Power Quality

Outage logs can't see what breaks your equipment. On September 12, 2023, this meter recorded a voltage sag to 0.03% of nominal for 1.8 seconds — deep enough to trip equipment on site. Two days later, SFPUC's official word was that there were “no outages” that day. Both statements were true: outage logs track sustained service loss, not the brief voltage collapses that destroy appliances. Without a power-quality meter, that event officially never happened.

The meter is the only precise public record. In October 2021, island residents told the Board of Supervisors about 6+ hour outages and repeated brownouts. This meter's charts confirmed their account almost exactly: a 6.6-hour outage on October 24, a 32-minute outage on October 27, and six voltage sags that month. Without the instrument, those events are anecdotes; with it, they're evidence.

It's cheap — and the city already agreed. A voltage-only PQube 3 monitor lists at $3,014; the full power analyzer at about $4,837. Five monitoring points across the island's feeders is roughly $15,000–$25,000 one time, with near-zero operating cost — the meter emails its own reports around the clock. SFPUC ordered a monitor for the main island feed in August 2023 and added one to its budget that October. The remaining step is making the data public.

If you felt a flicker or lost power, report the outage so it can be matched against the instrument record.