Schneider Electric, the leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, has launched its new MasterPacT MTZ Active range of circuit breakers in South Africa.

The MasterPacT MTZ Active is a revolutionary new circuit breaker designed to set new benchmarks for safety, efficiency, and sustainability while ensuring business continuity. These circuit breakers are helping to meet customers’ daily challenges such as 24/7 uptime demands and managing spiralling energy costs in an electrically driven and digitised world.

Kamogelo Makwana, Power Products Offer Manager at Schneider Electric South Africa, explains that this is Schneider Electric’s latest offering to accelerate energy efficiency and decarbonisation, optimising asset life without compromising functionality or safety. 

“The MasterPacT MTZ Active brings features that enables facility managers to monitor and measure power usage in real time,” says Makwana.

Across industry sectors ranging from healthcare, buildings, and energy to chemicals and OEMs, power is becoming more distributed and more complex to manage, especially with the current context of compromised power availability and reliability from the national grid, forcing industry to consider addition of other power sources to compliment the grid. This adds complexity to managing power and the MTZ Active is ready to act in assisting industry to manage this complexity. 

At the same time, companies expect electricity to be available 24/7, and for good reason. Experts at Gartner assess the cost of data centre downtime at $5,600 per minute or more than $300,000 per hour. Ensuring the safety of installers, operators, and maintenance personnel is also a priority.

Safety-enhancing innovations 

Makwana notes that the MasterPacT MTZ Active features safety-enhancing innovations to help protect electrical contractors, building occupants, maintenance personnel and property. Its Energy Reduction Maintenance (ERMS) setting, which is natively embedded in its intuitive control unit, sets a new benchmark in safety to improve the protection of maintenance operators/personnel from arc flash hazards. 

Together with the native ERMS feature, the infield selectivity check ensures that there’s full selectivity achieved in the installation, ensuring faster fault clearance and helping to prevent equipment damage, thus improving safety.

“This product is a more digitised circuit breaker solution with wireless connectivity features achieved through embedded Bluetooth, NFC and groundbreaking Zigbee technology, allowing customers to communicate with the breaker efficiently and to save on costs associated with a wired communication design.  The key benefit of digitising this unit is enabling faster response times,” he says.

“Customers can now remotely view and interact with the breaker, thanks to the availability of digital modules and the digital-ready breaker. This enables real-time data access for maintenance planning and safety, eliminating the need for on-site status checks.”

Quick action during outage

Knowing the root cause of an outage allows quick action to restore power and resume normal operations instead of having to endure lengthy and costly delays. The MasterPacT MTZ circuit breaker combines real-time information and ease of use to enable fast mitigation of outage events.

Makwana points out that the new MasterPacT MTZ’s innovative control unit, MicroLogic Active, monitors various breaker functions to provide vital, real-time information.

“In the event of an electrical fault, the breaker lets you scan a QR code, displayed on the LCD screen of the control unit, which is an industry-first QR code solution, providing quick access guidance on the best actions to take based on the trip’s root cause,” he says.

Designed for circularity, MasterPacT MTZ Active breakers can be refurbished by Schneider Electric for a second life with their original guarantee, thereby reducing waste and promoting sustainability. Additionally, the lifecycle of installed MasterPacT NT/NW breakers can now be extended simply by upgrading their trip unit with MTZ Active’s electronic control.

By avoiding the replacement of the entire breaker, costs are reduced, and waste is minimised. 

As electrification and digitalisation transform power supply and demand worldwide, Schneider Electric continues to evolve its MasterPacT offer based on input from our customers to deliver robust and reliable circuit breaker performance.