Beyond Blackouts: How Power Quality Breaks Building Tech

Power outages grab headlines, but power quality quietly undermines modern buildings: voltage sags, harmonic distortion, and transient spikes age equipment, trip sensitive network gear, and turn failover plans into surprise outages. In this episode Alex Morgan interviews Michael Harrington to translate power‑quality issues into operational decisions property teams can act on. We identify common causes (shared electrical loads, aging UPS strategies, grounding and harmonics), walk through practical measurement approaches that don’t require full electrical overhauls, and weigh tradeoffs between centralized power conditioning, UPS resizing, and tenant‑level redundancy. Michael brings real operational examples where subtle power problems cascaded into tenant impact and how prioritized, low‑friction fixes stopped repeat incidents. Listeners will get clear signals to monitor, lightweight testing tactics to add to maintenance cycles, and decision criteria for when to escalate capital work. This episode is aimed at property owners, facilities managers, IT leaders, and project teams responsible for reliable building operations.