This year, a leading South African supplier and manufacturer of uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs), proudly celebrates the supply of continuous power to blue chip and industrial companies in the South African market for an uninterrupted 40 years.

We are facing an ever-increasing power crisis in this country due to a combination of poor maintenance of power provision facilities and the overloading of our power grids in an effort to meet the huge building and industrial boom in South Africa . No longer are power failures an infrequent irritation, but rather a daily or weekly occurrence that is having a huge impact on our ability to conduct business and on our daily living conditions.

Important considerations

The power-outage threat has spawned a proliferation of new generator and UPS vendors, the unscrupulous of which are preying on our lack of technical knowledge to flog us standby systems that can sometimes do us more harm than good.

Merely inserting a generator into the electrical supply system is not necessarily going to solve the problem. Even if the generator has an automatic start-up and change-over feature, the power break of 10-45 seconds before the 'genny' starts up will have already wreaked havoc with any computer, process control or communication system involved. This is where a UPS comes into the picture, to bridge the gap between power failure and generator start-up. Then there are the technical considerations. Generators should be evaluated on aspects such as output voltage quality and regulation, frequency control and performance at altitude. Petrol vs. diesel is a major consideration from a safety and insurance point of view. Then there are noise and air-pollution factors to be considered.

Not all UPSs are compatible with any old generator that is coupled up as many unsuspecting customers discovered in the Western Cape during last year's Koeberg crisis. Most of the sales personnel in hardware and computer superstores, that are now 'expertly' flogging UPS and generator combinations, lack technical expertise in this area. They are technically unaware of how frequency and voltage instability or harmonic mismatches can lead to far more severe hardware problems and failures than before. The generator designed to drive an angle-grinder on a building site is not necessarily suited to drive a sensitive file-server, PABX or even an expensive home theatre system.

It is important to consult a professional electrical engineer or an established  company  to ensure that the generator and UPS are technically and performance compatible, especially for mission-critical applications where lives are at stake or for commercial operations where downtime equates to revenue lost.

Many companies already have UPS systems in place but should take care to ensure that the system is fully functional. Too often the UPS, buried in a basement storeroom, has not been properly serviced since it was first installed. Finding out at the instant of a power failure that the UPS batteries are long past their replacement date makes ownership of that UPS somewhat pointless.

Be careful too, that unscrupulous 'agents' do not offer cheaper service and battery replacement rates purely because they are actually supplying inferior skills and components. Do not let price be your only decision-making criterion. After all, if you were going skydiving would you purposely set out to buy the cheapest parachute or, worse, let a novice re-pack your chute for the next jump?

Read Past News Articles:           "Continued Power Cuts"                     -  January 18th 2008