Just because you think something is broken or doesn’t work anymore doesn’t mean it’s true. There is such a thing as product reconditioning in the electrical industry. Companies need to be aware that this is a great way to get electrical components for your company especially if working with limited resources. Just because they are reconditioned components doesn’t mean they are of lesser quality than if you were to purchase new components. In fact, many times the bugs and kinks have all been worked out of the reconditioned components therefore making them more valuable. Here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t think less about reconditioned electrical components and use them for your company.
Lower Costs
Every business is concerned with saving money. Buying refurbished industrial equipment will save your company a great deal of capital. On average, your company will save about 50% to 70% when buying refurbished industrial equipment over new equipment. You’ll be able to use this money in other areas of business to help you grow.
Greater Peace of Mind
Not only do reconditioned electrical components cost less, but you can rest assure that the products you’re getting are completely rebuilt, inspected and tested multiple times to make sure everything works as if it was new. Another benefit as mentioned earlier is that equipment that has been used for awhile and reconditioned has had a chance to have the kinks worked out. Problems that often arise with new equipment have been worked out and dealt with.
More Stringent Standards
Companies that are in business to reconditioned electrical components know when a product still life has to offer. Therefore, it is important to purchase components from a reputable company. This will help to ensure you are getting quality parts that have been processed at the highest of standards. You will be sure to get the best in reconditioned equipment and components.
Like New Appearance
Reconditioned electrical components are not only rebuilt and cleaned before being inspected, but they are also painted using quality paint and exclusive acrylic enamel chosen for its durability so that they look as good as new.
Increased Inspections
To ensure all refurbished industrial equipment runs right, the product is tested and re-tested again to meet or exceed the manufacturer’s UL certification. Each component is not only cleaned but also lubricated, reassembled and thoroughly tested before being allowed to be resold.
Learn more about J & P Electrical Company and their vast line of new, surplus, and refurbished industrial electrical components including: circuit breakers, bus ducts, bus plugs, disconnects, fuses, panel switches, tap boxes, and transformers at www.jpelectricalcompany.com. To contact one of our product reconditioning specialists, call 877.844.5514 today.
Right now, if you happen to be in North America, chances are pretty good that there’s at least one little face staring at you. Look around and you’ll spy it, probably about 15 inches up from the floor on a nearby wall. It’s the ubiquitous wall outlet, with three holes arranged in a way that can’t help but stimulate the facial recognition firmware of our mammalian brain.
No matter where you go you’ll find those outlets and similar ones, all engineered for specific tasks. But why do they look the way they do? And what’s going on electrically and mechanically behind that familiar plastic face? It’s a topic we’ve touched on before with Jenny List’s take on international mains standards. Now it’s time to take a look inside the common North American wall socket, and how it got that way.
Hubbell’s Plugs
Separable Attachment Plug, US Patent 774,250. Note the round, headphone-like prongs rather than flat blades.Consider the problems faced by engineers and designers in the early days of the electrical age. They were literally inventing an industry from the ground up, with very little to go on in terms of prior art. Not only did they have to invent the means of producing electricity, they had to come up with absolutely every component that would connect together to create useful circuits for paying customers, preferably without killing them.
One thing customers, particularly residential customers, would need would be a means to temporarily attach electrical devices to the mains supply, without requiring a visit from an electrician to connect them to the fixed wiring of a house or office, which was typically dedicated to sockets for light bulbs. The requirements were simple: provide two contacts, one for the line conductor and one for the neutral, that could remain firmly connected but easily interrupted at need.
Imaginative minds worked on this and similar problems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and various solutions were adopted. But it wasn’t until 1903 that Harvey Hubbell, an inventor from Bridgeport, Connecticut, patented his “Separable Attachment Plug,” a device that we’d recognize as a plug and socket. Hubbell’s first pass at a design used round conductors that looked a bit like the plugs used in manual telephone exchanges to make connections, and might have been inspired by them. The detents at the tip of the pins were retained by the spring action of the contacts inside the socket.
A Hubbell plug with flat blades, from the 1905 catalog.
The device worked well, but the manufacturer and businessman in Harvey saw problems. Foremost was the costs behind those round pins, which would have required machining to achieve the tip and detent. Harvey would have known that parts stamped from sheet metal would be cheaper and easier to manufacture, and so he scrapped the round pins in favor of flat metal blades in 1904. Like the round prongs, the flat blades had a detent for retention, and were arranged in a line. Catalogs from the time list dozens of variants of the “Hubbell Attachment Plug,” and the prices shown for each device suggest that Hubbell’s company fared well in the early 20th century.
For reasons unknown, though, Hubbell altered his design in 1912. The two blades were no longer in a line; each blade was twisted 90° to form the familiar parallel arrangement we see to this day. Hubbell continued to sell both styles of plugs and sockets, and by 1915 had sold something like 15 million units, enough to ensure that Hubbell’s design would be adopted as a standard, even without the millions of units also sold by Hubbell’s imitators.
Standardization
The specifications for the standard wall outlet we know and love today in North America are determined by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA). NEMA standards cover a bewildering range of electrical products; we’ve covered their enclosure and weather-resistance standards before. The standard 120-volt, 15-amp outlet is a NEMA 5-15. The third conductor, the ground pin that completes the outlet’s face, is a round or U-shaped prong. It was added to some outlets as early as the 1920s as a safety feature and is now required for all outlets by the National Electrical Code.
The ground connection is interesting. You’ll notice that on three-wire plugs, the ground pin extends further out from the insulated cord body by about 1/8″. The idea here is that the ground circuit will be completed before the line and neutral connections are made when plugging the cord into an outlet, and perhaps more importantly, will be disconnected last when unplugging. That ensures that there’s a path to ground any time a circuit is plugged into the outlet.
