Voltage Optimisation

So you are a scam artist looking for accomplices then?

I know your type. "Voltage Optimization" is an expensive implementation of an old concept that yields next to no tangible benefits. It's based on the false concept of "unstable power" from the utility, which in and of itself is untrue. Then you throw in crap about power factor improvement saving energy and how reducing the voltage improves efficiency. The trifecta of scam concepts that suck in the non-electrical engineering customer base you target.

Unfortuately some over keen salesmen have tarnished this market. We supply voltage regulation to reduce the costs of certain loads and it works well. We make no claims about PFC, harmonic suppression or phase balancing. If you wish, I would be glad to send you several respectable independent reports.

Enter the Monty Python team Vikings.

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Shadup! Bloody Vikings

Do I really have to be a SAP to work in this field??

I have been off the tools for a while so kind of forgotten and missed the good old sparky humour!

Stick around here and your sense of humour will return, otherwise you'll go mad along with the rest of us!

Dennis

you would be better off getting your own team, as if you have work all over the UK then trying to get a local contractor to work EXACTLY to way you want will be a devil's own job.. and if they don't understand the concept and technology.. very dangerous!!

One method is to have your team do the install and get a local NICEE contractor to inspect it.. I've done that...

However getting your NICEE is a lot easier than you think.

ps how much you paying?

My point, your image:

Right here I see snake-oil. Your "Pre-stabilization" graph shows, roughly, an incoming voltage that hovers between 500 and 550VAC. Being that you are in the UK, the average incoming voltage would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 415V max. So what the heck are you trying to show here? THEN you show the "Post-stabilization" voltage of 220V! Come on, are you serious?! You are showing apples and oranges, so I now do not believe ANYTHING you say after that. The only people who would be fooled by this kind of blatant chicanery are non-electrical people.

I rest my case.

You have misread the labelling of the graph. The blue side states KW not voltage and the green side states Volts P-N at normal UK levels.

Then why is the brown line in the left graph labeled "voltage"?

What do your example voltages have to do with the "HV zone"?

First point, on the right vertical axis of the graph, the brown P-N voltage line shows a pre average voltage 244v (quite normal) dropped down to 220v.

High voltage was mentioned because for the highest savings (controlling 100% of the load) we install the equipment (on the low voltage side) where the HV transformer steps down to the LV side.

That was all irrelevant, if not outright vapid.

Vague buzzwords just don't cut it, but snow jobs are easily sold to gullible customers.

Agreed, the market potentially has been soiled. But his market has a lot of different technologies/products. As an engineer originally I thought exactly the same. However our customers are high end, i.e. oil refinery, MOD, chemical plant, large hospitals. Their respectable top electrical engineers have scrutinised our product very carefully and then made orders.

Neither you, nor any of these high-end customers, has given a straightforward and cogent description of how and why your system supposedly works. Your graph might just as well have come from Darrel Huff's How To Lie with Statistics.

I am well aware of how voltage regulation can be valuable in environments subject to voltage dips. Putting it simply, the voltage can be boosted so as to remain high enough, and then regulated back to a near-constant value. This is primarily to ensure adequate voltage to sensitive devices, but is not particularly an energy-saving measure, though there may be a minor benefit of that. For this purpose, small units dedicated to a few electronic devices will usually do the job.

Motors basically draw the energy needed to match their loads; not much more and normally not less. Lightly loaded motors may have low power factor, and correcting that may save some current draw (kva) and minor I²R wiring losses, but only minimal energy (kw) savings, if any.

In your graph, the upper boundaries of the blue and green areas might conceivably represent instantaneous kw, but not kwh. (Over time, kwh would increase monotonically.) The areas under the upper boundary sort of represent kwh, but they aren't really normalized to anything such as hours. The horizontal axis wasn't labeled, anyway. To a real mathematician or physicist, the graph is a joke, basically a dead giveaway. Especially the brown "voltage" line on the left that is not indexed to a voltage scale. (Which I already mentioned.)

Your "heavy-hitter" clients may have money to burn, greenwashing agendas, or some sort of inside path to subsidies for alleged energy-saving measures; but I wouldn't accept anything on their say-so. A competent statistician or experimental designer would already know that anecdotal and testimonial "evidence" is very weak, along with the reasons why.

