Safer is Smarter - Kauai Island Utility Cooperative

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10 KIUC CURRENTS By Randy Alcott Holiday Lighting Safety Tips Decorating your home for the holidays is always a fun and exciting time, but it is no time to get lazy. Hundreds of homes each year are damaged by faulty electrical wiring during the holidays. Whether the cause is overloaded circuits or a bad extension cord, you have to make sure you are as safe as possible and using the best quality equipment you can find. Here are a few simple ways you can ensure that your outdoor Christmas lighting is as safe as possible. ◼ Make your Christmas green using lightemitting diode (LED) lights that use less energy than standard mini bulbs. ◼ Make sure the strings of lights you are using outside have builtin fuses on the lines. Sometimes, these fuses are located in the actual plug. ◼ Use Christmas lights designated for outdoor use only. If you use indoorrated lights, they may not be able to withstand the weather conditions in Hawai‘i, which will cause them to break down much faster. ◼ Use only Christmas lights and electric equipment that has been tested and verified by a reliable testing laboratory. Two reputable laboratories are UL and ETL. Any equipment or lights that have been tested safe will have one of their logos on the packaging. If it doesn’t have it, don’t use it! ◼ If you have a string of lights with a blown bulb, replace it with a bulb of the exact same wattage. ◼ Never tap into your home’s service line to power your outdoor Christmas lights or hang decorations on the line. ◼ Avoid using nails, tacks or metal staples to secure your outdoor Christmas lights. Use insulated hooks instead, and be sure your lights are strung tightly to avoid damage from the wind. ◼ Use only outdoorrated extension cords. Avoid connecting more than three strings of lights to a single extension cord. ◼ All lights should be plugged into a GFCIprotected outlet when used outside. ◼ When it comes time to take down your Christmas decorations and lights, never remove the strings of lights by pulling on the wires. This causes the wires to break free from the sockets and the bulbs to break. Decorating for Christmas doesn’t seem so easy anymore, does it? These tips don’t take long to perform—and imagine having to deal with a fire on Christmas Eve. Take the time to teach your kids these lifelong lessons, and your Christmas decorations and lighting will be tops on the block.
Although a KIUC vehicle may be a common sight around the island, coop employees have a full plate when they are out in the field. With work to be done inspecting and maintaining lines, meters, substations and remote equipment, any help they can get increasing the efficiency of their workload will benefit KIUC and its members. That is why most utilities today rely on an advanced system monitoring tool. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is a set of monitoring and automation technologies that can feed information from remote equipment back to a central control station location—in this case, your electric coop’s computer network. SCADA casts a net to keep track of everything from substations to control breakers and switches, continuously monitoring power distribution equipment status and performance. This information typically gets displayed for review by a dispatcher in the office and is stored in a database for future analysis. If any abnormal situation arises in the system, an alarm sounds so coop staff can respond quickly and accordingly. By Anne Barnes 50yearold technology front and center, forming the backbone to a smarter grid Staff Engineer Brooks Braun shows an updated version of SCADA. Photo by Shelley Paik COOPERATIVE TECHNOLOGY Keeping an Eye on the Grid with SCADA The setup allows automatic generation control of our units and at least partial control over other electrically operable remote devices. For example, on a distribution system without SCADA in place, a lineworker might have to drive a long way to close a particular substation breaker or a plant operator might have to manually regulate a generation unit. With remote control as an option, the same action rests just a mouseclick away. Although SCADA dates to the 1960s, when paired with other grid monitoring devices such as advanced meter infrastructure technology, it forms the backbone of what is now called the “smart grid.” Sources: National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Cooperative Research Network. OCTOBER 2010 11
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Page 17 and 18: Director Ben Sullivan gives his rep
Page 19 and 20: Members enjoy chili and rice plates
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Page 29 and 30: KIUC submitted a revised Short Term
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Page 43 and 44: LAST PAYMENT AMOUNT: 75.00 RECEIVED
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