Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

I’ll bet this has happened to you. You’re elbows deep in a wiring project, or lost in a trance-like state, figuring out a major troubleshooting problem.

Suddenly, a tap on the shoulder and a quiet “excuse me” interrupts you, sending a jolt right down your spine.

Flashlights used to be just, well, flashlights – handy tools for bringing a little illumination to whatever task was at hand. They also could be a little undependable in the old days. Battery strength was always a question, especially if they hadn’t been used in a while.

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?

In new construction, sustainable building practices are becoming the norm. But even in existing buildings, simple strategies can be implemented quickly and easily to address inefficiencies, reduce energy use, improve comfort, and enhance productivity in the space.

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.