Hot panels and plugs

[gar]

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electgut21:

You need to look closely at the plug and socket failures and try to determined where the greatest heat was generated.

If the failure was at the contact interface between the plug and socket, then do some contact voltage drop measurements under operating load conditions. It is possible you have some defective components, or excessive current for the plug and socket.

Voltage drop measurement must be made directly from the base elements of the plug and socket, not from the wires. This eliminates the voltage drop of the wire to plug component interface.

When I ran the tests of my earlier post I used a standard 120 V plug and socket because I had those at home. I will look at the shop to see if I have a large twist lock pair to test.

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[electgut21]

I made a mistake on the ballast to bulb. It is 1 ballast to two bulbs 65 watts each . Each module has 20 ballast and 5 electronic devices that the bulbs plugs into . eight bulbs to each electonic device . This is a ulta violet module.
i also took a frequncey reading on the neutral and it was 180 hz. 60hz on the lines. Also took temp. of some breakers and they were 200f. Some of these modules have electronic and magnetic ballast connected to the same electronics and though maybe this is causing the harmonic current. Someone also said that a k- rated transformer would not help.
All wiring is # 10 s cord or #10 thhn.

 

[__dan]

mmm

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The shorter UV wavelenght carries a lot more energy than the same thing in the visible light spectrum. Protect your eyes (special glasses that filter the transmitted lamp spectrum) if you are exposed to the lamps when they are on. You could easily get skin or eyeball burns from that stuff at the power levels you are talking about.

Sounds very specialized, the lamps are doing something like disinfecting or pumping high energy photons into a chemical reaction. Essentially, the equipment is custom built and engineered for each application.

I would gather as much data as you have described and get on the phone or email with the module manufacturer's engineers first. It's a very custom built system. They should be able to give you the wiring requirements and precautions / anomalies. Any changes may need their approval.

One last thought, a variable. If you are stuck with the ballasts and they are normally characteristically a noisy high harmonic load, look to see if the ballasts are multivoltage input and can be fed 277 volt. If you can feed the modules 277 you may consider a step up transformer, change the panelboard and twistloks to 277 Y, refeeding the existing circuits with 277. This will get the line current down a lot and possible mitigate the bad effects that go up and down with line current

I would go over the problems with the manufacturer first.

 

[electgut21]

There are 18 120 circuits @30a. each with gfci protection , they use epd type cb. We shut down each circuit one at a time and found the frequncey drop down to 60 hz. Found 3 modules were the problem. With the 3 off everything is fine , we have to find the cause . After opening up the troughs we found wire connections that over heated. Also most of the epd cb don't work right.
We like to thank everone that help us.