Dirty Power is a wide-encompassing term describing the delivery and quality of electricity. For businesses, dirty power means poorer performing business technologies, not excluding computers. Businesses benefit from having a properly configured UPS solution as it not only provides emergency power when necessary but helps to clean electricity used.
Dirty power can describe voltage spikes, frequency fluctuations, harmonics, and transients. This is a small set of what describes poor quality electricity, but they all affect how well business technologies will perform. This poor performance can cause businesses to waste resources (labor and cash) that would be better spent elsewhere.
One area where businesses lose money is the inefficiency of the equipment itself. Every component in an electrical and electronic device releases heat as a side-effect. Engineers design these devices to take heat as consideration by placing them in cooling fans. With fluctuating energy delivery, the devices behave abnormally and generate more heat. This requires the devices actually to draw more power in order to power the cooling fans and provide the required current for expected, normal operation. This directly causes businesses to spend more money on electricity.
Another observed effect is malfunctioning equipment. This means loss and corruption of data and requires employees to redo what they’ve already completed. Al Geist, IEEE, writes that “[too] large of a voltage fluctuation can cause circuits to switch on or off spontaneously inside a computer.” If this happens, users think data are writing to hard drives, but if the circuit fails randomly from power fluctuations during this time, then it could cause that data and the whole file system to get corrupted and lost.
This is a rare occurrence from dirty power, but lightning strikes happen. Poor electrical protection will destroy a computer and all attached equipment. To prevent these disasters, businesses can prepare themselves by incorporating a UPS for all their electrical and electronic equipment.
For information about uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), contact us.
