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Utilities

Peace of Mind — Your Best Defense Against Lube Pump Failure

DC Motor Starters are frequently used in utilities or other industries where power is generated. Here, turbine generators require constant lubrication. This lubrication is mandatory even during power loss because the multi-million dollar generating turbines can coast for as long as 30 minutes before coming to rest after loss of power. A typical lubrication system has a normal AC lube pump, an AC backup lube pump and a DC emergency backup lube pump. The DC backup pump serves as the last line of defense for turbine lubrication after all AC power is lost. This is a widespread application, since every municipality generating power can use these DC starters. This application is so critical that it is better to allow the pump or its DC starter to fail, rather than lose a multi-million dollar turbine. For this reason, DC motor starters for this application are custom-designed by EC&M with the overloads set to activate an alarm rather than shut down the motor. This design requires that a control relay and terminal points for customer connection to alarm contacts be added to our standard DC starter control circuit.

EC&M backs these DC starters with over 100 years of DC control experience. These starters use the same mill-duty contactor found on EC&M crane control panels, a contactor designed to operate in the most severe applications and environments.