Part 1 in our Series on How to Protect Medical Equipment from Faulty and Unreliable Electrical Power
Diagnostic Imaging Equipment is highly sensitive to electrical power problems. Massive electrical events such as lightening strikes and total power failures can cause immediate and catastrophic damage to boards, connectors, tubes and other expensive replacement parts on a machine. Most often, though, the same damage will be caused by small flickers, surges, swells, or brownouts, as the electrical components of a machine are overtaxed, worn out, and frayed to the point that a chain of parts failures occurs.
Understanding the different kinds of power problems your medical equipment can be subjected to will help you to identify and prevent potential problems — before you’re hard down and faced with big repair bills, cancelled patient appointments, or glitches in the middle of a procedure.
Common power quality disturbances include surges, spikes, swells, sags or brownouts, noise and outages. All of these power disturbances can cripple the equipment and place the care of the patients at risk.
