Opinion

Making myElectrical - update 4

Steven — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:15:00 GMT

It's been around a year since I last did one of these updates. Within that year lots has changed, particularly the move to the DotNetNuke platform and now's a good time to do another update.

Over the years, the site has matured and along the way it's been a learning curve for myself. The main reason for doing these posts is to let anyone who is interested know how the site works behind the scenes.

Until the middle of last year, I was pretty focused on the mechanics of getting the site to work the way I wanted. This was immensely time consuming and clearly stopping me from developing the content – which is the main point of the site. Much of this was historical, with a large part due to maintaining functionality using an older version of Community Server.

How Electrical Circuits Work

Steven — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:59:00 GMT

If you have no idea how electrical circuits work, or what people mean then they talk about volts and amps, hopefully I can shed a bit light. I’m intending this post to be a simple introduction to electrical circuits for anyone who doesn’t know, but is interested.

Periodic Electrical Installation Inspection – What to Inspect?

Steven — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:15:00 GMT

This is the second post in a series of two on periodic electrical inspections. In the first post, I discussed how often inspections should be carried out. As with how often, when looking at what to inspect there are two considerations – 1) inspection of systems, which businesses themselves have decided are critical to their operation and 2) the minimum systems which need to be inspected according to regulations.

Periodic Electrical Installation Inspection – How Often?

Steven — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:08:00 GMT

How often installations are inspected is up to the owner of the installation, provided such durations do not exceed any regulatory maximums in force. The criticality of the electrical installation to the continuation of the business, often determines how frequently the installation is inspected, for example many banks will carry out annual inspections of their installations. Other types of enterprise may do inspections more frequently and many installations are only inspected as often as required by regulation.

Are We Losing Professional Integrity

Steven — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:04:00 GMT

I have been thinking recently that there appears to be less professional integrity around than when I first started my career in electrical engineering. Recently the IET has also had a discussion around if engineers should sign an engineering equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath. While I’m not necessarily in favour of swearing oaths, it does illustrate that I’m not the only one thinking about integrity and ethics.

Equipment Verification (to IEC Standards)

Steven — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 20:36:00 GMT

One of the requirements to ensuring that everything works is to have equipment selected, manufactured and verified [tested] to IEC standards. Not all equipment out there meets this requirements. It is the responsibility of the engineers in the procurement and construction process to ensure that only equipment meeting these requirements is used.

If your involved in this activity you most likely already know what to do and have your own methods for approaching this issue. If your new to this or have just been tasked with verifying equipment meets requirements, hopefully this post will get you started.

Ensuring compliance is not complicated, but there are a couple of things you aware of.

Understanding electric motor insulation & temperature

Steven — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:01:00 GMT

Anyone specifying or using electric motors should have a basic understanding how the insulation is related to temperature. Three classes of insulation are in common use (with 'F' being the most common). The image (which is form an ABB catalogue for their low voltage performance motors), shows how the installation is used in practice.

Wiki Depreciation

Steven — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:06:00 GMT

We have had the Wiki with us for a long time now, but at last I have decided to say bye bye – more details on why below.

Arc Flash Calculations

Steven — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:14:00 GMT

Working in the vicinity of electrical equipment poses an hazard. In addition to electric shock hazard, fault currents passing through air causes Arc Flash. To protect people a risk analysis on the arc flash hazard is carried out to better understand what may occur.

When evaluating arc flash there are two main considerations, 1) the incident energy in the arc flash and 2) flash protection boundary. I will be looking at the calculation of these two parameters in terms of IEE Std. 1584 'IEEE Guide for Performing Arc-Flash Hazard Calculations'.

Windows Live Writer and myElectrical

Steven — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:27:00 GMT

When making an opinion post (or adding a Note) to our site we have a great online WYSIWYG editor and things are pretty simple. However, if you prefer you can write, manage and publish your posts using any external editor which implements the MetaWeblog API. A popular free post editor is Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer.