In the Desert, in the Rain, or where its Snowing, the J4 Ball Switch Keeps on Going
Recently CPI was contacted by PG&E, a major California utility company for using our switches in a fairly unique application. We’ve dubbed this application “Plungers on Poles”.
Safe, Reliable Breaker Detection
Once Again, CPI switches garnered the attention of engineers at PG&E owing to the rugged, environmentally hardened nature of our sealed mechanical design. In this case, our J4311 ball switch was used in an application designed to detect the state of circuit breakers on electric towers. This is the same design used in our Plunger Switches, just the actuator is different. Deployed properly, the switch acts as detection on high power circuit breakers, helping utility companies isolate power failures or other electrical grid events, to a single pole or single feed within that pole. The potential benefit in terms of time to isolate faults and restore power during an outage, could be significant.
Use of our J4311 provides a number of benefits in this application:
- Hardened solution for long term exposure to elements in a place not easy to reach (Tower)
- Impervious to wide swings in temperature, over all the area’s covered by PG&E in both the cold north and burning south of the state.
- Our switch is a passive device so no power required, ideal for an application where loss of power is the whole problem we’re trying to assist with.
- Patented ball carrier design with double seal prevents contact contamination and icing in very cold temperatures.
Bad poetry aside, this really is a switch that’s hard to kill. When you need to put your switch somewhere that’s hard to service, or in a critical safety application, or both, CPI electromechanical endurance ratings of up to 1 million cycles should put you at ease that you won’t need to be climbing any poles on our account.
For more information Contact a IPP sales engineer today.