User talk:Heart141

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Hello, Heart141, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Laurinavicius (talk) 18:36, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Edits at Power factor

Please read Wikipedia:Conflict of interest. It's a bad idea to quote yourself or your company website, or to promote your products and services in a Wikipedia article. The proposed addition to the article is redundant with the explanations already in the article. It is not phrased in an encyclopedia-like fashion; please look at Wikipedia:Manual of style. It is not accurate; national power grid loads are considerably more complicated than "all incandescent lamps" or "all fluorescent lamps". We don't run how-to or tutorial articles here, that's done by the Wikibooks project. Please don't repeatedly revert other editors without any attempt to solve the problems pointed out in the edit summaries; you may want to read WP:3RR. Encyclopedia contributions must have reliable credible third-party citations to validate the contents. --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:39, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

these are the comments you have not addressed. please don't keep adding the essay back, it's redundant and not even accurate. --Wtshymanski (talk) 04:26, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Response to Wtshymanski

I am new to contributing to Wikipedia pages and am trying to learn the ropes quickly. I appreciate the spirit and goals of Wikipedia and do not want to degrade their mission. I am a physicist who has probably spent more hours over the last 30 years designing and experimenting with active power factor compensation than anyone else. I have founded 3 companies that design, manufacture and market this equipment and am currently the CEO of one of these companies so conflict of interest is definitely a possibility here. I am a recognized expert and innovator on this subject and was recently asked to give a presentation at EPRI's annual conference which took place in Quebec last June. My work is mostly a labor of love as I am genuinely trying to contribute to solving the world's electrical power problems so that we evolve into something that is more sustainable. To do this, my companies have to become very successful financially and that has certainly been the case with Heart Interface, Trace and Xantrex (now Schneider) which all just reeks of conflict of interest. However, the world has changed and power factor, which used to be a more esoteric engineering subject, has become something that is effecting most people's lives in ways they don't understand. Understanding this, by people with no engineering background, is a legitimate function of Wikipedia. Although the grid is a complex mix of loads, each load, by itself, consumes some small amount of power and creates some small amount of transmission loss in the entire system, including the windings of the massive grid generators and transformers. The grid has to pay for all of this energy and the losses so you can see that low power factor loads cost the grid more per kWh to provide than do high power factor loads. With the massive migration to CFL lighting and the great abundance of computer power supplies the grid is having to absorb increased costs which they ultimately pass on to the customer. There are some articles about this that appear in EDN and EETIMES and other engineering publications but the general public is generally not aware that this is even an issue yet they are the ones who are buying and installing these low power factor devices. Since they are ignorant of the issue they do not create any pressure to address it. So, if they somehow hear that it might be an issue and don't even know what "power factor" means they might go to Wikipedia. If all they get is a very technical, engineering and very correct and precise article, they will most likely not even read it. So, what might seem redundant to someone educated in electronics, might be the only thing that a non-engineer even reads.

What are the guidelines to adding external links and references at the end of the article?

Quoting your credentials on Wikipedia is never a useful strategy; we've had editors claim amazingly good credentials that turned out not to be the case. The proposed changes at power factor have many issues of tone, accuracy, and redundancy. I've listed a few below:

• Section title "The Significance of Power Factor in the Modern World" - this is vague, long, and sounds like advertising copy. Wikipedia style is all lower case in headings except for proper nouns.
• "The AC power grid creates a sine wave voltage which is the yellow line on the picture." "Sine wave" isn't informative. Explain the pheneomenon first before referring to diagrams - this is particularly important on Wikipedia where diagrams and illustrations disappear without notice. The power grid doesn't "create" a voltage; better to describe that the AC voltage has a sine waveform.
• "If you connect a resistive load like an incandescent light, or a heating element, then the current drawn from the grid will also be a sine wave as is shown with the blue line." Avoid second-person address in Wikipedia articles. This article already explains this.
• "This is the most efficient possible use of both the ac power source (the grid) and the transmission lines and transformers that connect your house to the grid." Avoid second-person address. Is it really the case that 1.0 pf at a particular load has the highest *system* efficiency?

Provide a reference.

• "Inductive motors ...significant current."" The article already says this, for the general case of al reactive loads.
• " Because inductive motors were commonly used from the very beginning of the grid a term was created to describe this phenomenon, Power Factor. " One clause has nothing to do with the second clause. Inductive effects were observed long before ac generators were networked. This needs a reference to show who originated the term "power factor".
• "This is simply the real power drawn from the grid divided by the volts (rms) times the amps (rms). " The article already says this. Not just from the grid, could be an isolated source. The notion of "apparent power" is useful here and already used in the article's description - this allows extension to the non-sinusoidal case.
• " This means that a generator with transmission lines and transformers that could support 100 kW could only support 50 kW of these loads. On top of that it will double the amount of power that is wasted with transmission losses." Incorrect, if 100 kVA is being delivered, the I^2R loss will be nearly the same independent of power factor. The loss proportional to system voltage will be the same. In the case of replacement of incandescent lighting, the line loss is trivial compared to the 3:1 or 4:1 advantage in efficacy of fluorescent lamps. This is why power companies promote fluorescent lighting so heavily - it would make no sense (from an environmental point of view)to recommend a lighting alternative that increases power consumption.
• "In most grid systems the total transmission loss is around 13% so these .5 power factor loads would be actually wasting an additional 13% power. " 13% is doubtful for, say, MAPP or any of the North American networks; more like 7%; provide a reference. The doubling of losses is just wrong, as described above. It's not like there isn't already power factor correction in the networks due to long-haul transmission line reactance.

And so forth. This is why I think the proposed addition is redundant and incorrect, and why I have reverted it. --Wtshymanski (talk) 19:41, 27 July 2010 (UTC)