SandC TripSaver II Cutout Mounted Reclosers Instruction Manual

SandC TripSaver II Cutout Mounted Reclosers

Specifications

• Product Name: Reclosers
• Feature: Lateral Protection Strategy
• Manufacturer: Excellence Through Innovation

Product Information

Rethinking Your Lateral Protection Strategy with Reclosers is crucial for improving system reliability and customer satisfaction.
Reclosers help prevent unnecessary truck rolls and reduce outages on lateral lines, ultimately leading to cost savings and improved service quality.

Product Usage Instructions

Understanding Systemwide Problems

• Identify the existing issues in your lateral-protection strategy that may be causing sustained outages or momentary interruptions.

Improving Reliability

• Deploy Reclosers to mitigate faults on lateral lines, preventing interruptions that impact SAIDI, SAIFI, and MAIFI scores. Ensure distributed generation resources remain online during short interruptions.

Enhancing Operations & Maintenance

• Utilize Reclosers to reduce unnecessary truck rolls and minimize equipment servicing requirements. This helps in optimizing O&M costs and allows line crews to focus on critical tasks.

Boosting Customer Satisfaction

• By reducing outages and improving restoration times with Reclosers, enhance customer satisfaction levels and minimize complaints. This contributes to a positive customer experience and supports future system improvements.

Addressing Environmental Concerns

• Switching to Reclosers can help in reducing environmental impact by eliminating oil-based byproducts and lowering spark risks associated with other devices like fuses.

FAQ

Q: How do Reclosers improve system reliability?

A: Reclosers help in quickly restoring power after momentary interruptions, reducing outage durations, and improving overall system reliability.

Q: Are Reclosers environmentally friendly?

A: Yes, Reclosers are more environmentally friendly compared to traditional devices like fuses, as they eliminate oil-based byproducts and reduce spark risks.

• Dispatching truck rolls to respond to overhead faults may be a frequent side-effect of your organization’s existing lateral-protection strategy.
• But, did you know more than 80% of faults on overhead distribution circuits occur on laterals? Depending on your existing lateral-protection strategy, this can pose a range of challenges to your system.
• Sustained outages resulting from temporary faults may cause unnecessary truck rolls, boosting costly O&M expenses and negatively impacting overall system reliability.
• Even momentary outages have a major effect on your system. Customers are accustomed to an always-connected world and are even growing intolerant of momentary outages, which may last only a few seconds.
• A couple of seconds may seem trivial, but they end up costing the U.S. economy twice as much as sustained interruptions.*
• Past reliability improvements on your system have likely focused on feeders and neglected the modernization of lateral lines—to the detriment of end customers.
• As the grid advances, it’s time to reevaluate this approach. Examining your existing protection strategy on the last miles of your grid can reveal significant customer-reliability improvement opportunities.

What Systemwide Problems Do You Need to Solve?

Reliability

• Depending on your existing lateral-protection strategy, faults may either cause sustained outages or widen the impact of momentary interruptions on your system, regardless of whether they were temporary.
• These interruptions have a detrimental impact on SAIDI, SAIFI, and MAIFI scores, preventing you from improving overall system reliability.
• Additionally, distributed generation resources are becoming more prevalent on distribution feeders and are easily knocked offline by short interruptions.

Operations & Maintenance

• Frequent outages caused by temporary faults may be causing your organization thousands in unnecessary truck rolls.
• Or you may have a large inventory of devices that need regular servicing, requiring you to pull equipment down and transport it to a service shop.
• Time-consuming O&M tasks rack up monumental costs over time and take your line crews away from addressing more important jobs.

Customer Satisfaction

• Frequent outages place an undue burden on your end customers—especially those at the edge of the grid who wait longer for power to be restored.
• Customer complaints cause headaches for your customer service representatives, public relations team, and line crews who are coming face to face with frustrated customers in the field.
• On top of this, low customer satisfaction levels are linked to less support for future system improvements.*

Environmental Concerns

• Oil-based byproducts from hydraulic reclosers can have harmful health effects on wildlife, human operators, and local ecosystems. Other devices, such as fuses, carry high spark risks.

Truck Rolls O&M Costs You May Be Overlooking

• It’s easy to dismiss how much truck rolls for standard maintenance operations cost your organization.
• If your organization is guessing the cost, you’re likely underestimating it.
• With all costs included, truck rolls can be as expensive as $1,000.

