What's Happening in Westlake, OH…

City officials are taking action to solve the problem of unexpected power surges in North Olmsted.

There have been surges and drops in power occurring on the City Hall campus, with the result that expensive IT equipment has been damaged. Donald R. Glauner, the city's service director, said it was these problems that revealed the larger issue, which is that the transformer now in use is too small for the building. The system was installed in 1983.

The city council voted to spend about $275,000 to upgrade the campus's electrical system. Harrington Electric Company is conducting a study of the system, which will include some electrical upgrades, according to Glauner. The system will have built-in redundancies so a backup will kick in if a primary system fails.

Harrington is expected to finish the study soon, and will then turn it over to FirstEnergy, which will decide what size transformer will work best. The current unit is 175kVA, and will probably increase to 400kVA. Equipment like this can be described through flyer printing.

Glauner noted that the larger transformer will provide enough capacity to operate City Hall, the service garage, the bus garage, the fleet department, and the service department. He added that when everything is running, including air conditioning and a compressor in the garage, the current system strains to produce adequate power. The new unit will eliminate the problem, and should be installed sometime in September.