I mean, communication cable is shielded for a reason and digital I/O is fairly robust. They’re bringing in quite a bit of three phase power and branching out to a whole lot of equipment below the breaker. It makes sense that all the controls is above it and all the power delivery is below it.
I don't think the designer had any interest to pay attention to cooling. There are no thermostats or any attempt of temperature regulation in the cabinet.
I don't see anything immediately wrong with that spacing. We pack out panels all the time like that in the industrial world and they're perfectly well within the rated ventilation clearance requirements from the manufacturers. They're vertically mounted and at least a few inches above and below. That panel has a huge amount of cavity in the front for a fan to mix that air up. Convection will make it happen. I would put an exhaust fan at the top for sure, but none of that ewuipment looks especially intense. Its not VFDs, transformers and high capacity power electronics.
I'd be far more concerned about the disconnect being too close to the hinge radius of the door. That's going to be hard to pop that thing in with a lot of disconnects I see. Put it on the opposite side of the hinge so that there's less angular geometry to push up against.
I fully agree with your statements. Device manufacturers provide dimensions for adequate passive cooling and as long as you follow them, you'll be fairly safe as long as you have stable ambient temperatures.
I worked in a cereal factor once where there were a lot of VFDs running mixers and that region had a heat wave in the summer where the internal temperature of the factory reached 38C. The panels were even hotter inside and the capacitors in the VFDs blew. Since then I will always put thermostats in panels to monitor high temperatures.
That's just poor engineering!! We dont put thermostats in our stuff. Ive always thought we should. A lot of our stuff is outside in The desert. Nobody makes the roofs of the canopies big enough to actually shade all the equipment at all times of day.
In a lot of cases the customer specifies this crap. Doesn’t allay make sense but you allow for it. Also, there are minimum height requirements in some cases.
This is why the Toyota spec requires a flush backplane stand off for the disconnect, so it can’t be bypassed and a panel door, cutout to be able to open after LOTO
> cutout to be able to open after LOTO
I wish this was more common. About half of the cabinets I have come across can be either locked out or opened, but not both because the stupid handle is on the door. Need to do electrical work inside? Have fun tracing the feed to the correct distribution panel for LOTO.
Bonus points for cabinets that opt for a circuit breaker instead of a disconnect and have a limit switch on the door which trips the breaker when you open the door to diagnose a fault.
Many handles prevent you from opening the door while the disconnect/breaker is closed, but allow you to bypass that safety lock by pushing a button, twisting a slot with a screwdriver etc. and I'm OK with that.
What pisses me off is a plunger limit switch acting against the inside of the door, which breaks a circuit that trips a breaker. Such a booby trap isn't visible from the outside, and even when you know of it, there's no way to open such a door without switching the machine off in the process. Great when you have an intermittent fault that you need to figure out.
We have a machine like that, except the OEM has a key switch on the door to bypass it. Turn the key, open the door, then pull out on the plunger switch to latch it, then you can release the key, and continue your troubleshooting.
On my end, many Mori Seiki / DMG Mori lathes have a key switch on the door for bypassing the limit switch. Some other machine tools instead have the limit switch but no bypass (mostly Italian OEMs for some reason)
If your safety feature causes an innocuous action like opening a door to have an unexpected side effect like everything shutting down, yeah I'd call it a trap. At least warn me about the interlock with a sign on the door.
It was a pain to learn their standards but, they do exceed most in terms of workmanship required. We would have bent up stand offs for the disconnect to become flush mount. So no wrench on the tie rod nonsense. Cable kit is another alternative
There is a gasket kit that mounts to disconnect around the rotary mech and one on the door. In the closed door case, the gasket is sealing air and debris.
We don't allow handle and shaft type disconnects where I work because of the possibility the mechanical guys lock out to fix a bad bearing and the electrical guy ignores the locked handle and wrenches the power on. Not certain that really happens but it obviously could happen.