If you are skeptical, consider these expenditures you may be overlooking:

Variable Costs

Crew Costs

• Crew costs include those you would typically expect when considering truck-roll costs, such as each crew member’s salary or hourly wages and benefits.
• Additionally, repair work typically takes place after a storm hits, when you’re paying a storm or hazard duty premium for your crew. Overtime premiums also often apply for truck rolls.

Trip Costs

• The cost of the trip itself includes the price of fuel multiplied by the distance you typically travel to and from the location of the fault, otherwise known as your average trip length.
• Don’t forget to account for the average miles per gallon your utility vehicle gets, as well as the amount of time crews spend making stops along the way.

Inventory Costs

• When responding to faulted laterals, your crew needs to have replaceable parts on hand to provide a 1:1 replacement for spent equipment.
• This contributes to warehouse inventory costs as well as the costs and hassle of stocking every truck with an array of sizes and types of spare fuses.

Fixed Costs

Operating Costs

• Fixed costs that contribute to truck rolls go beyond the cost of contracting or owning the vehicles themselves. They also include insurance costs, such as liability premiums and collision and worker’s compensation premiums.
• In addition, you’ll likely have various licenses and fees, heavy vehicle use tax (HVUT) permits, and a utility garage storage allocation. It’s easy to overlook counting fixed costs in your calculation.
• However, they are crucial components that enable your crew to do their jobs during every truck roll.

Additional Costs

Miscellaneous Overhead Expenses

• Additional expenses to reflect on are annual maintenance and upkeep for utility fleet vehicles as well as a variety of taxes, such as road use tolls, fuel taxes, and property taxes for fleet housing.
• In addition, accidents are unexpected, but they happen, and sometimes vehicle repairs or health care costs for crew members injured on the job are needed.

Mutual Aid Crews

• When severe storms hit, you may need to request assistance from other utility crews to quickly restore power.
• This often requires housing, feeding, and caring for outside crews as well as spending additional time to provide necessary briefings so they can safely and effectively do their jobs.

What is the TripSaver II Cutout-Mounted Recloser?

• S&C’s TripSaver II Cutout-Mounted Recloser enables utilities to improve reliability for overhead lateral circuit protection at 15 kV and 25 kV by combining the best aspects of fuse-saving and fuse-blowing.
• TripSaver II reclosers keep the power on for more customers and avoid costly truck rolls for utilities. This strategy adds a reclosing device as close as possible to the source of the problem, so only customers on the faulted lateral are affected.
• Power can be restored automatically for temporary faults, avoiding sustained outages and reducing momentary outages on feeders by “blinking” only customers on the faulted lateral.
• Utilities will see an immediate reduction in the frequency of sustained outages on their system and a dramatic improvement in reliability scores.

Comparing Common Lateral Protection Strategies

• Depending on the lateral protection strategy you are using on your system, the impact faults have on your operations, reliability, and end-customers can vary widely.
• Though some strategies may appear beneficial at face value, it’s important to weigh the tradeoffs between each choice.
• These strategies not only affect your organization’s bottom line, but they also impact your end-customers’ daily lives as they experience the frustrating downsides firsthand.
• Here is a comparison of how common lateral protective strategies respond to both temporary and permanent faults beyond the lateral protection device.
• PRO TIP: At face value, you might think investing in a change in your system is too costly.
• However, sticking with the status quo can impede grid-modernization goals, cause mounting O&M expenses over time, and may ultimately hurt your end-customer satisfaction.
• Will inaction cost you more than making a change in the long run?

Lateral Recloser Device Evaluation

• Lateral reclosing is the winning strategy for reducing the impact on end customers in the event of both temporary and permanent faults.
• However, there are key differences among different lateral recloser devices.

Compare the pros and cons of common lateral protection devices:

End-to-End Lateral Protection

• Segmenting lateral lines with multiple fault-testing devices in series provides end-to-end protection and, for the first time, enables a smart grid in the truest sense—self-healing technology from the head of the feeder to the very edge of the grid.
• Configurable, flexible protection settings allow lateral segmentation, which curbs the number of customers affected by outages, increasing reliability and customer satisfaction.
• Lateral segmentation also reduces the number of customers affected by momentary outages by blinking only the affected lateral segment.

