ElectricSmarts Network

A major part of ensuring your company stays profitable is maintaining your own assets. That includes everything from tracking equipment location to ensuring proper maintenance PM schedules and repairs are followed. Whether your business is mobile or tied to a location, keeping equipment in optimal condition is vital to your success.

Sensor-based lighting control is becoming a must in many commercial and institutional settings. The drivers for this trend include ever-tightening energy standards and increasing scrutiny of energy bills by building owners and managers. How successful those sensors are in actually cutting lighting costs, however, depends on lighting designers and electrical contractors who understand the basics of how sensors work, and which models are best for each application.

Most of us who work in commercial or institutional spaces rarely think about lighting, and that’s a problem for any facility’s energy bills. Occupancy/vacancy sensors can help by becoming a lighting system’s brains – these devices think about lighting, so we don’t have to. Selecting the right kind of sensor for each location is important, though, because not every sensor “sees” in the same way.

There are several types of conduit. Of course, you know that. But in this article, we're only going to discuss metallic conduits. PVC conduit may be a topic for another day. Because of their somewhat fragile composition — particularly in commercial and industrial settings — they don't fit in with this article.

Of course, the main two families of conduit, if conduits had families, are steel and aluminum.

If your organizational skills are anywhere near as advanced as mine, you likely also have at least one drawer in your kitchen or office that’s jammed with all the various USB cables that have been packaged with electronic products purchased over the years. Charging one of those devices often means untangling multiple cords while also attempting to eyeball matches between connectors and devices. There are times when I wonder if that annoying process is a sign of technology moving backward rather than forward.

The latest addition to the USB connector lineup is USB-C, and, according to its developers, it might be the last (at least until the next one comes along). It takes the “universal” in “universal serial bus” seriously – not only is it sized slim enough to fit the sleekest smartphone, it’s also designed to make the most of the new USB 3.1 SuperSpeed+ standard, which enables broad enough bandwidths to transmit 4K UHD video to a flat-screen TV.  This means you could use the same cable to charge a laptop and connect a streaming device to your TV.