Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

Did you ever have trouble when choosing from restaurant menu, should I have the sumptuous meat or rather the so-nicely flavored fish? When looking at your typical pushbutton catalog, we are often faced with a similar dilemma: do you want to go to the metal pushbutton section or rather to the plastic pushbutton part? During customer visits, I often found that the initial move is just to go for the selection you’ve been going with in the recent or not so recent past.  But when we begin digging deeper, we discover that the choice is usually very much related to personal tastes and the applicative needs for the product, to the point that you can feel the passion for their machine behind most engineer reasons. To simplify, I’ve found that 3 factors are usually guiding this choice: The aesthetics The resistance to mechanical constraints The resistance to chemical environments. The aesthetics of pushbuttons is usually a compromise between 2 criteria. Metal pushbuttons are usually...

A smart city is equipped to increase operational efficiency and the quality of welfare services provided by the government, through the application of information and communications technology. A smart city also provides for an intelligent, clean, and sustainable environment, while also offering a higher quality of life to citizens. Smart city development involves the application of solutions like electronic service mechanisms, real-time power and water monitoring, renewable sources of energy, smart building controls, and intelligent traffic management systems – among many others. Using this technology, the government can interact directly with both the residents and infrastructure of the city. However, various smart city challenges stand in the way of their development. Financial requirement: Smart city solutions require a lot of funding, which brings forth the question of who will provide this necessary investment. Data sharing : Most departments involved in city building general...

Over the course of this blog series we’ve discussed the many benefits of smart circuit breakers for applications as diverse as wind turbines, industrial plants, hospitals, data centers, and large commercial buildings. As part of a fully digitized power distribution system, these intelligent, connected devices go beyond traditional protection functions to help facility teams simplify routine maintenance , avoid outages , and restore power faster if an outage occurs. In addition, embedded energy metering helps meet new efficiency standards , while Ethernet connectivity makes sure power, energy, and breaker diagnostic data is always available to everyone that needs it. The robust and flexible design of the most advanced breakers enables adaptation to any harsh or demanding environment, now and in future. All of these capabilities are essentially for helping facility teams improve safety, reliability, and uptime while reducing energy and maintenance costs, extending equipment life, ...

As buildings become more complex, with all sorts of electrical, heating, cooling and other systems that need consistent routine maintenance, it can be a daunting task for facility managers and maintenance personnel to keep up – especially as they deal with increasingly scarce skilled staff. Each component has a maintenance schedule to adhere to, myriad parts that may be required, and providers who perform the work. Work needs to be scheduled so as to minimize (or completely avoid) downtime. Once a maintenance job is complete, there are invoices to deal with and reports to produce, to document what was done – and when the next scheduled maintenance job should happen. The never-ending cycle of scheduled building maintenance Consider what’s involved in performing scheduled maintenance on any given building management system. It first involves scheduling time to complete the job, at a time that works for both the facility owner and the maintenance provider. Then you perform diagnostic...

When it comes to protecting people and equipment in low voltage (LV) environments, nothing is more important than having reliable circuit breakers  in place. Over time, circuit breaker technology has advanced in many different ways, including becoming more intelligent and more flexible. This has allowed them to increase performance and meet a broader range of applications. However, in extremely harsh environments, circuit breakers are faced with conditions that are especially challenging. These conditions can cause false trips or other kinds of breaker failures. In this post we’ll have a quick look at some of these situations, and the types of circuit breaker features you should look for to make sure they’re robust enough to survive any hazard. Circuit breakers that operate reliably will keep people and electrical installations protected, while operations run continuously and efficiently. Extreme vibration risks There are many applications where circuit breakers face high vibra...

In previous posts, I described the lifecycle-cost and environmental benefits  the cast-resin transformers provides, compared to liquid-type transformers. In this post, I describe the fire-resistance cast-resin offerings provide, especially when indoor installation is required. While their first costs can be higher, but often are competitive globally by taking into account all expenses of installation and other, cast-resin transformers are both less expensive and safer to operate than those using oil as an insulating material. Cost and environmental benefits As I described in “ Thinking Beyond First Costs When Specifying Transformers ,” cast-resin units – also called “dry-type” transformers – require much less ongoing maintenance than oil-filled transformers. And, as I covered in “ Today’s Medium-Voltage Transformers Are Turning Green ,” new CENELEC standards EN 50588 and EN 50629 are leading to more efficient transformers, across the board. But safety, especially electrical fire...

Among the more confounding issues facing industrial-plant operators is the challenge of power factor correction. Though power factor can be explained simply as the ratio of useful power to the total power drawn from the grid, it can remain a puzzle to both understand and to address. Industrial operations are especially susceptible to power factor problems because of the dynamic loads they can incorporate. Cranes, welders, saws and other such equipment can create electrical conditions requiring power factor correction to both improve overall efficiency and reduce the related penalties that can show up on monthly utility bills. The packaging production facility owned by Oji Fibre Solutions in Levin, New Zealand, was facing just such problems. The plant – owned by Tokyo-based Oji Group, a global producer of market pulp, paper and fibre-based packaging products – supplies a variety of food, beverage and industrial customers with packaging solutions. It’s a comprehensive operation that t...