Voltage optimisation

[Simon35]

Asking on behalf of the missus.....she's the FD where she works, and the electricity supplier have suggested they could get someone in to look at voltage optimization, as a way of reducing the electricity bill.

Anyone had any experience of this kit. I had a quick Google last night and a read of an IET paper on it. Whilst it sounds plausible, the companies which seem to provide it seem like the same sort of companies who provide solar panels and green heating solutions.

So, worthwhile savings, or snake oil?

 

[bernardgreen]

More snake oil then practical science. Especially the low power units intended for domestic use. At the other extreme tap changing at the substation to change voltage may be effective.

The bottom line is that if a device requires a certain amount of power then it will take it or it will not work as expected.

Most equipment ( computors, lamps with switch mode supplies etc ) will simply take more current if the voltage is reduced.

Heaters will give out less heat on reduced voltage but will have to be on for longer to have the same heating effect.

Only with direct on line motors and incandescent lamps will a reduced voltage also reduce the current and hence conditioning the voltage to these may possibly reduce the electricity bill. But at the cost of dimmer light and slower, less powerful , motors

 

[JohnD]

Might they be selling a load management scheme, where they offer a better tariff in return for the option to reduce your usage in periods of high demand? It would work if there is a lot of electric heating.

 

[Simon35]

Might they be selling a load management scheme, where they offer a better tariff in return for the option to reduce your usage in periods of high demand? It would work if there is a lot of electric heating.

The buildings being supplied are public areas, a group of museums and galleries, either recently-ish built or modernised (within 10-15 years), so I think the heating and lighting load profile is what it is.

Bernard - pretty much my thoughts....anyway, I think she will let them come in and bandy some ideas and figures around, see what they offer.

 

[ericmark]

Before the switched mode power supply, inverter drives, electronic HF ballast units, and pulse width modulated units to drive most items we produced a lot of heat as a by product. To adjust the voltage could reduce the amount of waste due to heat, this of course assumes the heat is waste. But now each unit has the system built into the unit to start with so rather a waste of time fitting one.

If you take as an example the fluorescent lighting, the wire wound ballast unit is very voltage dependent, so over voltage it uses far too much and under voltage it fails to work. The voltage optimisation unit would reduce bills with these lights, however so would fitting HF ballasts, and if you fit a HF ballast then it also starts up the fluorescent faster, uses even less power than the voltage optimisation unit would achieve, reduces the stroboscopic effect, and extends tube life, and makes them slightly brighter. So faced with both options it is clear which is the better option.

This is repeated with many other items, refrigeration units again very voltage dependent, too low and it will trip out and in the end damage the auto re-start device, too high and again wastes power. But fitting an inverter drive will also reduce start load, remove the auto re-start device so clearly it can no longer fail, and allow better control of the device, plus a better power factor.

So the voltage optimisation unit is like the old rotary atomizer fitted under the carburettor in a car, they did work well, but since fuel injection are useless.

 

[winston1]

Absolute waste of money, and the main company selling this snake oil, Vphase, has gone to the wall. Wonder why?

 

[Spark123]

Old wire wound fluorescent ballast type lights may benefit from reducing the voltage, I saw some commercial kits which claimed energy saving for these. They struck at full voltage and then throttled it back to iirc around 100v.

 

[Iggifer]

I've seen those as well, they're entirely different to a VPhase type deal, assume they would require all of the lights on the circuit they're connected to to be of the same type, otherwise you'd throttle say an incandescent lamp back to 100v and it'd be useless

 

[333rocky333]

our company have fitted loads of these
http://www.powerperfector.com/

 

[endecotp]

our company have fitted loads of these
http://www.powerperfector.com/

Crazy.

 

[Nozzle]

Is it a large factory in question? Large industries get metered for MW and MVar - those MVar costing many times more. Perhaps it's MVar management they're after to make all the inductive loads appear to the meter man as a bit more "resistive".

Nozzle

 

[ban-all-sheds]

the main company selling this snake oil, Vphase, has gone to the wall. Wonder why?

Karma from threatening to sic security on me at the Ideal Home Show if I didn't stop telling people that it was snake oil?

 

[ban-all-sheds]

our company have fitted loads of these
http://www.powerperfector.com/

I have a number of Thames bridges for sale, and an iconic iron tower currently in Paris - please let me know if they would be interested.

 

[ericmark]

Take a normal 230V rated lamp – when run at 240V, it will fail after 550 hours instead of 1000, drawing nine per cent more energy.

Define normal! I would say today the normal lamp found in any premises where they are worried about power use is either electronically controlled discharge or LED. Neither will have a quoted life as low as 1000 hours. And in both cases varying the voltage will not make a scrap of difference to power used within the declared range. Last LED I bought was rated 85 ~ 265 Vac.

I would agree a power factor correction unit makes some sense, there is also a case for harmonics, as to transients read Power Line info remover, I hate Power Line, however using a massive using to remove the signal is going OTT, far easier to just unplug the and put in the bin.