Super Bowl Power Outage

Having watched the Super Bowl last weekend and the 3rd quarter power outage, I was wondering if a capacitor had failed like the one in my heating system I mentioned in the last post. So, that got me to thinking, how many capacitors it took to run all those lights.

So, I looked into it, and each light has a ballast in it and each ballast has a capacitor. It depends upon the lighting system, but many of the lighting capacitors are a metalized polypropylene film type capacitor. These have good self-healing properties. If these were the capacitors used in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, I don’t think they were the cause, as these type capacitors are very hardy and often have discharge resistors as well.

Initially, when I began writing this post, the cause of the outage was not known. Now, however, we know it was a relay that was installed to prevent a power outage. The manufacturer has said the problem was not with the device, but rather how it was used. The trip setting was set too low, for the device to handle the amount of power coming into the building.