Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

I was talking to my brother, Mark, on the phone last night. We’d been trying to connect all week and finally got the chance. I’m in Arkansas and he’s in Arizona, so the time difference can be a pain.

We just missed each other the day before because he was over with the neighbors across the street.

Right now, I’m writing this article from the comfort of my side yard. Sitting on my bench under the tree, cup of coffee on the table in front of me. And I’m totally connected to the internet via an access point in my office about 30 feet away.

Looking through a manufacturer’s online enclosure catalog recently, I came across a term I hadn’t heard before. Now, I’m not a contractor, so I likely haven’t seen as many of these listings as you might have. But I am a journalist who has covered the construction industry for several decades, and the term “mild steel” stuck out to me when it showed up as a material option for the maker’s broad range of enclosure offerings.

Earlier this year at the Light + Building 2018 trade show in Frankfurt, Germany, Philips Lighting announced a string of new initiatives aimed at the transition to more LED lamps as well as the inclusion of LEDs into the “Internet of Things” (IoT) in homes and buildings worldwide.

First the company announced IoT platform called Interact, designed to handle data collected from connected light points, sensors, devices and systems.

Some facilities are changing their requirements for motor and appliance installations. This could be due to OSHA Lock-out and Tag-out requirements or NFPA 70E. The change is toward using pin and sleeve devices instead of having a hard-wired installation.

Safety requirements often have the maintenance person checking for the absence of voltage before touching. The rules are quite specific and are enforced by OSHA.

The Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) uses 24VDC input/output to provide 35W of power and 5 to 15 minutes Hold Time and is designed for critical networking and control applications such as industrial managed switches and human machine interfaces (HMI’s). The Industrial UPS uses Ultracapacitors instead of batteries, eliminating the #1 cause of conventional UPS failures, which lowers the risk of downtime - and there’s no need for costly and time consuming maintenance.