Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

All homes and workplaces need protection from fire. It’s part of building codes everywhere. The type of system will vary depending on the type of building, number of occupants, and intended use of the structure.

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.

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.

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.