Energy MonitoringPower Quality
Power quality faults damage equipment long before anything reaches the bill
Voltage sags, phase imbalance, harmonics and poor power factor do their work quietly: motors that fail early, drives that trip for no stated reason, and charges on the bill nobody has traced. None of this reaches a monthly statement. It is visible only in continuous measurement at the distribution board, where every event carries a timestamp you can set against a production record.
Start from the symptom your team already reports
The work starts from the fault your engineers keep reporting, then measures whether the suspected cause is the actual cause. The table below is the route from one to the other.
| What you observe | What it usually indicates | What we measure to confirm it |
|---|---|---|
| Motors and drives failing earlier than they should | Sustained voltage imbalance or harmonic heating in the windings. Rarely one dramatic event, usually years of small ones. | Per-phase voltage and current logged continuously, phase imbalance calculated across the campaign, harmonic distortion measured at the affected feeders. |
| Breakers and drives tripping with no obvious cause | Voltage sags on the incoming supply, or a start-up inrush colliding with another load. Very often recorded as operator error because nothing was measuring. | Event logging with timestamps at the incomer and the affected board, correlated against your production or operations log. |
| Billed capacity higher than the work the plant is doing | Maximum demand is billed in kVA, not in kW. A plant drawing 800 kW at 0.95 power factor is billed on 842 kVA; the same 800 kW at 0.80 is billed on 1,000 kVA — 18.8 percent more capacity for identical work. The usual cause is large inductive load — motors, compressors, chillers, lifts — running at low load factor with no correction, or with correction that has failed. | Power factor and reactive power at the incomer and at each heavy motor load, over the full operating cycle rather than a spot reading. |
| One phase running noticeably hotter than the others | Single-phase loads distributed unevenly across the three phases, which wastes capacity and stresses the neutral. | Per-phase current at the board over time, so the imbalance is quantified and the rebalancing can be planned against figures. |
| Consumption that does not match what the site is doing | Unmetered or unauthorised connections downstream of the measurement point, or a metering error. | Measured consumption at the incomer reconciled against the sum of the sub-meters and against the utility bill. |
Permanent meters and campaign analysers
The two record different things, and the distinction sets what the report can claim. Any proposal you receive should say which of them produced each finding.
Always on
Your permanent metering
The meters installed for energy monitoring already record the quality picture continuously: per-phase voltage and current, active, reactive and apparent power, power factor, supply frequency and phase loading. That gives trend and context — how power factor moves with production, whether imbalance is constant or shift-dependent.
Campaign
Power quality analysers
For harmonic distortion, voltage sags and swells, and transient events, calibrated power quality analysers are installed at the critical supply points — typically the main incomer, the transformer secondary and the feeds to the affected equipment — and logged for 7 to 30 days. The window is set to cover shift changes, start-up loads and grid events.
Client result
Fire risk identified
Voltage instability and unmetered load recorded — KCCA Usafi Market
Power quality monitoring at Kampala’s Usafi Market recorded load drawing on the market supply outside the metered distribution, and voltage instability at the distribution board severe enough to present a fire risk. Both were identified, quantified and reported to KCCA.
Read full case studyWhat the report delivers
Measurement record
The full logged data set per measurement point — voltage profile, harmonic distortion, power factor and logged events — with the measurement window and instrument placement stated.
Event timeline
Power quality events lined up against equipment trips, production interruptions and abnormal consumption, so cause and coincidence can be told apart.
Power factor correction case
Where correction is justified, a capacitor bank specification sized from the measured reactive demand, with the payback shown against the charge it removes and the assumptions stated.
Remediation priority list
Findings ranked by financial and operational impact against implementation effort, so your engineering team knows what to do first and what can wait for the next budget cycle.
Where a power factor charge is appearing on the bill, the correction case and the billing check usually run together — see utility bill verification.
Part of the monitoring service
This is one of the things Orijtech reads out of your monitoring data. It is not a separate installation and it needs no separate hardware.
Find out what is actually damaging your equipment
Tell us the symptom. The site survey decides where the instruments go.
Book a site assessment