Following up on a home inspection for the prospective buyer of a single-family home, the inspector’s report listed two electrical items: two receptacles had reversed neutral and line connections and two others were ungrounded...
One of the most fundamental parameters in power quality is often taken for granted. The late-19th century “Battle of the Currents” between Tesla and Westinghouse (who favored alternating current) against Edison (who favored...
In the past year, a group of volunteers working on IEEE Standards for the Power and Engineering Society, particularly those in the Power Quality Subcommittee, have published four standards. Considering one of the most well...
During the Q&A portion of a seminar I recently gave to a regional power quality group on PQ standards, a discussion of IEEE 1547, Standard for Interconnection and Interoperability of Distributed Energy Resources with...
Though I have been working in the power quality industry for more than 40 years, I still find it fun to solve power-quality related problems, particularly the more unusual ones. Lately, the more unusual are becoming more of...
With the unprecedented amount of unregulated information available on the internet, one can find a wealth of facts and fiction on a given subject. Power quality is no exception. Even those skilled in the art can be misled by...
During a recent summer thunderstorm, I was looking out the living room window when a blinding white light flashed accompanied by a deafening, crackling bang. I didn’t need a power quality monitor to know what that was, nor...
Last month, I reduced the vast array of phenomena that create power quality problems to the four most common categories and a set of causes-and-effects within those categories. Now, I solve them. An important step to remember...
The key to any detective show is to quickly find out who did it. For power quality problems that take down the process in a facility, whether it is plastic extrusion, financial data exchange or the lights in an indoor stadium...
While reviewing the various types of power quality disturbances I’ve previously covered as well as the phenomena PQ standards frequently reference, one of them stood out. Harmonics, sags and swells, transients, interruptions,...
In the past 12 months, I have celebrated two career milestones. It has been 40 years since I began working as a junior development engineer, being the fifth engineer hired at Dranetz Engineering Laboratories when it was on...
Though Ohm’s Law is a generalized construct that is not as encompassing as Maxwell’s Equations, it is far more understood and used by those in the electricity business. We have used Ohm’s and Kirchhoff’s Laws to understand...
