A well known commercial bakery, in Nantwich, Cheshire and a leading provider of fresh prepared food. With a massive operation spanning 43 sites and employing around 18,000 people, they’re a cornerstone of the UK food industry.
An existing client of Power Efficient Solutions they asked if we could assist in helping them reduce downtime, caused by electrical equipment failure. They had been suffering from an unusually high attrition rate of some electrical equipment for some time and couldn’t pinpoint a cause.
With more and more businesses introducing ‘non-linear’ loads, such as variable speed drives this is becoming an all to common problem so we recommended some Power Quality Analysis was carried out, as our experience shows ‘Harmonic Distortion’ could be the route cause of a lot of their equipment reliability issues.
Power Quality Survey
We carried out a 7-day Power Quality Survey and identified one of the three LV supplies was suffering from high levels of harmonic distortion and two others were suffering from a poor power factor (previously highlighted). All of which needed addressing. We presented the client with a detailed report and recommendations, for their consideration.
The client opted to not only action our recommendations but go even further in the case of one of their LV supplies. The supply in question had been suffering from non-functional Power Factor Correction equipment for some time and this was something they not only wanted to address but wished to introduce a level of ‘future proofing’ by installing harmonic filtration to protect against the introduction of non-linear loads at a future date.
We recommended the following solutions
LV1 – Power Quality System
LV2 – Harmonic Filter
LV3 – Power Factor Correction controller
There were challenges to overcome when carrying out the installation work, including access issues and the avoidance of any interruption to the clients’ electrical supply and loss of production.
The above recommendations were carried out across 4-days, in normal working hours, with no disruption to the clients’ electrical supplies or normal operations.
Within the first month the client had reported a noticeable improvement in the reliability of the connected loads and anticipate significant financial savings will be realised going forward.