Even the best-designed cable systems can fail if thermal resistivity data is missing, inaccurate, or based on assumptions. Without site-specific testing and validated models, you risk:
Cable overheating and reduced life expectancy
Emergency repairs or downtime
Project delays or cost overruns during commissioning
Design disputes or contractor rework
Thermal resistivity testing doesn’t need to delay your schedule, or introduce risk. Whether you’re testing in-house or outsourcing to our experts, METER makes it easy to capture the data your designs depend on:
Select the right METER tool for your in-house lab, or request expert thermal testing services.
Measure thermal resistivity of on-site soils or backfill materials during planning and design.
Use your data to build accurate ampacity models, specify insulation requirements, and protect long-term performance.
Underground cables generate heat—and if the surrounding soil can’t dissipate it, you risk insulation failure, performance loss, and system-wide outages. METER provides consistent, research-grade thermal resistivity (ρ) measurements that help you accurately assess soil behavior before installation. Whether you're validating backfill or selecting the safest path forward, you’ll have the data to design with confidence—and protect your system for the long haul.
While thermal properties tell you how well soil can dissipate heat, hydraulic properties reveal how fast that soil will dry out—and how water moves away from your cables. METER’s research-grade tools help you measure unsaturated flow, permeability, and water retention—so you can understand how quickly moisture will be pulled from the cable bedding and whether your system is protected for the long term. Design smarter, prevent dry-out, and keep your cables running cool and safe.
Prove your design before it's in the ground. When cable safety depends on how your bedding materials perform under load, you can’t afford uncertainty. Thermal failure isn’t just a risk—it’s a liability. With decades of expertise in heat and mass transfer, METER’s lab delivers material-specific thermal resistivity testing that’s both precise and practical. We provide ASTM D5334- and IEEE 442-compliant reports, so you can move forward with data that meets spec—and design decisions backed by science.
Customize your data collection and logging solution by combining multiple METER sensors with the ZL6 Data Logger and ZENTRA Cloud. ZENTRA stores your data in the cloud, allowing easy access to your data and near-real-time reports from all of your data loggers.
Avoid costly field visits by accessing your data from any web-connected device. Analyze it with ZENTRA Cloud’s built-in visualization tools, and easily share insights without tracking down log files on individual computers.
Streamline your laboratory analyses and reduce human error using the innovative LABROS soil science laboratory collection. Perform automated particle size analysis, generate soil moisture release curves, or measure thermal and hydraulic conductivity with METER laboratory instruments designed to produce accurate analyses in a fraction of the time of other methods.
Even better, LABROS instruments can be combined to perform all of these analyses from a single sample, saving time and reducing measurement errors due to variations in sample characteristics.
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