National critical power specialist, Powertecnique, has upgraded two UPS (uninterruptible power supply) systems to a Northamptonshire police station to support the critical police communications infrastructure, and ensure that the building is never offline.
Peter Chai-Tsai, Sales and Marketing Director at Powertecnique, explains: “We contacted the facilities department of Northamptonshire Police and offered them a consultation to review its current systems. During this review we found that the existing UPS units weren’t functioning as efficiently as they could, so we presented the facilities team at Northamptonshire Police with some options to improve it.”
Based on this recommendation, Powertecnique ended up supplying two 30kVA eKasar units in an N+1 configuration with a three-string common battery which supports various security systems. Configuring the batteries in this way meant that they could be shared between the two new UPS modules to keep the infrastructure of the site up and running. Having the two UPS in an N+1 configuration guarantees that should one unit fail, the other will be able to seamlessly support the load and keep police station operational.
The eKasar units are designed to protect critical systems which cannot be at risk of being powered from a poor quality electrical supply. They have a high operating efficiency of 96.5% at 100% load, which has enabled Powertecnique to gain accreditation for five of its eKasar products from the government’s Energy Technology List through the Carbon Trust.
Chai-Tsai continues, “Our engineers were mindful that we didn’t disturb an operational police station during installation, so planned the entire project to minimise disruption and downtime. There was only the briefest period of planned downtime to the existing systems.
“We managed this by designing a solution that fitted over the top of the existing battery and switchgear, replacing both UPS’ and tidying the wiring for the installations. We like to understand customers’ requirements and present them with an option that fits them technically and commercially to get the best solution for everyone involved.”
