Eaton PredictPulse Reviews

We get a monthly report, which is emailed to me from Eaton, with PredictPulse. We don't have software onsite. We just get the monthly report emailed to us. Then, I have the ability to use a web browser, like Microsoft Edge or Chrome, to dial into the IP address of the device and look at it.

We have 11 Eaton UPSs, which take on through controls equipment processes that basically cannot shut down. If they shut down, it gets extremely ugly, extremely quick. So, to prevent it from shutting them down, we have UPS systems which protect them and are scattered throughout our plant. It's a large physical facility, so we have 11 of them, and they are scattered throughout the plant. 

The UPSs are very reliable. We're about to replace one that's 19 years-old. They've been using them longer than that, but the oldest one that we have is either a 2001 or 2003 model. However, at that difference, it's not that big a deal as far as electronic equipment goes.

The UPS, if they have a fault for any reason, it tells you. We have remote locations. Nobody goes in there on a frequent basis. So, it tells me, "Hey, you have a problem," without me having to jump in the truck (or on the bicycle) and ride over to the plant, checking them weekly or monthly, to see if they're good. I get instant analysis on things. If there is a critical fault, I know within seconds. I get an email saying, "Hey, you have a critical fault on this thing. Here is what your critical fault is." That is a huge advantage. If there are other issues that are not critical, like the temperature, that I don't need to fix immediately but do need to be fixed very soon, it gives me notice so I can get the issue resolved before we do have a power blip that shuts our process down. It provides a very valuable function, which is vital for me.

The solution has helped proactively mitigate risk of issues, such as thermal events, because they put temperature probes in all the UPS units. I get these all the time, and UPSs do not like extreme heat and neither does my other equipment that is in those rooms. So this helps me monitor the whole room. It isn't the UPS's fault that the AC went out, but it allows me to see that and notify people. People go to some of these rooms about once a month. You don't want your room at 100-plus degrees for over a month before somebody realizes it. So, it helps mitigate UPS and other issues.

I just got a handy dandy email telling me my control room is over temperature, which is endangering the UPS. Therefore, I know to call the HVAC guy to go out there and fix the air conditioning in that unit. It's a unit that nobody visits very often. If the air conditioner craps out, it could sit up there a couple of weeks at 140 degrees and nobody would know it. That could absolutely destroy a UPS and other equipment that is in there. I get automatic emails telling me, "Hey, this thing is at 95 degrees, and that equipment is not supposed to run at over about 75 degrees." That is a huge benefit of it right there.

Years ago, we had an issue. Somebody made a booboo. They wired a receptacle into the wrong panel. This is a receptacle that runs high energy power equipment. It would trip the UPS out. The UPS was no longer functioning because it drew so much amperage that the UPS tripped. That is not the UPS's fault. It is whomever wired it; a contractor got the wrong panel by accident. Therefore, our unit had no protection. If the power blips, even for a fraction of a second, the losses were in hundreds of thousands of dollars. We were not protected, but I got my handy dandy email that blipped, saying, "Hey, you got a fault on this thing." We kept getting faults, and I was finally able to figure out, "Hey, it's one of the contractors working with his power drill out there." We were able to figure it out because of the constant updates via email stating that, "We had a problem." 

We get a lot of lightning storms. However, if the power would have blipped from a lightning storm, and the UPS had not been working, then it's an immediate six-figure loss. By having the emails coming to me, it told me the issue, then I was able to get it resolved before we lost power.

Another example: Something shorted out in our process. I didn't know what, and some people said, "Oh, this has happened several times recently." I was able to go back and look at the database, which is easy to pull up, as I can put in a date a year ago, and cycle through it really quick, and say, "No, there have been no extreme phase overloads in the last year, except the one that happened last Tuesday morning at 8:04 AM." That's helpful for me, having that database there, because I can pull and sort through to see if anything like that happened preceding the fault last Tuesday.

We have three 93PM UPS systems from Eaton. We use it as backup power for the control systems that we have at our facility. We're pretty happy with them. We're pretty happy with the PredictPulse system as well that was installed about a month ago because since then, we have had two events where PredictPulse has notified us and cut our troubleshooting time down tremendously in each of these instances.

We have had these units for almost three years now. We have been very satisfied with the operation of these UPS systems. We have had two units in the past month since we've had this PredictPulse system installed that had issues where they needed to be repaired, but Eaton was able to come out and repair them in a very timely fashion. And we've been very happy with the operation of this equipment.

PredictPulse is a system that is hooked up to each of our UPS systems that notify us as the end-users of any faults, problems, or issues that might arise in the UPS systems during its lifecycle and during normal operations.

PredictPulse saved us time by helping to avoid downtime and other problems. It would take 20 minutes to an hour to try to figure out the problem, whereas we immediately knew where the problem was with the help of PredictPulse. It easily saves us hundreds of man-hours just for that downtime. For production, we did have production lost and that could be in the thousands to possibly millions of dollars.

The use case for PredictPulse is because of the critical function of the UPS's and the scarcity of manpower. Although we have a SCADA system, we wanted a monitoring system for the UPS's that will give us much information about their status, which would aid in quick maintenance, given the reduced manpower available.

We plan to install 25 Eaton 93PM UPS's. These UPS's are primarily used for emergency lighting and data notification in an emergency. They also operate our communication radios during an emergency.

This is our second generation of Eaton UPS's. Since the system opened we have had Eaton units and we're now replacing those obsolete units with the newer model UPS's. That means we are confident in the performance of the Eaton product because of our experience with it for the past 15 to 20 years.

