By Leon White, P.E.
How do you know if you should invest in hydrogen monitoring for your fleet of transformers? Here’s an instructive analogy:
Do you worry if your house is going to burn down? If you’re not worried about it, then why does your house have smoke detectors? If you’re worried about it, do you have more protection than smoke detectors? Have you installed a complex sprinkler system in your house to minimize the chance of your house burning down? Does it have a computer interface with a dashboard and a lot of functions you have no idea how to react to if there’s an alarm?
You can think of transformer failures in the same way you think about the protection you have to alert you to a fire in your house. A smoke detector doesn’t prevent a fire from occurring, but it alerts you to an issue that could mean your house is burning down. In the same way, hydrogen monitoring detects issues inside your transformer by alerting users to something inside actively generating gas.
If you’re responsible for 1,000 transformers and you know that at least 10 of them will fail next year (1%), can you tell me which ones will fail? How many failures do you think you’ll detect BEFORE THE FAILURE by following the conventional practice of installing comprehensive hydrogen monitoring on only 100 (or 10%) of them? How many will you detect BEFORE THE FAILURE if you have hydrogen monitoring on all 1,000 transformers for about the same cost as the 100 complex systems?
H2scan GRIDSCAN 5000 hydrogen sensors are the most widely used sensors in the DGA industry. When you’re evaluating hydrogen monitoring, you should ask if your monitor is from H2scan or has H2scan inside. If so, you’ll be assured of a long, maintenance free life of the hydrogen sensor.
About Leon: Leon White is H2scan’s VP of Transformer Sales & Business Development. He has over 25 years of utility and sales experience including an extensive background in electric substations and online transformer monitoring. Leon can be reached at [email protected]
He brings a proven track record of achieving leading results in sales growth at GE and Qualitrol where he was responsible for a wide range of substation and transformer monitoring products. He is a Professional Engineer and a member of the IEEE Power and Energy Society. He received his Electrical Engineering and MBA degrees from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and is a registered Professional Engineer.
Learn more about H2scan hydrogen monitoring for transformers here.