Mark Paden
Posted: April 2015 | Updated: November 2015
I passed the Electrical Power PE exam a few years ago. Before taking the test, I asked everyone I could about what they did to prepare for the test. Since taking the exam, I have been asked the same questions. Below is a refined version of what I have told others. I took the exam in Alabama in 2012, so some of the following advice might be outdated or not relevant to your state.
You will not find many study tips here. This guide will focus mostly on how to gather and organize your references to make the most out of the open-book nature of the 8-hour test. If I had to do it all over again, I would probably take one of the online courses. Compiling resources took an inordinate amount of time. But, if you are going at it alone, I hope this guide might save some time.
The PE exam is an open book exam. Some people only bring a few books - enough to be carried in a backpack. Others use dollies or hand trucks to carry massive containers filled with books. Most people use a roller-board suitcase to carry materials.
I used a roller board large enough to require a check-in at the airport. Even if your books can fit in a 'carry-on' bag, you will want enough room to be able to rummage around for quick access. I have seen advice for more elaborate methods (such as using milk crates as book shelves), but I think having the books spread out is the most time effective method if you have fewer than 15 items.
How you choose to carry your materials is a relatively minor part of preparing for the test. Your selected references and how you familiarize yourself with them is of the most importance.
Here are the books I took to the exam:
The PPI reference book seems to be the only book that even attempts to be all-encompassing, but I think it falls short in accomplishing it.
Everyone I know who has taken the PE exam within the past 5 or 10 years has purchased the PPI books. I know people who have passed the Power exam after relying primarily on the PPI study materials, I just have no idea how they did it.
I lost faith in the book shortly after I started studying. I tried to use the Reference Manual to answer questions from the NCEES practice exam, but I kept running into problems that I could not find a section for in the reference manual. The first third of the book seems to cover material outside the scope of the test (calculus, physics, etc.). Of the chapters that do cover test material, much of the text did not seem to be in-depth enough to answer the questions in the practice NCEES exam. I never went through the book chapter-by-chapter. But, given other people's experience with the book, I have to assume all of the needed information is there.
After solving problems in the other two PPI books (The Sample Exam and Sample Questions), I went through and solved the examples in chapters relevant to the exam topics. The reference manual was helpful even if it was not used as my primary study tool, but possibly not worth the price.
Two sample exams. The questions did not really have the same 'feel' as NCEES provided questions and might be a little too easy. But they do cover the right topics and they are generally helpful. The solutions are fairly detailed.
More questions, but not necessarily in a format you would expect of the NCEES exam and some questions seem outside the exam's scope. Like the sample exams, they are helpful and worth going through.
This is the only 'must have' reference you will need. This will give you a good idea how much studying you will need to do. Obviously, of the other sample exams available, it is the most like the real exam. Many of the solutions in the back of the book are vague, but detailed solutions for nearly every question can be found at engineerboards.com.
These books were helpful, though pricey. Questions were thoughtful, similar to the NCEES questions (without being copies), and the solutions were thorough.
The videos posted to the Complex Imaginary website are very helpful. Watching the square root of 3 videos as a refresher should be among the first things you do when you start studying. If you do not want to buy the exams, at least print and work the examples they have posted on the website.
Of the various non-NCEES sample exams I tried, the Complex Imaginary books were the most helpful.
This book is in its second edition. I used the first edition, so some of these critiques might not be true anymore.
The book consists of five 80-question exams with answers in the back. Many questions were repetitive, especially between exams. The skeleton of the problem would be the same, only the numbers would be different. The Complex Imaginary exams were much better about making questions fundamentally different, yet still relevant, between exams.
This book had just been released when I purchased it. There were quite a few errors in the first edition, but the website was good about keeping an errata up to date. I assume it is not as much of a problem in the second edition.
The solutions were not very detailed. This is mostly because the questions are not difficult enough to warrant detailed explanations. But if you find yourself not understanding the problem, the solution is unlikely to help.
Like the Complex Imaginary practice tests, the Spin-Up exams are close to the NCEES type of problem. However, the Spin-Up problems are far easier and the Complex Imaginary problems are slightly harder.
Many sections cover topics not necessary for the exam, but a few chapters were very helpful. Since every chapter has a different author, results vary by topic. I found the best explanations for transformers, grounding and protective relaying in this book. The questions are helpful, but they are not the same style of question that you will find on the NCEES materials. The solutions are not detailed.
