Matching power protection to system requirements

Designing power protection components – uninterruptible power systems (UPS), emergency lighting inverters, generators, and isolated power supplies (IPS) – into a hospital or other healthcare facility’s electrical distribution system can be challenging. Each department’s evolving risk and resilience needs must be balanced against budgetary constraints, while also complying with all relevant legislation. Alex Emms, Operations director at Kohler Uninterruptible Power, examines the issues, and offers some practical ideas for design solutions.

Healthcare estates, and indeed standalone healthcare buildings – from GPs’ surgeries to large acute hospitals – require power infrastructures that can be both complex and challenging to set up and maintain. Today’s healthcare involves many specialised functions, with steady growth in both the volume and type of applications needing electrical power. Additionally – with their healthcare dimension – such applications are typically critical, and demand power of both good quality and high availability. Accordingly, it may be tempting to simply design in the highest possible resilience across the entire estate, to avoid the possibly extremely serious consequences to human wellbeing and business continuity of a ‘system crash’. However, to do so could well exceed available budgets, and simultaneously create unwelcome complexity. On some sites, there may not even be room to accommodate an excessive amount of protection equipment. 

So, a realistic question for healthcare decision-makers could be: ‘How can I find the balance between investment and resilience that is most appropriate for the criticality of any given application?’ Such personnel can find answers to this question within the Department of Health’s Health Technical Memorandum 06-01, Electrical Services supply and distribution document, which classifies the levels of risk that loss of electrical system supply can pose to both patients and business continuity. This provides a background against which an appropriate solution to each application can be designed, where resilience levels are carefully balanced against costs. With this background, the document discusses best practice, and references standards related to the design, installation, and maintenance, of electrical services