movies titles with numbers reverberate in my head: ”The Magnificent Seven,” “12 Angry Men,” “Catch-22” and “The Dirty Dozen.” The power quality realm features a dirty half-dozen: the six most common PQ phenomena result in the...
Though many never experienced this, my generation had pedestrian and bicycle training using projectors paired with vinyl records that went “BEEP!” to alert the projectionist to advance the film strip. Jiminy Cricket, the star...
Last month, we found the “low-hanging fruit” for reducing a residential electric bill: less-than-energy-efficient window air conditioning (A/C) units used during a heat wave. Figure 1 shows a two-day plot, demonstrating the...
Just before the record string of days above 90°F began, I installed a power monitor at a friend’s residence to determine if the electric revenue meter was reading correctly. We will now look at the data for signatures of...
A friend complained that their single-family residence electric bill had gotten much higher in the past year. Since we have the same electricity provider, I looked back at my utility records for the past 40 years. Whereas...
While researching grounding and power quality, the information was divided between how to design the grounding systems of an electrical infrastructure that was optimized to maximize the quality of the electrical power, and...
In my April column, we took a detailed look at applying Kirchhoff’s voltage and current laws to rms voltage variations, such as sags and swells. These laws apply to virtually all electrical circuits influenced by different PQ...
Wear proper PPE, no matter how long it takes to put on I hope that soon, the current critical health situation will be a lesson learned and not one that occupies nearly every news broadcast and newspaper. Among all the sad...
As I've mentioned in the past, Kirchhoff’s Laws hold the key to determining the source of power quality phenomena. They apply to nearly every PQ investigation I encountered. The few that didn’t were because something else was...
In the 1880s, Tesla (not the car) and Edison (not the city) debated which method of electric current distribution should be used to deliver electricity from generators to homes and businesses. It was a less-than-friendly...
During a “PQ Primer” seminar I recently presented, we discussed how photovoltaic inverters synthesize the fundamental power frequency when there is no voltage reference from the grid. For years, time was told by counting the...
I recently updated material I had originally written in 1995 for a forthcoming power quality seminar on the latest PQ measuring, monitoring and mitigating tools. Many of the tools are as necessary now as they were then, so...