It is mostly a guide for the NEC style problems. There are better, more straightforward options out there. This book seems to have been printed on demand and the formatting is poorly done. Like a cheap paperback, you cannot open it to a page and lay it on a table without causing serious damage to the book's spine. Not recommended.
The structure of the questions will not match what you will find on the exam. The solutions are not helpful. Because of these things, I did not extensively go through either of these books, but I did find a few good examples out of each. The index is helpful. But, that still does not make it worth even the small cost.
This is the best college textbook I have used, though I did not use it in college. I purchased it for the exam after seeing it recommended on engineerboards.com.
Chapters I found particularly helpful:
(These are not chapter titles - they are the exam topics they cover)
The section on power transfer (Chapter 25) was particularly helpful. It is an important topic that I could not find explained as well anywhere else.
Chapter 8 is a good refresher on the differences between delta and wye systems. It should be one of the first things you review when starting out.
This is a college textbook, which means it is expensive. However, there is an international version that is not. I bought it for less than $20 using abebooks.com.
How is the 'international version' different from the US version? I am not entirely sure. It is in English. There are no weird, unexpected units. I have no idea how the international version is different, or why it is 20 times cheaper than the US version. The only difference I could find is that the US version is a hardcover, while the international is not. Unless you want to pay well over $100 to make your reference suitcase slightly heavier on test day, I recommend buying the international version.
It is absolutely necessary to take either the Handbook or the regular codebook. If you are taking the exam, you likely already have access to one of these. The difference between the two is that the Handbook is a hardback version with helpful annotations.
While the annotations might not be the type of information helpful for exam questions, I still recommend the Handbook over the codebook because the glossy pages are easier to read and self-annotate.
If the Handbook is not available to you, I would not bother paying for it just for use on this test.
Apply tabs liberally.
I recommend this for any power engineer or electrician. It is a pocket-sized book containing all of the most used tables and formulas from the NEC. If tabbed correctly, you can use it to look up cable sizes, breaker sizes, etc. slightly faster than the huge NEC Handbook. This is not a replacement for the Handbook by any means. But, if you familiarize yourself with the contents, it could shave some time off looking up information during the test. However, I would not recommend purchasing it just for the test.
You can bring self-prepared material as long as it is bound. I put together three 3-ring binders for the test. In two of the binders, I included a tab for each topic found in the NCEES provided outline and for topics covered within those listed topics. Each tab consists of at least one of the following:
All three notebooks
Tabs I used with my notebooks
The third notebook simply had practice exams and any other sample problem I could get my hands on. I removed the spiral spines from my Complex Imaginary books and put them into my third notebook. I also included handwritten problems and solutions from other references. It also included an index for each problem I solved while preparing for the test.
One thing I did that I doubt many people do when studying is that I created an index of every practice problem I worked. I kept up with it with an Excel spreadsheet. For each problem, I listed:
Before the exam, I printed the index and put it in the front of my third notebook.
I did this for every sample problem I worked and for every textbook example I came across. I then sorted alphabetically based on what the problem asked for, printed it, and put it in my notebook.
At exam time, I had 1,340 problems in my index. The idea was, if during the test I came upon a problem I did not know how to solve, I could easily refer to my index and find a similar problem. During the exam, the index strategy did not go as planned. I think the index helped me once, and I checked it in a futile effort for 3-4 more times.
Because of this, I would not necessarily recommend this method since it consumes so much time that could be spent actually studying. I estimate that my indexing efforts took somewhere between 10 and 15 hours total. However, I do not regret doing it. The act of entering the information made me very aware of where everything was located. It was also a good way to keep up with how much progress I made during each study session.
It also lets you see how many cumulative problems you have worked and how they compare to the topics covered on the exam. For instance, 'Wattmeters' is listed in the outline of topics covered on the test, but the practice tests I used had only one or two Wattmeter-related questions. The index let me know that I needed to find more Wattmeter questions to be better prepared.
Notebook 3 - master index (Pages 20 and 21)
From the massive index, I pulled entries to make separate indexes for the following topics:
I printed these indexes and placed them in the appropriate tabs within my first two notebooks.
Notebook 2 - first page of my NEC-specific index
When solving problems, try to write down every step, even the seemingly obvious ones. Use a different color pen to circle or annotate parts that you could envision yourself forgetting during the test.