But if you want to dig yourself deeper and deeper into a hole, by all means keep going.

I have heard in the US there have been some VO horror stories and one product banned completely, so I respect a guarded view. Voltage stabilisation is used for volt drop applications and can increase the voltage to allow for dips. Voltage regulation never initially steps up the voltage but drops it to 220v (UK install) and holds it +/- half a volt, so the output voltage graph is flat as illustrated. That means electrical equipment will last longer with less maintenance because it is running at it's designed optimum voltage of 220v.

If motors do not have VSD controls which change the impedance then the savings are very good.

Occasionally there will be a green-wash case but for most customers (in this long recession) the hardest barrier is the finance director. They pressurise the electrical engineers to be responsible for a fast return on investment, so we aim for 2 to 3 years if possible. That can only be known by conducting very detailed and long data logging before and after installation with a detailed visual site survey, noting rating, load and duty cycle.

We are not interested in a one transformer job, as most large sites have several on a HV ring. We want the other transformers after the first install test case, so the data logging results (conducted by the customer) have to be good otherwise we walk away.

Just thinking that slightly undervolted motors do run slower as the slip curve 'flattens' a little bit so runs a little slower at the same load torque level. This drops the power along with the speed - hey presto - energy saving (sic).

On centrifugal loads this is more accentuated as load torque drops with the speed - a double benefit (sic sic).

I guess most people don't monitor their production output as carefully as the wattmeter in these 'tests', hence the extravagent claims of some optimisation devices.

There is a big Voltage Optimisation (VO) scam going on in the UK at the current time because the government are starting the 'Green Deal' which supports both the commercial and domestic sectors.

Generally, people seem to realise that the claims being made by these VO companies are absolute snake oil. The problems seem to start when people start trying to sell, aggressively, what is effectively a three phase technology for single phase applications i.e. the domestic market. Taking these issues in order:

The upto 13% savings on your electricity bill claims by this technology are what most people see them as, absolute snake oil. the term upto includes zero and in actual fact these VO devices which were originally designed for three phase lighting applications will not work with thermostatically controlled equipment; never have done never will do. Thermostatically controlled equipment as a reminder, is most of the heavy current using equipment in a domestic setting such as electrical water and space heating, refrigeration, oven...etc (most white goods). It doesn't stop there because neither will they work with modern switch mode power supplies (SMPS) like Low Energy lighting, computers...etc (most post millenium brown goods). Infact most of these companies went bankrupt in the late nineties when their bread and butter application three phase lighting switched (pardon the pun) from the old choke based flourescent units to electronic ballast based units. In summary, therefore it is upto 13% of a very small percentage of electrical usage in the home mostly old style incandescent lighting (not LE lighting) and equipment which is powered by old style low frequency transformers.

The sad thing is that when people are sold on the idea of saving energy they will pay a lot of money to get their electrical installation upto the spec required by the electricians who install these VO units. And therein lies the rub most of these companies are jumped up electrical contracting companies trying to turn a fast buck whilst queering the pitch for innovative electrical energy saving technologies that are in the pipeline and making their way to market. Most of these new innovative technologies are grid tied so that the saving is immediate and visible to the customer and are plug and play with no need for expensive installations.

The really sad thing is that although these VO companies are happy to go into a sales patter concerning phase balancing to sell their three phase equipment, they do not mention that in a single phase application the VO unit itself is a potential phase imbalancing element to the circuit. The imbalance in this case however effects the grid itself (causing heating effects in the neutral conductor from the substation to the consumer). The overall effect of the VO unit installation, therefore, is to increase the overall carbon footprint of the grid itself. Unfortunately, this is not visible to the consumer.

GA from me...

I've NEVER been able to work out how dropping the voltage SAVES money.

simple maths..voltage down... current up.. current up, KWH up... Yes?

A statement on the web site "how it works" does not really explain.. but does say this;

An example: a 3kW kettle rated 230v will require the same energy input for the water to reach the desired temperature, therefore any reduction in voltage will require the kettle to be on for longer. However, operate that kettle at 240v and it then consumes 3.27kW and the life of the element is reduced.

Am I wrong is saying that the kettle element is a fixed resistance? Therefore my earlier statement of "voltage down... current up.. current up, KWH up" is correct. MY working out tells me this...

