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Tim Barratt loved being a lineman for the Australian electric company where he grew up, even in the 2009 Black Saturday Brush Fire mixed chaos. It torched over a million acres and left many acres. However, when he moved to the US in 2013, his wife was not very keen to keep him going.
“My wife didn’t want me to be working on high voltage anymore for safety reasons,” Barat told TechCrunch.
There he returned to school and eventually earned a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Berkeley, California.
However, he couldn’t stop thinking about power lines. Rather, I’m listening to them.
“As humans, we can’t feel electricity. We can feel it. We can get electrocuted,” Barato said. However, neither of these will encourage long careers. Instead, electric company linemen use other senses to understand what is happening during the shutdown.
“In general, we’re looking. We’re listening. We feel the transformer vibrates differently. That’s what it is. We hit the pole with a hammer and then it rings.
It’s a tedious and time-consuming process. Utility workers often need to cross dozens of miles to track the origin of a stop, such as a tree branch placed on a wire, a squirrel that was fried when grounded, or a line that fell in high winds. Once you have reported the nature of the problem and the exact location, you can start the repair work.
“Some utilities spend nine figures a year on these patrols alone,” Bharat said.
Bharat needs a better way and when he reflects on his experience as a lineman, he remembers all the time he has heard of the different infrastructure. “This is where my heart went,” he said.
Together with Abdulrahman Bin Omar and Hall Chen, Barat was founded Gridware. The company’s products are literally devices that listen to electrical issues.
“We think of the grid as something like a giant guitar, in contrast to circuit boards,” Barato said. “It’s physical. You need to monitor not only the voltage and current, but also the physical attributes of the grid.”
Wires, poles and trances emit different sounds depending on whether they hit wooden limbs, or are hit by a car or immersed in the wind. The gridware sensors attached to the pole just below the line are not connected to the wire itself. Instead, they await mechanical perturbations (sound and vibration) that the company’s AI and signal processing software are trained to identify as different dangers in the grid.
Processing occurs on each device, and once the software identifies the problem, it sends details and locations to the cloud via cellular or satellite connections (or to another device to relay the message if the signal is weak). The entire box is iPad sized and features solar panels, angled so that those panels face the sun. The device can be installed quickly, as it does not touch the power line or requires a separate power source. The power lines can maintain energy, and each box takes less than 15 minutes to mount and activate.
Bharat said Gridware had positive cash flow last year, but he still felt it was the best time to raise money. Gridware recently closed its $26.4 million Series A led by Sequoia, the company told TechCrunch only. The convection capital of existing investors, 50 years, small carbon capital, and true ventures took part. “This pay raise was very easy in that we didn’t need it,” he said.
Gridware is currently monitoring more than 1,000 miles of power lines from 10,000 pole devices. The company previously worked with PG&E to cone to ensure that the devices accurately report on site issues.
However, before Barat could reach the utility pole, he had to prove to himself that the gridware device was working.
“I made my own grid,” he said. “It was a full size, a 55-foot pole, a 200-foot span, and I have been destroying it in every way for years, destroying it in shape and shape.
How did his wife feel about it? “I got into trouble,” he said, but “in the real world, we generally get three to four events a day, so that’s behind us.”