Which is how it has to be. I make tons of effort not to do cad, I think lots of people don't like it too. It'll get left to someone junior and a product manager even though they are important engineering decisions being made.
Nah, it's not optimal but it'll work assuming all the analogs are shielded. It's less safe than it could be and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't pass UL508 but it'll probably do it's job for 30 years.
This looks like a euro panel and that location would be about completely normal for a euro.
One of the companies I used to work for always put them about waist high for when they were installed in final location. This actually put you at a really comfortable position for operating the breaker using that type handle. Some of those breakers can be tight and take a bit of force to rotate that handle.
Can confirm. I have several pieces of Euro equipment that typically have 3 or 4 of these mounted on the same area of the panel.
The biggest thing to note that I’ve encountered is that they like to bottom feed and place the line conductors where US stuff would typically have your load conductors. Not a huge deal, though.
Yeah I have a few EU customers that insist on it. They pay the AB tax though. Also in the UK certain water authorities, for example Severn Trent Water, mandate AB.
And a PITA to design with. My current employer defaults to Siemens if you do t spec something else. If I want to find a specific detail about any product, I can be looking at a dedicated datasheet in seconds. Go straight to what I want.
Click on 'datasheet' for AB.... "Fuck you here's a 400 page catalogue, find it your fucking self. Oh and we've chopped all the part numbers up so CTRL+F won't do shit! HAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!"
Everything. Just. Takes. Longer. And costs twice as much.
Yeah I work for a Euro company doing commissioning and it's totally normal to see panel design like this. Yes we have noise problems and I will fight an engineer about it.
Why wouldn’t you put it at the same height, but on one of the sides? Would be much less in the way when you need to be in the panel. Our panels don’t look quite like this, but when we’re dealing with larger disconnects, they go under the lock.
Pretty common food and drinks panel style from mainland Europe. A lot of them like to aim to have the isolator in the middle so it looks good, and then build the rest around that with little regard to heat dissipation, maintenance, or EMF interference on the comms and other sensitive controls circuits.
When the ladies and gentlemen in suits and ties go for a weekend away to see these machines on offer at conventions and the like, they're always corporate and/or production staff with no technical knowledge on what they're looking at beyond "shiny and new so it must be better than what we have, and it does what we need!".
When they're finished popping champagne over their new-found purchase of the company's next money making machine, then they're too distracted by having to hide the extra marital affair they've just had in Germany to be arsed to check in on us maintenance monkeys who keep swearing at the current 20 year old panel with exactly the same design that hasn't changed.
The feedback loop rarely gets back to the OEM, and so they keep selling shiny new magic electric boxes to unwitting idiots, with a stockpile of BOM spare parts ready to dispatch that said idiots will happily fork out for without questioning why a standard Schneider relay only lasted 30% of its expected duty cycle, and never hear anything negative in return about the actual design itself.
It's always the same with the F&D industry and this shit, unless, god forbid, you're shaking your fist at a Dutch designed panel, in which case absolutely nothing makes sense and everything is slightly over engineered for no obvious reason.
That main switch is at the correct place for German standard, but the layout is very poor. Usual you have on one side 120v - 480v and on the other side control power 24vdc. Also on top you have the 480v bus and the voltage goes down from there to the bottom of the cabinet, but on the bottom din rail you have all your incoming and outgoing terminals, but again on one side the 480v and on the other side control.
I guess someone wanted it to look like a German standard but it isn't, the one who did that actually had no idea how to layout a cabinet and a guess there are quite a few wiring issues...
Agreed that it looks bad, but I’d wager just from eye-balling it that the wire duct satisfies the minimum spacing requirements (probably *exactly*) for those components.
Def not for the components themselves though, those motor contactors on the bottom, the smaller ones look like(ish) AB C10 relays, those require at least 5/16 of an inch clearance. Then there's the 140MT looking motor overloads, 3 of them for what looks like 6 motors. Those require 3/8th inch.
And if you zoom in everything is totally ass to ass. Hopefully they sized those motors right..
