There have been a million or more power quality instruments sold by dozens of manufacturers since they were introduced in the 1970s. However, a typical instrument that can measure and capture the array of PQ phenomena defined...
In a recent interview for a historical report on power quality instruments, I was asked to describe the evolution of PQ monitors during my 41-year tenure with one of the leading design/manufacturing companies. In the late...
Searching the term “NEC Article 100 qualified person” will turn up several million hits, and different organizations provide slightly different definitions. OSHA regulation 29 CFR 1910 (general industry) considers a qualified...
A power quality audit report can be a money-saver for the facility and a money-maker for the report writer. With some experience analyzing the data and a PQ audit template, it doesn’t take that long to produce a report that...
In the years working with design engineers for PQ instrumentation, occasionally all of the engineers would gather around a project that had a significant failure and resulted in a smoke cloud wafting up to the lab ceiling. We...
in 2008, I presented “Effects of the Feudal Society on Power Quality” at a conference in Germany. It was a humorous look into why European countries tend to have legally enforceable limits for the permissible levels of most...
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...
