Ditek 2 Power Quality 101

Power Quality 101 White Paper 1 of 1 service life of any piece of electronically controlled equipment is to a large degree determined by the of the electrical service that it receives power from Most electronics have an incredibly long theoretical but a fairly short life This is mainly due to two factors The first and most critical is the of the supply power The second is environmental actually dust and dirt getting on and in the If you were to take a motherboard from a computer put it in a vacuum and give it a perfect sine to the power supply you would replace nothing except maybe the power supply for a few thousand or so Obviously they don last that long in real life We don normally dust the insides of our or TVs and we don give them clean power number one complaint from electronics commercial and residential owners is downtime The number cause of downtime other than user error neglect or abuse is poor power quality According to Utility information power quality is at an all time low and with deregulation rolling along it getting worse are several issues that can be easily addressed to improve the overall quality of any electrical system paper briefly addresses the ones that appear to have the most detrimental effects on electronic and electronically controlled machinery A low resistance single point ground is imperative to both surge protection and power quality A regular check and upgrade as needed of grounding systems will interference and line noise improve power factors reduce the risk of accidental help decrease potentially damaging harmonics and improve the efficiency and of surge protection equipment Grounding will be covered in depth in another paper TUNE UP An electrical tune up consists of a periodic inspection and improvement an existing system Check grounding Verify and tighten all connections including Lines and Ground at panels breakers disconnects switches and receptacles Clean up any on connections Verify breaker integrity IR check Replace worn broken or damaged as needed TRANSIENT VOLTAGE SURGE SUPPRESSION A properly designed and installed protection system provides two critical power quality functions it will reduce potential damage from spikes and surges caused by lightning loads and utility including major events like grid shift as well as the daily of Capacitor switching and temporary since TVSS systems incorporate filtering in the internal components low level line noise and RFI EMI will be reduced or eliminated This will lower the number of a system experiences and increase the life of the equipment that is being following the simple inexpensive procedures listed above an owner can reasonably expect to see reduction in system downtime and improved performance from all electrical equipment DITEK Center Starkey Road FL 33771 Direct 1 727 812 5000 Support 1 888 472 6100 Number STS 100003 001 Rev 1 10 07 DITEK Corp Subject to Change