Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

If you’re an electrical contractor, you’ve likely developed a series of workarounds to help you handle business. Maybe you’ve got financial software to help you manage your checking account and invoicing. And maybe you’ve got apps to help track mileage and keep track of upcoming jobs and materials orders. These options might be fine in the short run, but they also could hold your business back as it grows. A better approach could be a construction management package that brings all these functions together and is accessible when you need it, whether you’re using a laptop, smartphone or tablet.

During a big remodeling project this spring, I became more familiar with the options available for electrical receptacles these days. These include new features, like adding USB charging ports that do away with the need to track down the right adapter for every phone, smart watch and earbud charger. And now there are smart outlets you can control remotely (so, if you’re afraid you left the iron on, you can double check from your phone).

Floor boxes are a great way to bring power and communications/data connections away from the walls and into the middle of a room. This could be to provide AV access for a presenter at a podium or needed kilowatts to a convention center floor.

Honestly, I can't think of anything that bothers me more than stray hairs. Now, I'm not talking about the hairs on my head. (In fact, the older I get, the less I have to worry about those, if you know what I mean.)

Fiber optic technology has become standard where high bandwidth capacity is required – data centers being a prime example of such applications. Like other cabling products, fiber optic cables all can look pretty similar from the outside. However, just as electrical cabling comes in different varieties to meet every application’s specific safety requirements, so, too, do fiber optic offerings.

In a previous article, we looked at some of the manually operated hand tools for crimping terminals and splices. Some of them would crimp sizes up to #2 AWG. Not bad.

But when you get into the heavier electrical work, such as building transformers and other more industrial type work, a hand tool may not cut it … excuse me … crimp it.