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GE Introduces Entellisys™ Low-Voltage Switchgear: Simplified system design enables breakthroughs in safety, reliability and flexibility

Industry firsts: new safety options, advanced zone-based protection, mobile metering, and drastically reduced components and wiring for enhanced reliability

Plainville, CT -- Entellisys™, an exclusive, new low-voltage switchgear solution (208–600 volts, 800–5,000 amperes) from GE Consumer & Industrial, provides new operational safety features and newfound levels of advanced protection, lifetime system flexibility, greater reliability and major strides in ease of use.

"Entellisys is almost as easy to use as an ATM," says Jane Barber, Entellisys' product marketing manager. "The Entellisys interface is very intuitive and is a vast improvement over the many devices in traditional gear with cryptic interfaces."

Entellisys sets the stage for new best practices in such settings as oil and gas plants, healthcare facilities, airports, corporate data centers, manufacturing facilities, and water and wastewater treatment plants. For the first time, operators can perform virtually all control, monitoring and diagnostic work outside the arc-flash protection boundary using Entellisys' remote human-machine interface (HMI) options.

Entellisys' advanced protection options include the industry's first cost-effective implementation of bus differential (ANSI 87B) on low-voltage switchgear. Bus differential provides true zone-based protection and detects faults that range from less than the bus rating to the full short circuit rating of the equipment. Entellisys does this in minimum time, clearing faults faster; it is 100-percent selective all of the time.

Historically, bus differential has been used only on medium-voltage switchgear because of its complexity and related cost. Now, because Entellisys' central architecture uses minimal components and provides all non-mechanical functionality in software, specifying engineers are free to explore new possibilities for protection and control.

Likewise, Entellisys' simplified design enables it to handle late-point changes during system build and installation, usually without the type of significant delays required by traditional, hardware-based systems.

Additional, unique safety options
Entellisys' near-gear and remote HMI options are just the beginning of the safety story. Entellisys offers further safety features with its reduced energy let-thru mode and ability to quickly customize settings to minimize arc-flash energy under specific conditions. Similarly, Entellisys' unique remote racking device eliminates the need for an operator ever to be near a moving breaker when it is being racked out or racked in.

System design = reliability and flexibility
Entellisys is designed with a simple central architecture. Its few components and minimal wiring allow a fully redundant system to be installed. With Entellisys, there is no single point of failure for the system.

As facilities change, Entellisys can be easily upgraded without additional hardware or downtime. Mobile metering is just one example of Entellisys' flexibility. Users can purchase a single metering function and then move it to any circuit for any length of time. Unlike a traditional system, there are no wires to rout, CTs to add or holes to cut.

Real-time monitoring, diagnostics and alarms
Entellisys provides fully synchronized, waveform capture from every circuit simultaneously, and synchronized within microseconds. This enables fault reports and event logs based on accurate, system-wide information before, during and after an event for each breaker. This facilitates root cause analysis of power disturbances. Traditional waveform capture occurs on a breaker-by-breaker basis, is unsynchronized between circuit breakers and is typically limited to a few selected devices.

"Entellisys is unique in its ability to provide all protection, control, monitoring, and diagnostics based on highly accurate information from each circuit, synchronized within microseconds across the system," notes Barber. "Essentially, it gives users real-time visibility into the power distribution network and the switchgear protecting it -- with powerful backup protections and multiple redundancies."

Users can set as many as 600 different alarm conditions for which Entellisys will send information to designated devices -- PDAs, laptops, desktops, etc. -- so that situations can be addressed before becoming problems.

GE Consumer & Industrial spans the globe as an industry leader in major appliance, lighting and integrated industrial equipment, systems and services. Providing solutions for commercial, industrial and residential use in more than 100 countries, GE Consumer & Industrial uses innovative technologies and "ecomagination," a GE initiative to aggressively bring to market new technologies that help customers and consumers meet pressing environmental challenges, to deliver comfort, convenience and electrical protection and control. General Electric (NYSE: GE) brings imagination to work, selling products under the Monogram®, Profile™ GE®, Hotpoint®, SmartWater™ Reveal®, Edison™ and Energy Smart™ consumer brands, and Entellisys™ industrial brand. For more information, consumers may visit www.ge.com.

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