ElectricSmarts Network

Arlington Industries offers a wide range of countertop, floor and wall box kits, with plastic or metal covers in up to five different colors featuring either metal or plastic flip lids and plugs for new or retrofit construction.

To address the retrofit or remodel market in particular, Arlington also offers an electrical box extender that can be used to correct setbacks and insulate devices with an easy install design, eliminating the need to align device screws with extender holes.

Don’t look now, but your electrical outlets may one day soon start developing some smarts.

Smarts, that is, in terms of artificial intelligence through which an outlet box can “learn” to differentiate between a fuse-flipping arc event such as faulty wiring and a “nuisance trip” such as when a vacuum cleaner or hair dryer momentarily overloads a circuit.

Solar energy has grown from a niche player in the electricity-generation market to a significant contributor to U.S. energy markets. Aiding that growth have been notable equipment improvements, including more efficient photovoltaic (PV) panels and the introduction of smart inverters enabling safer and more productive operation of installed PV systems. But some contractors might not yet realize that even the most basic connectors and other fittings also have become optimized for the harsh conditions they can face in solar applications.

If you could go back a decade or so, you’d find the growing data center market then under fire for its notoriously high energy demand. Operators based their siting decisions on locations offering easy access to inexpensive electricity, with energy cost being the primary motivator.  Today’s owners, however, are equally concerned about the environmental impact of that energy’s generation, which is helping to drive efficiency improvements in data center design.

A new report released by Honeywell Industrial Cyber Security Solutions and Services warns that a big threat to industrial process controls can come in very small packages — namely, removable USB devices and flash drives used to transfer data between and among computers.

For the last 20 years, behind the scenes, the Industry Data Exchange Association (IDEA) has been working to develop and improve the way electrical contractors and distributors find the electrical product and pricing information they need for bidding and other purposes. Long called the Industry Data Warehouse (IDW), the product database IDEA manages, was recently rechristened IDEA Connector, in a move IDEA says more clearly communicates the database’s intent.