Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

Whole-home surge protection has become a much bigger issue for residential electrical contractors in the last year as local authorities have begun adopting the 2020 edition of the National Electrical Code (NEC).

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.

Work lights are among those contractor necessities that are easy to overlook, but also can make a big difference in productivity and comfort when you’ve gotten the right model.

The state of California made news in 2018 when it passed the nation’s first mandate that most new homes under three stories had to incorporate rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, beginning in 2020.

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.

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.