Poor power quality can be a real headache for any facility owner or manager. Just think of the multitude of equipment we plug in to our power supplies these days: fluorescent tubes, dimmers, air conditioners, computers, printers, cordless phones.
Every piece of equipment you plug in to your power grid has its own pattern of drawing current. In combination, these various patterns can cause “power pollution” in the form of harmonic disturbances within your power supply.
Firstly, this problem can manifest itself in the form of audible buzzing.
In any kind of film, TV or studio recording situation, buzzing may be picked up by microphones; or appear in audio and video monitors via circuitry.
However, there are many other commercial situations where buzzing may create an unpleasant working or customer environment.
Then, there are also any number of non-audible operational problems that could be the result of harmonic distortion:
- overheating of electrical motors and/or cables
- power supply failures in office equipment, especially computers
- regular tripping of circuit breakers
- constant failure of lighting dimmers.
Electrical Testing Company has test equipment to capture & record distortion in both voltage and current up to the 50th harmonic… in both high voltage & low voltage applications.
Additionally we can capture Transient Disturbances, Waveforms and Spectrum Analysis
using portable digital oscilloscopes, oscillographs and power quality analysers
like the Fluke 41B or Hioki 3197 & 3169.
The data is then used to pinpoint faulty or harmonic generating equipment and/or suggest the right filtering equipment to rectify the problem.