SKM / PTW alternatives?

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malachi constant

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Minneapolis
Hi all, consulting engineer here. I've been a user and advocate of SKM/PTW for over 20 years, however as our engineering team has expanded and gone increasingly remote our IT team has struggled to manage SKM licenses (which provide my team members access to the program). I am not here to besmirch SKM because from my (non-IT) perspective the issue could be on my company's end and not on that of the software company, and the software itself is fantastic for my purposes...when I can get access to it. I find myself perpetually locked out of the software and wondering what there are for alternatives out there. We primarily work in 480/208V commercial environments (not industrial, not much medium voltage), and primarily use the software to perform short circuit calcs. We prefer to outsource OCPD studies and arc flash calcs to the contractor (who hires a third party engineer), so those functions aren't heavy uses of ours but we do still use the software to perform such calcs when we're in a pinch. Might be best to PM me as I am not out to start a flame war between competing software...I just don't know of any competing software, and our IT issues have become intractable.
 
If your not providing full studies and just using it as a tool during design , depending on your project types you could cook up an excel sheet based on hand calculation process. That should be good for justifying the rating of the equipment your specifying and providing it on the drawings when needed for building department or something.
 
Charged said:
If your not providing full studies and just using it as a tool during design , depending on your project types you could cook up an excel sheet based on hand calculation process. That should be good for justifying the rating of the equipment your specifying and providing it on the drawings when needed for building department or something.
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I've done hand calcs for occasional "pieces" of a distribution system, but we have too many - and too large of - projects to survive this way.
 
Understood, I misread when you mentioned about the out source. I see your situation now. We use both those softwares . I’ll see how IT handles the License, I know it’s different than some of our other softwares. Maybe give you some ammo with your department
 
Easy Power pretty solid. I learned on SKM and it probably has some of the best features but it is outdated. Easypower is Windows based and easy to use.
 
We moved our dongle-based SKM license to a network model for the same reason, remote work. The license server is running in a VM and everyone has SKM on their PC. There are other power study packages, ETAP, Easy Power, etc., but they will need to run on a network license to solve your problem so you might as well set up SKM on the network and not have to do the retraining.
 
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