Power Quality Is Important, Here is What You Can Do
To Help Protect Your Equipment

When a momentary power interruption occurs at home, it can be a source of irritation. When the same momentary interruption occurs in an office, a process line, or production line, the result can be a costly equipment breakdown. Years ago a brief outage was not considered a problem, but today’s solid state devices are very sensitive to power system fluctuations. It is this vulnerability of modern technology that has brought an increased awareness of power system variations, a reality of life that has always been present.

Power Quality — What Is It?

Power quality is the term used to describe this problem. Power interruptions can be caused by natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice storms; pole-line accidents; tree contact with power lines and other easily recognized factors. An interruption can be momentary or sustained. Historically, most calls and complaints received by electric utilities have been of the simple “lights out” variety. Power system conditions included in today’s definition include harmonic distortion, voltage variations (sags and swells), voltage reductions, power interruptions (momentary and sustained) and voltage surges.

Managing Power Quality

The fundamental quality of utility power systems throughout the world has not significantly degraded. What has changed is that today’s society is a heavy user of solid state electronics. This “power quality-sensitive” technology has accentuated imperfections in the power supply which have always existed. This article discusses the various types of power quality problems and strategies that can help you protect your equipment. Although these problems are not always easy to identify and sometimes expensive to investigate, once they are identified and resolved a very high degree of reliability can be restored to a power system.

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