Power conditioning

Getting tired of 1/4 sec power flickers stopping equipment. Has anyone installed a industrial power conditioner? And did it work? Not sure if power conditioner is the term.

Thank you

Unahorn said:

Getting tired of 1/4 sec power flickers stopping equipment. Has anyone installed a industrial power conditioner? And did it work? Not sure if power conditioner is the term.

Thank you

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We had one for a cmm a few years back. It only ran the cmm IIRC, and I think it was damn expensive. Yes it did seem to work, although I can't readily quantify that...

I imagine a ups that could run a PC could run a CNC control, but not the drives

A whole shop UPS, yow, that'd be real cash

Conditioners are really for spikes, not actual power drops

yah live in the woods?

why is your power so bad?

I have to stop laughing before I can type

The location is listed as California

Unahorn said:

Getting tired of 1/4 sec power flickers stopping equipment. Has anyone installed a industrial power conditioner? And did it work? Not sure if power conditioner is the term.

Thank you

Click to expand...

Yah. Even wrote some books on 'em.

1/4 second is an age for a "conditioner" to pull through.

You would need an "UPS". "No break" class power ELSE the machine stutters. Not much gained to keep only the brains alive if the spindle and servos hiccup while in the cut.

So ... yah need high enough capacity to carry the FULL load, hard at work, not idling, but not necessarily for long endurance. EG: Enough time to abort and power-down to wait for a better time of day or day of week.

Even if you ruin one piece of work in progress, the more important machine and tooling survive, undamaged

Five minutes can carry a major telco / IS/IT "FM" site, and 20 minutes is all the battery banks are usually sized for, max, even as uber-critical as such facilities be.

.. but...

..only because the Diesels or gas turbines - plural, redundant - are online in a matter of a few SECONDS.

You cannot afford that, You don't REALLY even want to know what we have to spend on it.

But all you need is time enough to do an orderly shut-down.

If that is "too often" and/or "too unpredictable".. Or "some combination of the above?"

Then your best "power conditioner" is probably space in Texas or Northern Idaho.

Might WISH that was a joke. But it is anything BUT a joke.

It should pay back the cost of the move in lower taxes and all other operating and living costs. Probably by year two, if not year-ONE.

Or even "in advance"!

For than matter, MOST other states have an advantage, and a GROWING one at that.
Even rust-belt-stained Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Illinois, or Maryland not, and New York or New Jersey may as well be classed as train-wrecks "in progress".

A "better place" doesn't have to be "Trumpist" nor a "red" state, BTW.

Just 50% less crushingly self-burdened and insanely end-Luser/bizness hostile than Kalifornikya has become.

Can't boil a water shortage, even less a shortage of good sense, even less with no power to DO it - even if you could boil an ocean off the back of yet-another forest afire

Interesting topic, our shop is in a heavily industrial area, however every 2-3 months I get glitches and outages lasting ~30 sec. Just enough to jack things up. I considered renting a line monitor since they are insanely expensive to see if I could get an idea of what exactly was happening . Armed this data I could confront the power Co.
Having a ups for the "computer" is a good idea, something I will look into.

Check with your power company to see if they will put data loggers on your lines to monitor them. If they find problems you may get improved power.

I put all my shop computers on an UPS system a year ago and it's been nice. Definitely worth it.

Would solar help?

Solar no help.

Power wall maybe.

Power conditioners have many flavors.

Last we used was basically a multi-tap transformer that a controller switched windings to step up or down voltage to condition it.

Do not do much for intruptions but good for brownout.

Just worked on 10kva ups that would handle fair size and support a 40 kva one.

They make ups large enough to support many things but budget is limiting factor.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Tapatalk

I spent 33 years in the electric utility industry I would request they come out and check your service and set a recording volt meter. If in Sacramento you probably have SMUD or PG&E as your utility. This will identify if your problem is from the utility side of the service. These problems could be caused by any number of things. Does the problem happen at a particular time of day or temperature?

Flywheel energy storage - Wikipedia

https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2015publications/CEC-500-2015-089/CEC-500-2015-089.pdf
This is in CA, do they use it to power the CNC on page 5...

Jmaks said:

Flywheel energy storage - Wikipedia

https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2015publications/CEC-500-2015-089/CEC-500-2015-089.pdf
This is in CA, do they use it to power the CNC on page 5...

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Amber is in the bay area. It could be a solution but you need to dig a pretty big hole. Really built as a battery for solar , the conditioning is a side benefit.

We have installed conditioners on projects that are integrated with the switchgear. They seem to work well especially if you have a lot of technology running in your facility.

Not sure how well that would work with high amp draw machines.

Flywheel energy storage is really interesting, back in ~1950s there was I believe a milk delivery service that employed a similar system in their delivery trucks. They would spin them up in the morning and had enough stored energy to make the milk run(s). The technology never really caught on then for several reasons such energy loss through friction and cheap dinosaur squeezing's (petrol).
Now there are some folks are re-visiting the technology in light of super conductors, lighter alloys etc..

I once did some quick and dirty calculations on building a flywheel isolator for a typical house, if I recall I figured it would be about the same cost as the house to get enough rotating inertia to give a good minute of power until it slowed enough to dip below acceptable voltages. Flywheels are rather expensive, and can be extremely dangerous. It basically came down to having a simple motor/generator setup like you would use to go 2 to 3 phase, except you never turn it off and stick a car on the back just to make it coast longer. Now if you leave the car off, a 3 phase generator with a power filter on it may be a workable solution to less than a second of power loss. Finding one big enough to run an entire milling department... have fun with that...

Get your line monitored. Our house lights used to flicker in high winds. When we changed our service during construction that problem was discovered. Connectors up on the house were never crimped/tightened properly.

Probably a lot cheaper to move away from California.

doug8cat said:

Interesting topic, our shop is in a heavily industrial area, however every 2-3 months I get glitches and outages lasting ~30 sec. Just enough to jack things up. I considered renting a line monitor since they are insanely expensive to see if I could get an idea of what exactly was happening . Armed this data I could confront the power Co.
Having a ups for the "computer" is a good idea, something I will look into.

Click to expand...

Coming off a telco backgrond, and with acess to used/obsoleted gear, my first UPS was a salvaged pure-sine-wave Lorraine inverter. Stayed with 48 V battery banks for years, even in later-model 'puter UPS out of Taiwan.

And then, as CPU got more efficient, memory and storage faster, leaner, less HUNGRY than racks of stagger-started SCSI RAID?

Shed everything else BUT uber-premium, then modest, then simpler and cheaper YET ... LAPTOPS.. which have their own built-in battery.

The only UPS in the plan now isn't even "un-interruptable" at all. The reverse, actually. Standby and cycled intermittent is fine.

Battery bank & inverters for the fridge/freezers.

Not because spoilt meat and veg is so effing valuable. Because it can .. and in my case twice HAS .. effectively destroyed the fridge/freezer if gone bad whilst I am out of the country for a spell.

That - with good thermal flywheel of the dwelling, bottled gas fallback cooking, the LOW power LED lights - (and AMD Ryzen laptops, BTW) - need these days, lets me run the Diesel only a few hours out of 24 as well, so less fuel to store. lower wear, longer life.

Partial loads are NOT a favorite of pure Diesel engines for longevity nor efficiency, either one. They love about 75 percent demand or so, not loafing and wet-stacking.

Where I'm looking? "Saltwater" battery. Low-density, hence bulky? BFD.

A residence is not a motorcar, aircraft, hand-held portable, nor short on space, as needs the most dense of Lithium and beyond technology

Even if I have to DIG to take advantage of natural freeze-resistance.