200-A TripSaver II Recloser:| Replacement for HYDRAULIC RECLOSERS on laterals, CLOSEST TO THE FEEDER

•       Vastly reduces inventory and eliminates costly maintenance schedules

•       Simple deployment and installs in half the time

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100- A TripSaver II Recloser:

| Replacement for FUSES on laterals, FURTHER FROM THE FEEDER

•       Prevents unnecessary momentary outages resulting from fuse-saving

•       Prevents unnecessary sustained outages caused by temporary faults resulting from fuse-blowing

•       Reduces O&M costs by avoiding truck rolls

40-A TripSaver II Recloser:| Alternative to LOW-AMPERE SOLUTIONS on laterals, CLOSER TO THE END OF THE LATERAL

•       Keeps faults toward the end of the lateral from affecting most customers upstream on the same lateral

•       Local data visibility and communications require less than 1 A of load current

• Accompanying the wide range of lateral protection offered by the TripSaver II recloser, the VacuFuse II Self-Resetting Interrupter provides grid-edge protection for customers in the most vulnerable locations on your system.

VacuFuse® II Self-Resetting Interrupter:

• Alternative to OVERHEAD DISTRIBUTION TRANSFORMER FUSES at the GRID-EDGE
• Avoids unnecessary sustained outages, which equal 70% of wasted O&M costs from re-fusing these areas
• Targets grid problem areas with repeat outages and low customer satisfaction, automatically restoring power when temporary faults occur.

Common Misconceptions

• You may hold some preconceptions when considering TripSaver II reclosers, but here are a few facts to dispel them.
• MISCONCEPTION: TRUCK ROLLS ARE NOT THAT EXPENSIVE.
  • Truck rolls are much more than the cost of your crew’s labor.
  • Additionally, there is still a significant opportunity cost of responding to outages caused by temporary faults, which could be otherwise avoided, taking your crews away from important grid modernization tasks.
• MISCONCEPTION: TRIPSAVER II RECLOSERS HURT LINE CREW INCOME.
  • Your crews may believe TripSaver II reclosers will cut into their overtime pay, which commonly occurs during storm response and contributes meaningfully to their overall income.
  • However, the device allows line crews to be available for other, higher value-added services on your system, such as grid modernization or responding to major events such as storms.
• MISCONCEPTION: THIS DEVICE ISN’T COMPATIBLE WITH MY SYSTEM.
  • The TripSaver II Cutout-Mounted Recloser offers more than 300 Time-Current Characteristic (TCC) curves from which to choose that align with existing hydraulic, fuse, and microprocessor curves on your system.
  • Other devices may not be one-to-one replacements for existing equipment because non-standard TCC curves require increased coordination study efforts.
• MISCONCEPTION: UNFAMILIAR DEVICES WILL INTRODUCE DIFFICULTY IN DETERMINING WHETHER THE DEVICE HAS OPERATED.
  • When a permanent fault occurs, TripSaver II reclosers swing to a visible Open position, providing an easy and unmistakable visual identification. Crews then visually inspect the line, repair the issue, and manually restore power.
• MISCONCEPTION: THIS DEVICE MAY NOT COMPLY WITH MY ORGANIZATION’S ENVIRONMENTAL OBJECTIVES.
  • Every truck roll avoided with the TripSaver II recloser saves emissions. Also, unlike fuses, TripSaver II reclosers do not expel debris, which reduces sparks. And Non-Reclose mode allows operators to disable reclosing if needed.
• MISCONCEPTION: I’LL HEAD DOWN THE PATH OF PILOTING TRIPSAVER II RECLOSERS, BUT I CAN WAIT TO RALLY MY TEAM.
  • Before proceeding with a new device on your system, it is critical to gain buy-in from key groups or individuals at your utility.
  • Operations, engineers, and line crews will need to familiarize themselves with the new solution. Convincing key stakeholders early on will smooth the path forward from pilot to deployment.

Next Steps

• Now that you are equipped with the information you need to carefully evaluate your present lateral protection strategy, it is important to keep the next phases in mind.
• A shift in strategy will require you to convince others in your organization that change is good—particularly those most affected by using a new device. You’ll also need to consider how existing standards and processes will be affected by a change.
• Running a pilot will help calculate the long-term benefits of installing TripSaver II reclosers on your system, especially how different your reliability and bottom line could be if you install the reclosers across your system.
• A targeted pilot will prevent outages from temporary faults, reduce momentary outages, and eliminate O&M costs from unnecessary truck rolls, allowing your crews to focus on other, value-added services.
• Preventing temporary outages will improve the overall reliability of your system, improving SAIDI, SAIFI, and MAIFI scores as well as customer satisfaction.
• If you aren’t sure where to start in explaining the value of a pilot project or mapping out a path forward, S&C is here as a resource to help prepare a case for you and develop a plan to present to key decision-makers.
• And we’ll guide you through each step of the pilot phase.

Rethink Your Lateral Protection

• Strategy atsandc.com/tripsaver
• 461-4500021924
• © S &C Electric Company 2020-2024. All rights reserved.

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