7 Common Mistakes in Industrial Electrical Planning and How to Avoid Them
When you’re in the middle of a shift and a production line goes down, no one is asking how much that original electrical design cost. They’re asking when the line will be back up. The decisions that were made during planning, possibly months or years earlier, will give you that answer.
Mistake 1: Ignoring Future Expansion
The most common avoidable error in industrial facilities is designing for the current load and ignoring future needs. The problem is compounded when new machinery is installed on a system that was not designed to support it, resulting in daisy-chained circuits, too-small distribution boards, and wiring that may function but isn’t up to code.
A good single line diagram will not only chart your current load requirements but projected ones as well. Over-designing spare capacity in your switchgear and conduit runs at the design phase is a fraction of the cost of doing it as a retrofit down the track. If your industrial electrician is not asking “what are you planning to add in the next five years”, then you may have a problem.
Mistake 2: Skipping The Arc Flash Study
Arc flash analysis is often considered optional until there is an accident or a regulator performs an audit. It should not be the case. An arc flash study during the design phase determines the incident energy level at each point of the power distribution system. Based on these results, the correct protection equipment, breaker configuration, and safe working distances are ordered and installed.
This is not an extra expense that can be eliminated; the expense is simply transferred to someone else, typically the facility owner. Any electrician worth his or her paycheck will bring up arc flash concerns during the design phase of a project’s power system.
Mistake 3: Underestimating Environmental Conditions
A control panel that is suitable for a climate-controlled office has no place on a foundry floor. Dust ingress, moisture, chemical vapors, and extreme temperature swings will degrade electrical components faster than nearly any other cause – and it will likely cause a “random” failure.
Enclosure ratings matter. The IP or NEMA rating on every enclosure should reflect the actual conditions on site, not the cleanest corner of the facility. This goes for cable selection as well. Skimping on cable jackets in a washdown environment is not a cost saving. It is a scheduled failure.
Mistake 4: Poor Cable Management And Labeling
This may sound trivial, but it is not. Proper and adequate labeling is your best friend during commissioning or when facing an issue. And if you think every technician who will ever work on that machine knows it’s T1-PLC-601’s output you’re testing right now because it’s written in your program, you’re wrong.
Rubber, ink, and properly sized and located labels are dirt cheap and save you a ton of time.
Mistake 5: Treating Automation As A Separate Problem
An overlooked mistake in industrial electrical planning – treating the power system and the automation logic as two separate problems. PLCs ‘just’ turn things on and off, right? The lights go out, you reset the circuit breaker, sorted.
Except when half the other machines on the line reset at the same time for no obvious reason. Except when you can see the fault lights blaring on the HMI and your voltage meter says everything’s normal. And except when the sensor detects it’s not applying any power, but your drive is furiously spinning up to max speed.
Professional electrical control system design that leaves the automation logic in the dark will lead to ghost faults from machines caught in reset cycles, trip faults from conditions that never should’ve initiated a trip, and similar confusing results you’ll never get to the bottom of until the competitors finish eating your lunch and start on afternoon tea.
Mistake 6: Neglecting Load Balancing And Harmonic Distortion
For three-phase power systems to work optimally, the load must be balanced across all three phases. When the system is unbalanced, it overheats, motors deteriorate quicker, and energy is needlessly lost. These problems don’t suddenly appear; they gradually get worse.
Harmonic distortion, a frequent result of variable frequency drives and other non-linear loads, exacerbates this issue. If not properly addressed and factored into the design, harmonic distortion spreads throughout the facility, leading to breakdowns in electronic equipment and higher energy bills.
Mistake 7: No Preventative Maintenance Plan In The Design
A plant that is designed with a thermal imaging schedule and formal inspection intervals from day one simply doesn’t fail as often as one that waits for a breakdown. Preventative maintenance is a strategy that should be brought into the design and construction conversation, not an after-the-fact consideration after the contractor’s truck has pulled off-site for the last time.
This isn’t a “What’s the R.O.I of design and planning?” question. The answer to that has never been all that complicated, since ITIC tells us all that 98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000, and industrial sectors regularly have line costs exceed $5 million per hour on top lines. No planning shortcut saves money against that math. For the electrician doing the work, one catastrophic failure event avoided will pay for ten plant electricians to spend a month on the job site.
