Our industry is evolving. Quick Pole is keeping up!
Sonideft understands where the utility industry has been, where it is currently and a good idea of where it is going.
Historical perspective.
The process of determining utility pole strength and height requirements in different situations is a time consuming task for the utility industry. To make the process easier to use, various simplistic methods and rules of thumb have been developed by numerous organizations and people over the years. Most of these have their fundamental design roots in the 1940 to 1950 era when the best computing engine available was the slide-rule. In the majority of cases, these practices would always result in a "safe", but oversized, utility pole recommendations.
One of the disadvantages of these simplistic methods however, is that the more complicated and loaded a pole is, the more time consuming it became to use the process, and the more over-provisioned the final recommendation became. There were many aspects of structural analysis which needed to be ignored because of the time required to deal with all the details. Many, many assumptions were made in order to facilitate calculations.
Our Vision.
The latest code standards in Canada and the US, as well as many other parts of the world, have evolved to the point where absolute defendable accuracy is required. The decision to install or add to utility poles in a particular manner is being questioned by the regulators, the legal system and the public at times. It is no longer defendable to use "Rules of Thumb" or other means that are not directly traceable back to solid Engineering Principles.
Sonideft understands this requirement very well. We go to great lengths to expose our calculation results and methodologies to the critique of engineering professionals and welcome any opportunity to explain why we feel certain calculations are the most appropriate. As an example of our long-term commitment to quality, the precursor product to Quick Pole (Autopole) utilized a Finite Element Analysis Engine since 1995, almost two decades before any national codes mandated its use (CSA-2015).
