What Makes a Power Quality Problem Worth Solving?

Most power quality events won’t shut you down. But when they do, they cost more than just a headache.

The challenge isn’t detecting power quality problems. That’s the easy part. The real question is: Do those issues actually matter to your operation? A dip, a transient, a bit of harmonic distortion—none of these are problems on their own. They’re only problems if your systems are vulnerable to them.

Let’s walk through how to determine that, and why proactive monitoring saves more than it costs.

What’s a Power Quality Problem—Really?

Power quality issues come in many shapes:

Voltage sags or dips
Transients
Swells
Harmonics
Flicker
Interruptions

But none of these are problems unless they affect your systems. If your equipment can handle the wave shape irregularities without missing a beat, no action needed.

The problem comes when susceptibility meets exposure. If your equipment can’t tolerate a dip—or if enough of them add up over time—it’s not just a nuisance. It’s a liability.

For example, during a commissioning test at a data center, step-load tests were used to validate backup generator performance. Monitoring showed voltage stayed within spec during most of the test, but during a 100% impulse load, frequency dipped below 55 Hz. That momentary dip didn’t trip any alarms—but it did reveal the system was skating close to the edge of its tolerance. If the team hadn’t been monitoring, they wouldn’t have known the frequency drift was that severe—or that it could jeopardize compliance with generator specs and UPS tolerances under full load.

Think Beyond the Event: Consider the Cost

Even if your systems are sensitive, that still doesn’t make every event worth fixing. The second piece of the equation is economic exposure.

What’s the cost of downtime?
How long does recovery take?
What does mitigation cost, and how long until it pays off?

If a $10,000 UPS avoids a $50,000 shutdown every six months, it’s a no-brainer. If that same UPS is protecting a non-critical load that goes offline once a year with minimal impact, that money’s better spent elsewhere.

Smart PQ strategy lives in this gray area—balancing cost, risk, and resilience.

Monitoring Is Your Early Warning System

You can’t make informed decisions if you don’t have the data. That’s where power quality monitoring comes in.

It helps you:

Spot problems before they escalate (like signs of capacitor switching issues before they damage gear)
Analyze fault cause and location (so you can stop guessing whether it was utility-side or internal)
Protect mission-critical systems with targeted mitigation
Avoid finger pointing—back your ops team with facts

We sometimes call monitoring the DVR for your facility. When someone says, “Something went wrong at 10:42 a.m.,” you can pull the data and say exactly what happened—and just as important, what didn’t.

Where Do These Problems Start?

According to industry data, around 70% of power quality problems originate inside the facility. Not from the utility.

That means most PQ issues are your responsibility. And the good news is that’s also where you have the most control.

Internal culprits include:

Adjustable speed drives
Poor grounding or wiring
Load switching
Microprocessor-based devices with high sensitivity

Knowing what your system is doing—not just what the utility’s sending you—makes all the difference.

A Tier III data center, for instance, kept experiencing unexplained voltage sags that caused certain racks to reboot intermittently. At first, the center’s technical team suspected issues upstream with the utility feed. But Class A monitoring showed the culprit was internal: a large HVAC unit cycling on under load.

Every time it kicked in, the inrush current created a brief but deep enough sag on the same panel feeding sensitive IT equipment. The monitoring data clearly tied event timestamps to HVAC cycles.

The fix? They added a soft start controller to the HVAC system and moved key server racks to a separate, isolated circuit. No finger pointing. Just facts—and a stable facility..

Standards That Keep You Honest

If you’re investing in monitoring, data consistency matters. That’s why IEC 61000-4-30 Class A compliance is a non-negotiable for serious applications.

It ensures:

Repeatable, trusted measurements
Side-by-side comparability between meters
Confidence when using data for reporting or compliance

You’ll find this in our HDPQ line—and we were the first to offer it.

“If two meters give you two different answers, you can’t trust either. Class A compliance fixes that.” — Ross Ignall, Dranetz Director of Product Management, Marketing & Technical Support

Even if your utility doesn’t require it, compliance with these standards protects you. They give you confidence when you’re justifying upgrades or troubleshooting downtime.

Wrap-Up: PQ Is About What You Can Control

You can’t stop lightning. You can’t change your neighbor’s harmonic emissions. But you can understand how your systems respond to power quality events—and make smart decisions based on that.

Start with the basics: