Craftsmanship: Taking the Road Less Traveled
Making It Easier: A PLC module is mounted at a 45 degree angle to allow better field technician access to the wiring points on the left side of the module.
By Garrod Massey
With panel building, there’s often a choice to make our jobs at UCEC easier on ourselves or a choice to make things easier on our customers.
We choose to make the customer or the end user’s job easier, not ours.
There are several ways we do this, but they all circle back to the pride we all feel when we fabricate and wire our panels. We’re choosing the best materials, the finest skilled craftsmen and the most recent technology to deliver superior electrical control panels.
One way we make things easier for the customer is when we run wireway in our panels. We like to squeeze our ducts really small, but we leave the customer’s ducts large. Let’s say we have four strips we need to wire in to the panel. We’ll use the pattern small-large-small-large and we’ll take the small duct. Saving the large wireway for our customers will make it easier for them to wire on their end.
This picture shows how we stagger the horizontal Panduit sizes, small, big, small, big, etc. Notice that 99 percent of the wiring is inside the small wire duct. That is what we call a “panel” Panduit and the empty one we call “field” Panduit.
Other customer-first step we take concerns din rail. (Din rail is a metal rail used for mounting industrial control equipment inside panels.) We often take the din rail to our metal shop, and we’ll bend it at a 45-degree angle so that the customer’s wiring access is easier. Meanwhile, we’ll take the non-bent side of the panel, which is more difficult for us, but easier on the customer, of course.
There are other ways we make our customers’ lives easier, but I can’t give away all of our secrets! We’re just pleased to do the work on our end to save sweat and aggravation for our customers. We’ve heard from engineers and field contractors that they appreciate how we build and wire our panels because it makes their jobs easier.
I’ve been in the field enough to know most panel shops don’t put this kind of effort into their work. But by choosing to take the harder road, UCEC excels with every panel we make.
Garrod Massey is an Operations Support Manager at UCEC.