Note too that the NEMA standard says the ground pin is actually located above the slots for the line and neutral pins, turning that frowning face upside down. There’s some logic to that — if something conductive should drape across a partially unplugged cord, it’s safer to have the line and neutral blades physically blocked by the ground pin. In practice, though, most outlets in residential and business settings are installed with the ground plug down. But look around the next time you’re in a hospital; chances are, the outlets there are all installed the correct way.
Behind the Face
The internals of a NEMA 5-15 outlet vary by manufacturer, of course, and even within a brand, there are different grades of outlet. The picture below shows two different grades of outlet taken apart. They’re similar in that both the line and the neutral connections are formed brass bus bars, with screw connections on the outside for connection into a building’s wiring, and springy contacts to grip and retain the mating plug. The industrial-grade outlet has thicker bus bars, better contacts, and stouter plastic in the body. You’ll notice too that both grades have the ground pin directly connected to the metal frame of the outlet, which would also be in contact with a metal wall box, if it were mounted in one.
EMA 5-15 outlet internals. Source: HandymanHowTo.com
Considering how much else has changed in the last century, it’s pretty remarkable that Harvey Hubbell’s original plug and socket designs have remained pretty much unchanged. They’ve been tweaked, for sure, and the original idea has been extended to a panoply of configurations for every connection imaginable. There’s no doubt that the design has some deficiencies, but in the end, Harvey’s ideas seem to have won the day by addressing the basic needs.
Asset recovery is the specialized technique that allows companies to go into facilities and complete electrical tear downs and manufacturing plant clean outs. Companies specializing in asset recovery take resources that are no longer being utilized and resell them after they are put through the reconditioning process. This technique allows materials that would be normally disposed of and allows them to be sold. Electrical surplus recovery companies do complete manufacturing plant clean outs, taking materials that are going to otherwise be disposed of and turning them into usable assets. Below, we are going to look at the definitions that one should know during asset recovery and purchasing electrical components that are new, used, recycled, or refurbished.
Recycling:
Harmful materials and disposal costs of material waste can be reduced with recycling. In the recycling process materials are converted during plant clean outs, generating income as well as preserving resources.
Reuse:
Equipment and electrical components often can be reused in other manufacturing facilities after a plant is closed. Re-using equipment allows older equipment to be replaced with internal resources before the need arises to make an external purchase. If the equipment is not currently needed but could be used in the future can be put into storage for later use. Reusing idle equipment helps companies reduce depreciation, taxes, and capital.
Reconditioning:
This process begins with electrical components and machinery that has previously been used. Companies recondition components by taking them completely apart and rebuilding them. This process is done often during plant clean outs as a way of generating capital. Components are refurbished and sold to other users at a discounted price. The process of reconditioning reduces waste and allows companies to offer like new components for resale.
Reclaiming:
This process involves solvents, chemicals, lube oils and more that have been used to be reclaimed and reused, most often in a manner in which they weren’t initially used. This allows companies to cut down on waste while being environmentally friendly.
Reselling:
When used or reconditioned surplus inventory is sold. This occurs when it is no longer viable or useful to the company and there is no reason to store it for reuse later on.
These processes keep companies from literally throwing money away in dumps. Manufacturing plant clean outs allow materials to be reconditioned or sold as used through electrical surplus recovery shops. Companies that go in and process industrial plant clean outs greatly help companies recover capital from their previous investments. It is important to extract every bit of value out of your initial investment.
Learn more about J & P Electrical Company and their vast line of new, surplus, and refurbished industrial electrical components including: circuit breakers, bus ducts, bus plugs, disconnects, fuses, panel switches, tap boxes, and transformers at www.jpelectricalcompany.com. To contact one of our product reconditioning specialists, call 877.844.5514 today.
Arc faults are one of the leading causes for residential electrical fires.
Each year in the United States, over 40,000 fires are attributed to home electrical wiring. These fires result in over 350 deaths and over 1,400 injuries each year.
Smoke alarms, fire extinguishers and escape ladders are all examples of emergency equipment used in homes to take action when a fire occurs. An Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter (AFCI) is a product that is designed to detect a wide range of arcing electrical faults to help reduce the electrical system from being an ignition source of a fire.
Arcing can create high intensity heat, which may over time ignite surrounding material such as wood framing or insulation.
The temperatures of these arcs can exceed 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Arcing may be caused by damaged wires behind a wall or damaged cords that are plugged into an outlet.
This commonly occurs when furniture is pressed up against a plug in an electrical outlet or nails and screws are driven into a wall.
Conventional circuit breakers only respond to overloads and short circuits, so they do not protect against arcing conditions that produce erratic, and often reduced current.
The AFCI continuously monitors the current and is able to selectively distinguish between a harmless arc (incidental to normal operation of switches, plugs and brushed motors), and a potentially dangerous arc —that can occur in a lamp cord which has a broken conductor. This circuit breaker breaks or interrupts the circuit when it detects an electric arc in the circuit.
As of the 2014, NEC, AFCI protection is required on all branch circuits supplying outlets or devices installed in nearly every room of a home.
Older homes that have not been rewired or homes that only have the circuit breaking electrical outlets and not in the distribution board —breaker box—itself should consider consulting an electrician. What’s in your breaker box?
Some homeowners assume that just because they have the electrical outlets with the little red light that can be reset that they have all bases covered, this may be a disguise. Local electrician Brian Jones of Triple J Electric said, “The AFCI at the fuse box and the electric outlet in the home are two different things, it takes a combination to cover all areas that need protecting.” Jones is a state licensed electrician 256-996-8157.
Original Source: http://times-journal.com/dekalb_living/at_home/columnists/marla/article_6e0a123c-383a-11e8-b230-1f3a343a5f4f.html
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