Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital

Administering Critical Care

If any facility must be ready anytime for anything, it’s a hospital because it really can be a matter of life or death. St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, located in Belleville, Illinois, needed to strengthen its electrical heart – the vintage, loaded-to-capacity, unit substations, which were installed during the 1960s. The efficiency of its electrical systems is a vital part of the hospital.

St. Elizabeth’s engineers wanted to upgrade the substations, not replace them. So they met with Wissehr engineers and assessed their problems. The existing substations couldn’t transfer load during peak usage, and they didn’t have any computer intelligence to balance demands or display critical information. After many hours of discussions and planning, Wissehr applied its added-value engineering expertise to give St. Elizabeth’s engineers not only what they wanted but also what they needed.

With a plan that rivaled a military maneuver, Wissehr electricians removed a 1000 KVA substation from service and used an existing standby generator to provide power for critical use at a reduced load. To minimize disruption, they performed their work during the hospital’s third shift.

Tom Wissehr, president, explains the process, “We dismantled the substation and installed a Square D Power Logic System, which delivers management control for monitoring electrical usage, demands, faults and power quality. Then we retrofitted the transformer with RTDs and added cooling fans, which help for heavy load and high temperatures. We also provided for future networking capabilities where they could connect the stand-alone energy management power logic unit to a central monitoring station or to a program and watch the hospital’s electrical demands.”

Wissehr diagnosed St. Elizabeth’s electrical usage problems and solved them with ingenuity and intelligence.

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