How to analyze the effects of a “power outage” at your company

The prolonged interruption of the electrical system causes a total shutdown of facilities and equipment—unless auxiliary generators are available. But how can you get detailed and accurate information on what happened in your installation?

On Monday, 28 April, the Iberian Peninsula experienced an unusual and unprecedented blackout. Lights, public transport, industry, the service sector, communications, lifts, traffic lights... everything went out of service. For a few chaotic and historic hours, we lived without electricity. According to official sources, 15 gigawatts suddenly “disappeared” from the power grid—equivalent to 60% of the energy being consumed at the time.

Companies like Circutor were forced to halt all commercial, manufacturing and logistics activities, which severely impacted their normal operations. This event created uncertainty about how the loads within the installation were affected. There are solutions for obtaining reliable data on the extent of the issue, such as power quality analyzers, which can record and report events involving the electrical supply, and detect incidents during a system restart.

The role of the QNA-600 quality analyzer at Circutor

At Circutor, we used our QNA-600 power quality analyzer, which helped us understand the magnitude of the power outage even during the event, thanks to its built-in battery that keeps communication active and allows its data to be downloaded from any computer.

The QNA-600 is certified as Class A according to the latest edition of the IEC 61000-4-30 standard (Edition 3), which ensures that the data recorded meets the established accuracy and method requirements. This makes the device an essential tool for demonstrating compliance or non-compliance with quality standards, both for electric companies or distributors (suppliers) and for customers (subscribers).

How did the “power outage” affect Circutor?

The following graph shows the voltage variation recorded by our QNA-600, installed at Circutor, including detailed information about the event's duration. This data allows us to better understand the impact and behavior of the electrical supply in our installation, which was completely without service.