How low-quality power can cost your business money

Many businesses simply assume that comes from the plug sockets in their premises is always at a very high quality. However, it is actually true that power quality can vary.

It should be noted that the government mandates that power quality must be maintained above a specific level in order to protect not only businesses and organisations but individuals as well. However, no system is perfect and sometimes errors do occur.

A drop in quality, however, can be a major problem for businesses and it can potentially cause everything from voltage sags and surges through to equipment failure and outages. Not only are these problems a real pain to deal with but they can also cause a range of additional issues especially if you have equipment that runs constantly. 

If you have worries about power in your building it can be worth investing in a power quality analyser. “Anaylsers are easy to use and produce extremely reliable results,” says John Outram, director at power quality specialists Outram Research “they can be used to understand the quality of the power coming into your property”. 

Having low quality power could be costing your company a significant amount of money every year. Working with specialists to resolve the issue can actually potentially save you money through reducing your losses on low quality energy. Here we take a look at some of the ways that low quality power costs you money. 

Causing issues with your equipment

If your businesses utilises important and specific equipment as a part of its normal operation, then you need to be very careful about your power quality. Low quality power has the potential to actually damage equipment if it runs through that equipment for any period of time. Many pieces of electronic equipment rely on a highly specific level of power at all times, and low quality power can cause a huge range of problems. 

Of course this can even get to a point where the equipment needs to be replaced, which can come at a huge cost to the business. Even when the problems are not as severe, long-term damage can stil be caused. And this could be extremely frustrating know that this problem could be avoided.

Downtime for the company

It is not just the cost of the equipment that can be a problem if you have low power quality issues – it has a knock-on effect. If your equipment isn’t working correctly or becomes broken due to the power quality, this can mean that it is no longer operational, and that means a period of downtime for your business. 

Downtime can be extremely expensive to a business. If you assume that your operation runs at full capacity, having to lose a day or even multiple days due to broken or damaged equipment can drastically reduce your output. 

Additional maintenance required

Low quality power will create issues with your equipment, or even problems that affects the whole company such as outages, flickering lights and more. One of the biggest issues here is that these problems will require maintenance which is another cost to the company. 

Maintenance that you carry out might paper over the problem, but it won’t get to the heart of it. And it may be that fixing the issue would require remedial costs, but it is going to worth it in the long run. 

Higher energy costs

It is also worth pointing out that low quality power can also lead to higher energy costs for your business. This is because as equipment struggles to run on lower quality it actually uses more electricity. This means that you can be sucking more energy into your system at a high price, even though you are getting less out of it. 

Businesses can’t be successful when they allow costs to spiral out of control and this is a good example where it would be beneficial to regain control to bring those costs down. 

Final thoughts

If you are concerned about low quality power affecting your business, it is definitely worth working with professionals to ascertain whether you are getting the right level of power into your premises. Doing so may have a fee, but this will be offset by the savings that you will make from restoring high quality energy.