3000watts divided by 230volts = 13.04amps. Is this figure of 3Kw the kettle rating and NOT the amount of power consumed?

Same kettle, new voltage of 240volt

3000w divided by 240v = 12.5amps...

Now using the example from the statement "the kettle consumes 3.27kw at 240v..

3270w divided by 240v = 13.62amp.

How can you say that the rating of the kettle has increased?

Who said "snake oil".. try good old fashion BULL Sh*t!

It is difficult to see this but remember a kettle is effectively a thermostatically controlled load which is purely resistive (non reactive) although there is some drift with temperature.

With incandescents lighting wysiwyg in other words as you drop the voltage for a fixed ohms/per light element (see ohms law), the current reduces as well so the light intensity (e.g. in lumins or candela) is reduced. This reduces the running cost and arguably this will increase the life span of the said lighting.

With Switch Mode Power Supplies (SMPS) as you decrease the voltage the unit (which is electronically 'self adjusting') tries to draw more current.

With old style choke based fluorescent lighting the units will spark and run at a lower voltage and current dependant on the fluorescent material used to render the tube which can make a significant saving in a three phase scenario (e.g. N lighting units/phase). This will not work with electronic ballast (see SMPS) type fluorescent units.

With three phase motor equipment. Running the motors at the lower end of their European harmonised voltage range does reduce the power dissipated in the motors, which also reduces the number of commutator brush changes required per motor lifetime which can have significant savings in terms of maintenance costs and cost of downtimes along with the reduced energy running costs. Even though there is a reduction in torque/speed at the output of these motors it is within the original design parameters of the equipment. Also, if the motors are part of a thermostatically controlled equipment (such as a refrigeration compressor) arguably even in three phase equipment no energy saving will be made. Often a saving is reported, however and this is most likely to do with the phase balancing action of three phase vo installations. Phase balancing is a genuine and important means of reducing losses in three phase equipment. The national grid being three phase means that phase balancing is intrinsic to the grid and there are lots of scholarly articles on the the phase imbalances and energy losses introduced by single phase circuits.

Any single phase application is bogus because of the phase imbalance introduced by the VO unit topology in circuit. The companies marketing this equipment claim that this will would be aggregated out if every property had one!

You said.."a kettle is effectively a thermostatically controlled load"

Well.. maybe.. but for me, you switch the kettle on, then once the water has boiled, it switches off.

Going through single phase Voltage optimisation articles on line; it would appear that the Carbon Trust in their publication Voltage Management are not endorsing off the shelf voltage optimisation equipment. They recommend that voltage optimisation companies discuss energy usage with the customer to provide a more bespoke voltage management strategy tailored to the customers needs. One assumes that this puts the customer in a stronger position vis bogus claims.

The other thing is that single phase VO companies say that VO doesn't work with thermostatically controlled heating equipment but that it does work best with refrigeration and air con units?! Refrigeration and air con are both thermostatically controlled. The savings they are claiming are approximately the same as the reduction in power that they are claiming for the VO units overall. Again one assumes that these units simply run 'slower' which is scary for refrigeration equipment. I would not use VO with refrigeration unless the manufacturer endorsed it because although VO runs equipment within it's European Harmonised Voltage Range there is no guarantee that the manufacturers of electrical equipment endorse their equipment for use permanently at the lowest end of this range which is what VO does.

would you not agree that, for example, A/C unit are designed to work a certain way, with the compressor working at a certain RPM with a certain load, therefore no matter what you put onto that unit, VFD or VO or anything else..which will change the operating perimeters, the unit will not perform as designed!

The same can be said for other equipment..... this VO is not an exact science and is not as good as it sounds.... I would not recommend this to anyone

Voltage Optimisation does run electrical equipment within it's design parameters which in the uk is the European harmonised voltage range (approx 207v a.c. to 256v a.c.). However, there is not a single manufacturer who will endorse running equipment at the lowest end of this range, permanently or even for a sustained period because, as you say you don't get something for nothing. Notably, in single phase VO the losses come on the other side by unbalancing the phases of the grid.

The better three phase Voltage Optimisation units work really well but this is not particularly because of their vo action. It is more likely to do with the phase balancing action that the better vo units have got. So VO is really a white elephant, a sales pitch.