A standard power meter reports RMS averages every second or three. A voltage sag lasts a few cycles. A switching transient lasts microseconds. The meter reports that nothing happened, and the breaker on the floor disagrees. This is why so many electrical problems present as mysteries: the instrument that should explain the trip cannot see…
Tag: harmonics
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Our early research wrote it plainly: the difference in current balance across phases returns directly as current on the neutral line. A neutral sized for balance carries the imbalance as heat. That makes phase balance a safety property. Excess neutral current raises conductor temperature, lifts neutral-to-ground voltage, and interferes with electronics that reference ground. The…
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The Reality of Fire Risk in Transmission and Distribution Networks The flow of power in the grid is continuous much like water in a riverbed, only instead of erosion being the steady force of change and floods being the worst case scenario, it is infrastructure degradation and out of control fires. As suburbs push further…
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Update, October 2026. Software-Defined Power is the name 3DFS used in 2016 for what it now calls Software-Defined Electricity. The server rack in this video is the ancestor of the 2020 test at a 208 V panel, where the neutral current fell from 15.6 A to 2 A with one unit on. That test and…
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Data centers electrical networks are filled with thousands of loads all demanding power at the same time. In this video, we isolate a server rack loaded with various storage arrays and GPU accelerated blade servers and individually review a few of the beneficial effects of subcycle correction. The server rack shows a clear operational difference…
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As we work on publishing our most current case studies, we are releasing the performance study that took place on October 21-23, 2013. This study was performed at a water treatment facility in Florida. The VectorQ2 production prototype was installed without interruption to the service and a third party evaluation was conducted by Intelligent Building…
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Power quality is a term that we are all seeing more of these days. What does it mean though? How can the importance of power quality be conveyed so that the average person understands the impact of power quality on their daily lives? Most of us were introduced to electricity as kids in school when…
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We appreciate everybody’s interest in why Power Quality is important. There is a more current description of why power quality is important in relation to electrical losses and carbon footprint on our blog here. Thank you for your interest. Almost everyone in the United States uses electricity. Surprisingly, few of them know that there is…
