Renovating and upgrading an electrical system can challenge even the best and brightest professional. Given all of the variables in play, unforeseen challenges can emerge at any time and force painful adjustments to project schedules and budget forecasts.

Building Trends
Industrywide, there’s a boom in building renovations. The reasons vary depending on where you look. Companies that are growing and adding more workers usually need more space, which means they should revisit and beef up their electrical systems. Others that want to retrofit an existing building for an entirely new purpose—often called adaptive reuse—almost always need an electrical system upgrade.

Perhaps the most important trend, then, in simplifying your next building renovation is to map the electrical system upgrade to ensure the building takes into account future needs. After all, as the business grows, the building should be ready to accommodate that growth.

Minimizing Downtime
At some point during the upgrade, you will probably have to shut the electrical power down. How long you do that, and how well it goes, is worth close study. Without a doubt shutting off the electricity will be felt across the entire enterprise—in production, operations, customer service, safety, security, and so on. The impact can be just like a catastrophic electrical failure.

For this reason, it’s common that most electrical service upgrades are scheduled for a weekend, holiday and other non-business hours.

One way you can minimize downtime is to find a service provider that can design, plan, coordinate, implement, and complete the task all under one roof. This is where the three-part approach comes into play: lean construction principles, prefabrication practices, and 3D, CAD and BIM tools.

Experts suggest you make a systems upgrade plan months in advance of the actual installation date. This will give you an opportunity to move as many tasks upstream in the process and give you a better chance for a smooth, trouble-free installation.

Lean Construction

For the past five years, Interstate Electrical Services has been on a journey to learn and apply lean construction concepts and methodologies across its organization. The 50-year old company joined the Lean Construction Institute and adapted lean practices and methodologies into the day-to-day business of its electrical service and construction.

Applying lean principles and methodologies to prepare a building for an electrical systems upgrade can bring many advantages. Lean ensures you work closely with facility managers, building owners, and construction professionals at the planning stage and throughout the entire process.

The lean philosophy also advocates for developing a detailed work plan. The approach used by Interstate is to pre-map the workspace using 3D modeling software to extract and project data points for precise positioning of the electric room spaces and the feeds going in and out. Interstate will also closely study your in-line drawing or create one if yours is outdated or missing.

With lean, you can make sure all parties get an opportunity to review the upgrade process, identify areas of concern and plan for contingencies, from start to finish.

Built, Staged, Tested, Delivered

The final stage in the upgrade is to prefabricate and preassemble the electrical system. When the work can be done offsite, in a controlled setting, the project tends to go much more smoothly. For this reason and others, a few years ago Interstate opened its own Operation Center.

Under this new model, the electrical system can be built, staged, and functionally tested before it is delivered and installed. If there’s a quality issue, it can be uncovered beforehand, and fixed. In many cases, an entire electrical room can be built, tested, shipped, and delivered to the customer site for installation. Interstate finds this approach saves time, assures quality, reduces downtime, and gets the customer powered up faster than traditional assembly methods for electrical system upgrades.

It’s worth pointing out that both the customer and contractor get value from this bundled approach. With prefabrication, pre-staging, and pre-testing, the customer’s worksite has less waste and is therefore safer since many components, such as light fixtures, transformers, and electrical panels, are assembled offsite.

There are also far fewer lost and damaged parts because most components are transported after they are assembled. Safety is also improved since the typical “hand operations” like conduit bending, wire cutting and splicing take place at an offsite workshop.

Customer Benefit

Without a doubt, the biggest benefit of all is the one experienced by the customer. By following this three-part strategy—which includes lean construction principles, three-dimensional design and visualization tools, and prefabrication—you can keep things running smoothly downstream to deliver a much better upgrade.

Just as important, you can avoid the nightmare that everyone fears with an electrical system upgrade. It’s the moment when the project is done, you switch on the power, the system isn’t fully functional, and the troubleshooting and scrambling begin.

Now You Know There is a Better Way.
Interstate Electrical Services’ team specializes in electrical system upgrades with minimal disruption of the electrical service to your building. Contact the professionals at Interstate Electrical Services today for more information.

Ensuring that your commercial building runs safely and without power outages can be hard work, but upholding preventative maintenance is imperative. Start with an infrared scan of your electrical system to ensure that you aren’t blind to an accident that’s waiting to happen. Understanding infrared scanning—and how to get the most of it—will help you meet the requirements established by the National Fire Protection Association for a predictive maintenance program that’s performed on a routine basis.

A Hidden Problem

Infrared scanning will give you an inside look at your building’s electrical system—the good, the bad and the ugly. It also will help you stop a small problem from turning into a breakdown in your other systems, including your communication, fire safety, security and other mechanical systems.

All too often this is a hidden problem, and it can also be a silent one. Experts say that weak or at-risk components in electrical systems can go undetected for months or even years.

In electrical systems, increased heat and resistance can be caused by component age, fatigue, oxidation, wear, loose connections or poor installation. Even new components can be defective. Something as simple as a loose screw on a breaker can cause a hot connection.

Because most things electrical tend to get hot before they fail, infrared inspection is the preferred diagnostic technology used to detect early failures in electrical systems and switchgear.

Equipment Checklist

On a typical infrared scanning procedure, a technician generates a list of all electrical (and mechanical) equipment to be inspected. Getting familiar with the building will allow the technician to inspect and record the condition of equipment faster and more accurately.

Typical equipment to be checked include panel boards, fused switches, busways, motor control centers and transfer switches. Other equipment might include substation transformers, power circuit breakers and essential motors.

A significant advantage is that all scan inspections are done while the equipment is energized, so that continuity of power is maintained. This also means your scan can be performed during business hours, with no disruption in service.

Detecting Heat

At Interstate Electrical Services, we use a thermal scanner. The principle of operation is that operating electrical equipment gives off heat. This heat can be detected by a thermal camera that produces images in color showing variances in heat patterns.

Basic components of the color system are the thermal-sensing camera and a portable, rechargeable battery pack. With just these two components, effective real-time detection of hot spots can easily be done.

Getting the best possible thermal images means the doors and covers of the electrical components must be opened, exposing the inner workings of the system.
Keep in mind that only a licensed electrician—not an infrared technician—can work on a live electrical system, according to NFPA 70E guidelines. The NFPA also requires the electrician to wear personal protection equipment.

Tech Team

It takes a professional to conduct an infrared inspection, but you may encounter two kinds when you arrange a thermal scan. Each brings skills to the job, but they are different in important ways.

An infrared technician, who is trained to use infrared imaging equipment, like a camera, can conduct the scan and capture the needed images. A licensed electrician, on the other hand, brings expertise and knowledge in long-term building systems care and applicable codes and standards. An electrician will also be knowledgeable in the nuances of older and newer technologies, retrofits, and lifecycle costs, and be sensitive to the overall goals of the facility such that they can help to prioritize any needs of these systems.  In addition, if equipment must be opened to get a good scan, a licensed electrician has the expertise and appropriate PPE to ensure compliance with NFPA 70E safety regulations.

Once the images have been collected, it takes a professional with substantial understanding of electrical principles and electrical systems, like an electrician or even better an electrical engineer to effectively read and analyze the resulting images. The process of diagnosing hot spots can be assisted if the scan also includes both voltage and amp readings to corroborate the visual findings. Being able to read the details is as important as highlighting the problem.

Post scan, the images, notes and recommendations for any remedial action are detailed in a report. Included are all of the images collected whether or not they show a hotspot.  These become the baseline and against which future readings can be compared to determine a pattern that should be addressed (filtering dust for example) and can help in establishing an electrical maintenance routine that may include tightening connections and cleaning components.