Increasingly, the Industry is having to deal with the consequences of performance drivers seeking both high reliability levels and the minimization of outage times. In the case of power transformers, best practice currently is initially to take an oil or Buchholz gas sample and send it to a laboratory for dissolved gas analysis and reporting.

From a number of perspectives, the active devices in an electric power delivery system, the circuit breakers, can be characterized as the weakest links in the network, as opposed to the passive components such as lines and transformers. Yet the unerring action of switching devices is critical to power delivery quality and reliability.