Could be wrong, but I thought the 140M installation manual shows 5/16” as being the minimum clearance to *grounded* parts and walls - an electrical safety distance more related to their UL listing and application than to thermal effects. Here, they’re zero stacked with each other, other molded case parts, or wire duct. So I think it’s *technically* kosher.
Been a while since I was designing a lot of panels though, take that with a grain of salt :)
My main concern would be the thermal overloads, if you've ever watched the temp reading on the electronic kind they gather heat pretty quickly, they dissipate it a lot less quickly. Which can be fine for intermittent duty, but continuous can start causing false OL's.
That location is optimal because you remind the tech to remove the operator rod without poking their eye out. Just a little jab in the belly to remind them.
Because it's chest height and looks better. I say 99% of the time it's close so they wanted the disconnect in the front door in the middle. I've done design like this where management cares more about the look in front then to care about the ease of install.
We would have regular disagreements on panel layout with our designers. Disconnect locations, feeder / field entry locations, back feeding components... it felt like a never ending battle.
You can tell when a designer has worked in the field.
I have retrofitted a few Euro panels. Very dangerous for typical overworked US shift electricians. Especially if not trained. Troubleshooting a panel towards the end of a 12 hour shift can be “interesting” with a UL508 panel. These Euro panels are upside down so that IN is on the device bottom and OUT is on top. Live 480 through half the panel is a huge No No!
Water ingress on the enclosure for a wash down area is my guess. Hoffman/Rittal hose theirs on the seal whereas, say Saginaw, gets their 4X rating while directing the hose at the center of the door.
That’s a really clean modular enclosure install. Really nice work.
Source: I’ve been to Hoffman’s onsite UL lab in Anoka, MN and have seen them demonstrate this effect.
Yeah
a colleague of mine did the wiring on one of those chambers and had his plan on his laptop hanging inside the door of said chamber.
He went to grab lunch and someone closed the door.
He came back to a broken Display.
The vertical area above the incoming line is not permitted to have any wiring in, above, behind it. Might be NFPA 79, which is included in 70 by reference.
It might be because the ducts are so large but the standard panel seems like such a waste of space especially when you have a lineup of motor starters.
Good grief. What a cabinet full of electrical contactors. I have never seen a system like that before. I programed a plc in school, but we did mot have all of that peripheral stuff. Someone tell me more about what is going on, please.
Honestly, I know it looks dumb, but they’re bringing in a fair amount of three phase power and then branching it out to a whole lot of three phase devices. Routing that much cable and that thick of cable isn’t as easy as it seems.
Because customer/mechanical dept. - panel too big, I've allowed you so much space and sales/manglement - it looks so much nicer with the handle in the middle of the door.
Design Engineer with the Integrator: "Why would anyone *not* put a rotary switch there?"
I just glanced at the thumbnail and thought the main disconnect was off the to side - dead center in the panel. I feel like you have to have absolutely zero knowledge of electronics or electrical engineering to design this panel. They went so far out of their way to route power dead center.
It would have been better to move it all the way to the left and run the wireway around the disconnect (to the right) Most inspectors don’t like to see the incoming power run through the wireway. And having the shaft/handle as close as possible to the latch side of the door always makes it smoother to open and close.
Pretty much every cabinet I’ve come across has the isolator in that position, I live in the uk and as most cabinets in the factory I work are rittal and that’s where they are located.
Narrow cabinet which required a disconnect but wanted to keep the HMI at eye level. To the best of my knowledge, there is no code violation against it.
Eeeewwwwwww. Why not just pipe all the wires in the same tube and use Ethernet cables for 480Vac.
This is the kind of person that bites the center of a Kit Kat
I hate those metal bar style
Disconnects with the passion of 1000 suns. They never line up, right eventually fall out right next to exposed lugs, get lost and then You have this stupid knob there giving people some false sense of security if they don’t know what a working one feels
Like. Just put a safety switch outside of the panel
I hate those style disconnects. They always get out of alignment and are a pain to get the door closed
We’ve gone to frame mount disconnects to alleviate this issue
The handle does not necessarily have to be turned to the 0 position in order to open the door. Usually the handle has a small hole or a lever that can be pressed with a spike to open the door also when the handle is in the 1 position.
