Work vs. What the Grid Ships

Your factory draws 80 kW of useful power, but the utility bills for something larger: apparent power, which includes the reactive current sloshing back and forth through inductive loads. This power factor calculator turns those numbers into the PF ratio — and the correction needed.

The Power Triangle

Real, reactive, and apparent power form a right triangle: kVA² = kW² + kVAR². Given any two legs, the third follows, and the angle between real and apparent power is the phase angle whose cosine is the power factor.

Fix It With Capacitors

Capacitor banks supply leading reactive power that cancels the lagging reactive demand. The correction readout shows exactly how many kVAR of capacitance would lift PF to 0.95 — usually the point where utility penalties disappear.