Unit Rebuild at Laundry Factory

A new customer at a Laundry cleaning factory recently enquired about having their Power Factor Correction unit serviced. The unit was built into the main LV Switchboard and had not been serviced since installation 10+ years ago.

The LV Switchboard is located on the main factory floor and as such over the years the internal components had been covered with a thick layer of lint.

Upon carrying out a full maintenance it was found that all the capacitors had failed along with a number of control fuses. The contactors had very pitted contact faces and were full of lint. And the control relay was outdated and provided very limited information on what the Power Factor unit was achieving.

A load test was carried out while on site as part of the maintenance and it was concluded that the capacitor stages were also too coarse, and site would benefit from smaller stages that would provide finer correction.

Following this visit a full report and quotation was provided to replace all the single-phase capacitors with new high quality, long life metallized polypropylene 480V rated capacitors. Replace all contactors with new Soft Switching contactors and splitting theses stages down into 2 x 25kVAr & 2 x 50kVAr.

The control relay would also be upgraded to a new Lovato DCRL5 digital control relay which would supersede the requirement for the manual key switches.

 

 

The unit was stripped down, fully cleaned out and rebuilt with all new components as required, during normal working hours without disruption to site and the unit was left operating satisfactorily.