” says Stan Klein, senior director of curriculum development for the National Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee (NJATC), a Washington D.C.-based education and training association for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA). “Increasingly, contractors are being asked to handle power quality issues. No longer does the electrician’s job have to end once a building is constructed. With training, a contractor can stay on to ensure quality power for a building’s future power needs.”

So what is clean power? “It’s hard to define, as some equipment can ride out power quality disturbances, such as interruptions, often masking problems, whereas other equipment may have problems with the same quality of supply,” says Richard Bingham, director of product development for Dranetz-BMI based in Edison, N.J. His company is a leading manufacturer of power monitoring equipment and services. “A hospital’s specialized diagnostic and treatment equipment or an office building’s IT infrastructure may be operating without apparent interruption, but is the power clean?”

For Klein, the question is “how dirty versus how clean the power” is for that office, hospital or manufacturing plant connected onto the power grid. “Equipment is forgiving to a degree, but once a serious scenario evolves to affect the power quality and equipment, the culprit could be anything from a copy machine causing transients to a tree knocking down or crossing utility power lines somewhere nearby,” he says.

Bingham adds that there can be vulnerable components affected by poor power quality, including harmonics in transformers, neutral conductors in cables, circuit breakers, feeders and motors. Meanwhile, communication equipment without VPS or TVSS protection remains vulnerable to power surges, interruptions, bad grounding and other faults.

“Sixty to 80 percent of power quality issues occur within a facility,” Bingham says. “Some issues are due to improper installation. Some are originating from the utility. Others might be attributed to rearranging load, or current imbalance leading to voltage imbalance.”

The Power Quality Survey
According to both men, a physical site inspection is the first step in investigating a site’s power quality.

“When something goes wrong, the customer will often blame the equipment, as opposed to considering a power quality issue,” Klein says. “But the source of the power needs to be analyzed and logged, and the site examined through a visual inspection. A contractor can begin to identify problems through an interview with the customer. One step in the process is to start narrowing down causes by narrowing down locations. Is the power problem affecting the whole building, or limited to a distribution panel, or in a group of offices? An analysis tool then can be put to better use when some initial questions are answered.”

Get Up to Power Quality Speed
“Before deregulation, customers often turned to their utilities that had in-house power quality service groups,” Bingham says. “Now they are turning to electrical contractors of which this is new territory. Quality problems are not going away and power susceptibility issues are on the rise due to our dependence on IT equipment and other significant sources of harmonics and other distortion.”

Bingham, working with Klein and others recently developed a Power Quality Survey course, which has been added to the NJATC training curriculum. In fact, power quality is addressed throughout the curriculum so apprentices, journeymen and certified contractors can learn more about this issue.

“Contractors and their employees who go through our survey course end up with a basic knowledge of the various power distribution events that can affect power quality,” Klein says. “They have an understanding of what a power quality analysis can show, and learn some remediation skills.”

Specific power quality equipment training typically is provided by the manufacturer. “We educate and train as well as sell monitoring equipment and services,” Bingham says. “Power quality analysis equipment is sophisticated and requires education on how to read what it tells you. It’s our responsibility to make the equipment as easy and adaptable to use as possible.”