With more electricians retiring than coming into the workforce, the time is now for a connected electrical room. Within this digitalized environment, all equipment communicates in real time, providing complete system transparency. For example, through ABB energy management systems (EMS), electrical contractors can forecast maintenance needs before failures occur, reducing unexpected outages and service requests and expediting troubleshooting.

“When they have visibility into the system, it helps them to identify problems much sooner and operate their businesses more effectively,” said John McHale, ABB Product Specialist, Digital Solutions. “Without this technology, you would need to do everything manually. In some cases, you would need to plug in each piece of equipment individually just to check everything out. In a connected system, everything is at your fingertips on a screen.”

For years, electrical contractors have been able to monitor electrical equipment through alarms and controls. A connected electrical room, however, takes this technology a step further by providing predictability, said Mike Hoppe, U.S. product marketing director, digital portfolio, for ABB.

“You can go in and see which equipment or devices are connected in the electrical system, how they’re operating, and what’s happening with them,” Hoppe said. “Then if you add an energy management system, it will give you continuous real-time data, and that enables the predictive analytics, which allows you to get ahead of any problems before they occur.”

Saving Labor Hours

In today’s electrical industry, where uptime is critical and skilled labor is in demand, electrical contractors must discover a way to reduce callbacks. Through a connected room, using ABB’s intelligent, self-monitoring solutions, they can streamline maintenance and eliminate unnecessary truck rolls.

“We’re just not producing as many electricians as we have in the past, so whatever we can do to make that faster and require fewer people to roll out a truck or show up on a site, it makes it that much easier for the end customer,” McHale said.

One way contractors can save time is by installing electrical equipment with built-in support resources. For example, once electricians and technicians connect ABB’s Lite Panel Pro inside the electrical room, they can scan the QR codes and pull up the ABB EPiC mobile app to gain instant access to manuals, technical documentation, and augmented reality tutorials.

“Before, you either had to bring the manuals with you or had to have copies of them somewhere, which was much more difficult,” McHale said. “Now you can load it up on your smartphone, do a targeted search, and get the information much more quickly.”

Creating a Connected Electrical Room

To save labor hours, electrical contractors are swapping out passive equipment with more intelligent, self-monitoring solutions. Before they move in this direction, however, electrical contractors need familiarity with cloud platforms, low-voltage wiring, commissioning, IP addressing, and network topologies, McHale said.

In addition, contractors also require more IT backbone, Hoppe advised. Any time electrical contractors are working on projects requiring network communications to send data back and forth, they must loop in not only the facility manager and engineers, but also the IT director or manager, he said.

“IT needs to be part of that conversation because there has to be permissions granted so they can open up the ports and everything else necessary for the devices to communicate,” Hoppe said. “That leads to the predictability and commissioning and everything else to occur.”

While the technology saves time in the long run, contractors may need to follow a few extra steps during the commissioning process. By installing equipment such as ABB’s Ekip Com Hub, Edge Industrial Gateway, and Lite Panel Pro, however, electrical contractors can simplify commissioning with guided workflows and preconfigured device mapping, reducing on-site commissioning time by up to 75 percent, based on ABB internal performance data.

“With a non-connected system, there is no real commissioning, beyond setting protection settings within a breaker,” McHale said. “It puts a little more work on the electrical contractor to go digital versus a more passive system.”

In the past, electricians had to commission each piece of equipment or device manually and then map it to the control system. Within ABB’s Lite Panel Pro, they can use auto-discovery to eliminate steps because it has been preconfigured.

“They don’t need to create all the mapping that can be done automatically on site or remotely through the systems we offer,” Hoppe said. “We make it as simple as possible to reduce the time and steps involved.”

Improving Safety
Beyond improving efficiency, a connected electrical room can also enhance electricians’ safety. Electricians no longer need to stand in the arc flash zone to interact directly with the equipment.

“They don’t even have to be in the room to open or close the breaker,” McHale said. “They can do it remotely with the Lite Panel Pro, and that makes it much safer for the people on site who need to interface with the system.”

Through a connected electrical room, contractors can help their customers to fix minor issues before they escalate into major, costly outages. Shifting from a reactive to a proactive approach helps to streamline maintenance and minimize downtime.

ABB can serve the connected electrical room by providing visibility, predictability, and predictive analytics. Through the energy management system, contractors and their customers can get an overview of the power being used, current, voltage and temperature.

“When devices communicate with each other and push that information into the cloud —accessible from a phone, tablet, or PC—contractors gain real-time visibility across their entire electrical system,” Hoppe said.

The connected electrical room helps contractors do more with less—less downtime, fewer callbacks, less time spent troubleshooting on site, and less exposure to unnecessary risk. With greater visibility, guided commissioning, and predictive maintenance tools, contractors can work more efficiently while helping customers keep critical systems running. For more information, visit ABB Electrification U.S. or the #ContractorBetter resource center.