Following a maintenance request from a large aggregate manufacturing plant just outside London we carried out a service on what turned out to be one of our Power Factor Correction units, a FSi300 originally built by us in 2007 for a 3^rd party installer.

The unit had never been serviced since installation and due to its dusty environment years of accumulated dirt had built up in and around the unit which eventually led to the site isolating the unit in 2020 where it had been left ever since.

During our service, we found multiple capacitor failures along with lots of rust on the detuning reactors. All the ventilation fans in the roof had also seized and the unit’s key had ben lost.

Due to the failures and lack of servicing the best option was to replace the internal trays with new ones, including all capacitors, contactors and fuses. Along with this we also replace all the fans in the roof and upgraded the control relay to the latest Lovato DCRL range.

Upon completion, the site had improved its Power Factor from .041 inductive to 0.99 with all works being carried out during normal working hours without any disruption to site operation.

We were asked to investigate a possible fault with a Voltage Optimisation unit installed at a Gym south of London. The site reported that the load started to flicker and eventually the VO unit went into bypass mode increasing the voltage back to its original levels.

Upon further investigation, it was found that the L2 phase terminal on the voltage transformer had failed and caused damage to the L2 transformer winding. The unit had not been serviced since installation and we suspect a poor connection was the cause of the terminal overheating and ultimately failing.

Therefore, we  recommended a new 400A VO unit connected to the existing 400A-rated bypass device along with the removal and disposal of the failed equipment.

The work was to be done out of hours to prevent any disruption to the Gyms customers and keep downtime to a minimum. upon completion the site voltage was reduced from 429V per phase to 398V per phase, helping them save money on their electrical bills.

This Power Factor Correction unit was found to be unsuitable for site during an annual maintenance inspection along with multiple failures. It was also noted that the capacitor stages for too coarse for the load and the site would benefit from a mixture of smaller and larger stages to allow the PFC to fine-tune its correction.

As such a new 5 stage 100kVAr Power Factor Correction unit was quoted to be installed with a mix of 13.5kVAr and 25kVAr capacitor banks all controlled via a Lovato DCRL5 digital control relay.

Utilizing the existing power and C.T cables kept the cost down for the customer and meant our engineer could carry out the work during normal working hours without any disruption to site supply.

We are contacted by an insurance business that occupies a large commercial building in central Ipswich regarding the failure of an Active Harmonic Filter on one of the LV supplies.

We already carry out the annual Power Factor maintenance on site and were familiar with the site’s electrical installation. Following a week-long Power Quality Analysis we were able to provide a quotation to supply and install 2 new 100A 4-wire Active Harmonic Filters to be wall-mounted in the same location as the failed unit. These 2 new filters were designed to go on one LV supply with the filters working in a Master/Slave configuration.

Due to the additional AHF being connected a new 4 core cable was also run to a spare switch on the LV panel and the original C.T circuit was reutilized.

All works were completed during normal working hours without the need for a shutdown.

Unit replacement on baggage line at large UK airport.

Due to a change in the load, this existing single-stage 50kVAr unit was too large for accurate correction so it was to be replaced with a unit that still had a total kVAr output of 50kVAr but split into 4 smaller stages of 13.5kVAr.

Utilising the existing power cables and C.T cable the unit was swapped out with a standard FS100 PFC unit with built-in local isolation and the remote control relay was moved from the LV panel into the PFC unit itself for easier access.

A recent installation of two Power Factor Correction units at a large recycling facility in north London.

Due to the nature of the site, the switchgear was extremely dirty and the original Power Factor Units installed, one stand-alone unit and one panel-built unit, had to be disconnected and removed ready for the new equipment to be installed.

The larger of the two panels was a fully detuned 400kVAr FSi Deep PFC unit with 8 stages of 50kVAr, each with its own 189Hz detuning reactor, soft switching contactor and sub-fusing.

The smaller unit was also a fully detuned 250kVAr FSi PFC unit with 5 stages of 50kVAr each with its own 189Hz detuning reactor, soft switching contactor and sub-fusing.

Once the old equipment was removed and the new units positioned, additional cable trunking was installed for cable management and a shutdown was scheduled for final connections.

Finally, the area was cleaned up and the units were commissioned. All the works were carried out over 3 days by 2 of our engineers with minimal disruption to the site.