Towards the end of my studying, I challenged myself to fill an entire 120-page spiral notebook with solved problems. I did this by reworking the Complex Imaginary exams, the NCEES practice exams and a few NEC questions I found on the internet.
The spiral notebook where I re-worked the practice tests
My indexing habit took an obsessive turn when I numbered all of the pages within the spiral notebook and then indexed the problems within. This was too much. Do not do this.
The most helpful online resource I came across was EngineerBoards.com. It is a message board with a primary focus of helping people prepare for the PE exam. Even though I did not participate in posting, it was still helpful. I did not post anything simply because most questions that I could pose to the board had already been asked and answered before.
Nearly every NCEES sample exam question has a few threads dedicated to explaining the problem's solution. You can easily find sample example discussions by using a Google search in the following manner:
site:engineerboards.com NCEES problem number
Beyond engineerboards.com, standard Google searches are often ineffective for finding step-by-step descriptions of how to solve a problem.
The best way to find step-by-step instructions is to search university sites and PDFs. You can do this by using this search format in Google:
site:.edu filetype:pdf [your search terms]
This will often lead you to a class website for an EE class where lesson PowerPoints are posted as well as step-by-step homework solutions.
Here is a partial list of the internet references I used in my notebooks:
Resistance Grounding System Basics
http://apps.geindustrial.com/publibrary/
Understanding Ground Resistance Testing
http://www.rainbirdservices.com/Training/Documents/Understanding%20Earth%20Ground%20Resistance%20by%20AEMC.pdf
GFCI
http://www.homeinspector.org/resources/journals/GFCIs.pdf
Voltage Regulation
http://esrdc.mit.edu/library/ESRDC_library/VR_parallel.pdf
Insulation Resistance Testing
http://www.powercet.com/uploads/files/ae_understnd_insulation_res_testing.pdf
NEC - Conductor Sizing
http://pdhsite.com/courses/Conductors%20course.pdf
NEC - Motor Calculations
http://www.pdhsite.com/courses/Motor%20Calculations%20Article%20430.pdf
NEC - Voltage Drop
http://fac-web.spsu.edu/ecet/wagner/4520-PPT09.pdf
NEMA Enclosure Types
https://www.nema.org/Products/Documents/nema-enclosure-types.pdf
Harmonics
http://ecee.colorado.edu/copec/book/slides/Ch15slide.pdf
Symmetrical Components
https://www.eiseverywhere.com/file_uploads/a4f0ea9ba5ebe8baf31cba17ff378633_SymmetricalComponents_2013.pdf
This is covered at length in any Power textbook, but this pdf does a great job at covering the most pertinent information at a basic level. The printout includes helpful examples covering 3-phase faults, single-line-to-ground faults and line-to-line faults.
IEEE/ANSI Device Numbers
http://www05.abb.com/global/scot/scot296.nsf/veritydisplay/c1256d32004634bac1256e19006fe88a/$file/1mrb520165-ben_en_ansi_numbers_ieee_standard_electric_power_system_device_function_numbers.pdf
Power Flow Analysis
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.128.239&rep=rep1&type=pdf
More Power Flow Analysis
http://faculty.mu.edu.sa/download.php?fid=89894
Protective Relaying
http://www.gedigitalenergy.com/multilin/notes/artsci/art01.pdf
Economics - FE Exam Reference Handbook
http://ncees.org/exams/study-materials/download-fe-supplied-reference-handbook/
Economics - Nominal and Effective Interest Rates
http://ise.tamu.edu/inen303/Slides/Chapter4.pdf
Theodore Wildi Problems
http://www.wildi-theo.com/index.php?p=ListProblems
Calculators - Bring two. Make sure they are on the NCEES's list of approved calculators. Use both to study with and make sure that both are correctly configured (some calculators give answers as fractions out of the box - you will want to make sure they are set to decimals). Know how to switch between radians and degrees, polar and rectangular, etc.
Wristwatch - I am used to telling time with my phone, so I had to buy a cheap wristwatch to keep up with time during the test.
Bottled Water - Pack a bottle in your roller-board.
Lunch (but leave it in your car) - You only get an hour for lunch so leaving the test site is too risky. Bring a simple lunch to eat as you quietly second-guess each of your morning answers.
Do these things and hopefully you too can pass the exam and celebrate by purchasing an overpriced Peruvian domain name that you will immediately realize that you have very little use for. Good luck!
Questions, comments and corrections can be sent to mark@paden.pe