Our units are deployed in passenger stations in the underground commuter rail system for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

PredictPulse reduces the manpower needed to do maintenance because the technical data presented in the reports save precious time. We can do less maintenance, from every three months to every six months. So we're saving on critical manpower resources by the monitoring of the unit.

It will save me money on manpower needed for maintenance, as we will be able to maintain these units with a smaller staff because of the PredictPulse data reporting feature. These things were just put online three months ago so an evaluation of the hours saved is still premature. The rail system covers an eight to 10 mile area and for maintenance we have to travel each site to look at each unit, work on it, and then travel back. All that time would be charged to maintenance. We will be saving significant amount of hours, cumulatively over time, because we won't have to travel to the sites. The PredictPulse software will be reporting the status of the units back to us, remotely.

We're a 24/7 operation and my staff does maintenance 24/7. Anytime a unit is taken offline for maintenance, I'm notified, anytime of the day and any day of the week. PredictPulse notifies me remotely what's happening. That gives me proof and demonstrates that I can have confidence in knowing that this critical piece of equipment is always available for its purpose and critical use.

We use PredictPulse to sustain our data centers.

We're not awake 24/7, so it's good to have somebody else receiving data constantly. A few times, I've gotten a call from Eaton when they noticed abnormal data in our data center. They were dispatching one of our service reps, but I needed parts, so Eaton was given access to do what needed to be done before I even knew anything was wrong. 

I've only really used it for sending out a report whenever there's an outage. Occasionally I might run a report for the health of it, and that's about it. The real use of it would be for our radiology department, since they were the ones who purchased the UPS itself. We just helped set up the notifications, if there is an outage, and anything that deals with the reports for it.

The Eaton equipment we have is mostly the UPS, which is directly for our CT machine. It's the only thing that's hooked up to that UPS.

I don't have any examples of how it might have changed the function of our radiology department. But if we've ever had an outage or anything happened with our CT, it's made it quicker when contacting our third-party vendor that supports the CTs. That has been faster, but I've had fairly limited experience because it's the first one I've ever really dealt with. But Eaton themselves have been very reliable. I haven't had any issues with them.

PredictPulse's 24/7 remote monitoring has helped to alleviate stress. Whenever we've had downtime for the hospital itself, we've been able to run reports and send them. Because I have email on my phone, I get the reports there and I can send them to the chief of nursing for the hospital or to the CEO. And they can see if at least the CT is doing okay, and that there's no damage to the CT unit. That has been a relief. Management has been happy with having that kind of knowledge.

PredictPulse has saved us money by the CT unit being up and accessible for ER and for med/surge. Even if we've had an outage, they have at least been able to continue to run CTs. The downtime doesn't usually last more than a day or two, at most. If we were to run eight or nine CTs in a day at $800 per CT, those are the kinds of savings we're talking about for a given incident. We've had three or four such incidents in a year.

It has also definitely saved time, helping us know that things are up and running and that there is no issue with the CT itself.

We haven't received any alarm notification calls from Eaton as a result of using PredictPulse. They did reach out to us once, but that was only because I had not properly set up the report portion of PredictPulse and the reports were not going out to everybody. That was just user error on my part. But they did proactively reach out to me to correct that.

• Monitoring UPSs.
• Preventing failures.

We are using Eaton SecureConnect Installer Cloud, which is a private cloud deployment model.

The service has definitely quickly deployed field technicians. At one of our sites, the temperature in the room was rising. Because we received a notification, we were able to get an engineer dispatched to the site to the HVAC problem. Had we not done that, we might have ended up with a UPS failure.

We are a 911 center, so we have building-wide UPS. We have two very large UPSs, and each of our systems are on either UPS A or B. We were very careful to make sure that everything was on the same UPS. Therefore, if one goes down, we only lose half our center. That is why we went with Eaton. It is just built for that type of resilience. Resilience is everything when you are a 911 center. We have two PDUs supporting the UPSs: Model 9395-550 UPS units.

I use a weblink to access PredictPulse, primarily using the email. We have certain emails for critical things set up to come to us, so we don't really have to use the dashboard often. We use the solution as an alerting system.

Right now, we very carefully filter through and select the emails that we're interested in. When we get an email that says, "I'm sorry, this is going on," then we try to figure it out. For example, with circuit breaker overload, we say, "Let's look at our spreadsheet and see what that circuit breaker goes to. Let's go figure out why this is overloading. This is not good." 

Another example might be if we get an email that says, "The building is on generator." Then, why is the building on generator? 

Should there be a very catastrophic situation, then we get an email that says, "I'm sorry, but I'm running on UPS." This means we need to figure out why the generator didn't kick on and transfer to our emergency generator number three by using a manual transfer switch ASAP.

The solution is hired wired to our network.

We mostly use it for alerting via email. We rarely find a need to log in. However, when we do, a picture is worth a thousand words. The graphics are really nice if I want to give it someone. For example, if somebody said, "How reliable do you find Eaton?" I could print them those beautiful little graphics, and say, "Well, what do you think?"

The primary use case is notifications for all the Eaton UPS devices in our organization. This lets us know when the system is down or having other issues, as far as connectivity, input/output, battery level, and reports.

We are using the most recent version.

We now have knowledge of what is going on with power fluctuations. Before, when we were offsite, we wouldn't know if the system was down or if there was a power outage. Now, I get alerts. 

I receive my monthly reports from it, so I haven't needed to logon directly in a very long time.