Monitor Your Critical Equipment with a Smart Power Cord

If you want to know how much power your equipment is using but don't want to pay costly electrician fees or deal with complex IT networks, a smart power cord could fit the bill.

Packet Power’s smart power cables allow you to capture power and energy use for any device with a plug. You simply plug the device into the smart power cable and plug the smart power cable into an outlet. No electrical expertise or configuration is needed. 

Packet Power initially created smart power cables to add monitoring to unintelligent (basic) rack-mounted power distribution units (PDUs) in data centers—converting them to smart PDUs. PDUs are critical pieces of hardware, and it’s important to be able to know they are operating  around the clock. 

It also makes economic sense because purchasing a smart PDU (like the smart version of a lot of devices) costs significantly more than a standard, non-networked option. Adding a smart power cable to an existing basic PDU is a cost-effective alternative. 

Teaching Old Devices New (Data) Tricks

As soon as you connect a Packet Power smart power cable to a device, it will begin collecting and wirelessly transmitting data via a purpose-built wireless network that only transmits power data. The network is not discoverable by IP networks—increasing your security against outside hackers. Your monitoring data only exists on your own private network. You will immediately be able to monitor voltage (V), current (A), power (W), power factor, energy (Wh), frequency (Hz) and temperature of any electronic device.

This information can be integrated into standard building management systems (BMS), making critical equipment performance easy to track in real-time.

Along with connecting smart power cables to PDUs, data centers have found them incredibly useful for monitoring storage area networks (SANs), mainframes, and switches. 

There are many applications outside of a data center for companies that want to improve their insight into how their energy is being consumed. The data from a smart power cable can tell you how a piece of equipment is operating, or whether it is operating at all in the case of an emergency.

Where Smart Power Cables Shine

Most companies know what equipment is critical to their operations, but if you are not monitoring power usage, then you are flying blind. Predicting a failure, energy usage planning, forecasting equipment needs, and maintenance planning become a guessing game without energy monitoring data.

Smart power cables can be used in these settings (and many others) to provide essential operational data for any equipment that has a plug including:

• Motors and pumps
• Heavy industrial presses 
• CNC machines
• Server rooms and critical IT infrastructure
• Charging stations for electric vehicles

If highly secure, cost-effective monitoring information from critical equipment is your goal, we would be happy to talk with you about options that can get you there.