Friday, August 29, 2008

Generator Redundancy

Re: Generator Survey

I am trying to ascertain the range of generator coverage you all have? Until we added a new ED, we have been fortunate enough to be able to:

Power 100% of the hospital with generator power (fairly nusual I suspect?)

We have 2 - 750KVA generators, 1- can carry the load with a medium A/C load, therefore we essentially have redundancy, should one of them fail for any reason. With a heavy A/C load, we'd have to shed 1 or more transfer switches depending on the load.

When we added 36,000 sf for the new ED and education/admin addition, the wisdom of the engineers was to put this addition on a new, single, separate 550KVA generator, w/o a transfer switch back to our 2 original generators, therefore, should it fail, the ED has only Life Safety (lighting only), (we fed life safety back to to the original generators, just in case of
failure.)

Here's my issue: I suspect we are all over the board on generator coverage ability, as well as redundancy? Therefore I need to know if my belt and suspenders concern is shared among you in your own shops. This new ED generator has failed to start 2x in test since February, therefore, I want to install a transfer switch to be able to power the ED, should the new ED generator fail (+/- $75,000 job). Can you answer the following questions, while identifying your hopsital for me?

1. What %, or level of coverage can your generator/s provide?

2. Do you have more than 1 generator?

3. If you have more than 1, can it pick up the load should the primary fail (how much redundancy capacity)?

4. Hospital Name:

Other comments are appreciated.!

2 comments:

Maine Healthcare Engineers said...

1. What %, or level of coverage can your generator/s provide? About 50% at Hospital campus and about 35% at Long term care campus.

2. Do you have more than 1 generator? 1 at each campus

3. If you have more than 1, can it pick up the load should the primary fail how much redundancy capacity)? N/A

We are relatively small and don’t have redundant permanent generators. I haven’t had a Generator fail to start when needed. We had a fail to start once when the service tech had left the charger off and batteries eventually went weak, but this was noticed during weekly test thank goodness.

Maine Healthcare Engineers said...

Here's something I found that may be useful for reference:

http://www.ashe.org/ashe/products/whitepapers/07an/title.html

Scroll down to "Planning for Power Failures".