Hospital's Power Outage Problem Solved

A lightning storm caused a fault that resulted in the operation of a re-closure of the utility feed to this large city hospital. The resulting outage affected critical medical diagnostic equipment, including the angio suite cath lab x-ray systems, MRI and CAT scan devices. Since the hospital had invested in UPS and emergency generation systems, this “unexplained” outage was quite disturbing and potentially costly.


By monitoring the incoming and outgoing power from a UPS supplying critical power to the Cath Lab X-Ray System and using the cross triggering comparison feature, the Signature System was able to pinpoint the power outage problem. The Signature System verified the interruption of the utility supply and that the UPS was doing its job, providing a “clean” supply of power to the load. However, twenty seconds passed before the emergency generator came on-line, causing downtime and confusion. The Signature System data enabled the customer to determine that the X-ray Emergency Power Off switch was being incorrectly fed directly by emergency power, rather than feeding the UPS as was specified in the hospital’s power system design.