Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

Fun fact. Light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second. Whoosh.

That’s kind of fast, right? Faster than my old Ford pickup, anyway.

One of my favorite topics to talk or write about is LED lighting and lighting accessories. I’m a big fan of those little light-emitting diodes. Even in the early days, when prices were high and options pretty much non-existent, the technology intrigued me.

There have been many times when I was elbows deep in a wiring trough or raceway. We sometimes called the smaller units gutters, but all were raceways and wiring troughs.

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.

Lighting automation has bells and whistles, but a lighting contactor is necessary to switch the actual lighting circuits. Properly selecting lighting contactors can save installation and maintenance costs. What are some of the important considerations in addition to the correct voltage and current?