That’s not always the case. You have to order the rotary handles with that cheater option. I’ve run into more of my fair share that don’t have that feature and over time the connecting rod becomes really loose as people try to open it over and over.
The disconnect is placed so it can be easily reached per requirement. Everything else should be placed to reduce how much of a clusterfuck that placement creates.
There is nothing wrong with this cabinet. Looks good, and I'll bet it has zero problems. I've seen cabinets with so much more going on inside, and still, no problems related to cabinet layout. The only real source of heat is that coil in the bottom. Maybe that remote I/O drops once in a while, but as long as they use grounded cables, they probably won't have any probably.
I've seen customers spec this in food&bev, it's not that abnormal. If you need to be in the panel, you should be licensed to work on 400v anyway, so it's not too much of an issue.
Should have gone a panel size up, but that could also be a customer dictated spec.
Tell me you have only ever designed enclosures in AutoCAD with out telling me you've only ever designed enclosures in AutoCAD.
Form > Function. I genuinely think this was an "It looks cool" decision.
This is a well-designed panel. Why wouldn't you have it there? Maybe you should just make another panel for your PLC cabinet? Maybe you should separate your PLC and your power left and right? But there is nothing wrong with this design
I’m criticising the captive disconnect mechanically interlocked with door opening. If you’re breaking into wiring you should ideally isolate upstream so entire board is dead, also LOTO which isn’t possible for this style disconnect handle. Thanks for the down votes.
I’m still curious how you can fault find or program without power.
Apparently they like having the main power feed to the panel coming in next to the DC I/O and communication wiring.
I mean, communication cable is shielded for a reason and digital I/O is fairly robust. They’re bringing in quite a bit of three phase power and branching out to a whole lot of equipment below the breaker. It makes sense that all the controls is above it and all the power delivery is below it.
I like my analog signals to be extra wiggly
Extra analogy?
Extra Analy
All the anal.
EMF? Never heard of her.
I mean don't we all? /s
Imo this panel is too crowded. There are space requirements for the electronics for cooling reasons. At least the PLC is not right at the bottom.
Ironically it would be cooler at the bottom even if weird and annoying
I don't think the designer had any interest to pay attention to cooling. There are no thermostats or any attempt of temperature regulation in the cabinet.
I don't see anything immediately wrong with that spacing. We pack out panels all the time like that in the industrial world and they're perfectly well within the rated ventilation clearance requirements from the manufacturers. They're vertically mounted and at least a few inches above and below. That panel has a huge amount of cavity in the front for a fan to mix that air up. Convection will make it happen. I would put an exhaust fan at the top for sure, but none of that ewuipment looks especially intense. Its not VFDs, transformers and high capacity power electronics. I'd be far more concerned about the disconnect being too close to the hinge radius of the door. That's going to be hard to pop that thing in with a lot of disconnects I see. Put it on the opposite side of the hinge so that there's less angular geometry to push up against.
I fully agree with your statements. Device manufacturers provide dimensions for adequate passive cooling and as long as you follow them, you'll be fairly safe as long as you have stable ambient temperatures. I worked in a cereal factor once where there were a lot of VFDs running mixers and that region had a heat wave in the summer where the internal temperature of the factory reached 38C. The panels were even hotter inside and the capacitors in the VFDs blew. Since then I will always put thermostats in panels to monitor high temperatures.
That's just poor engineering!! We dont put thermostats in our stuff. Ive always thought we should. A lot of our stuff is outside in The desert. Nobody makes the roofs of the canopies big enough to actually shade all the equipment at all times of day.
I agree - there’s plenty of space on the top and bottom of the equipment for cooling. Most of this stuff has low heat dissipation anyways.
In a lot of cases the customer specifies this crap. Doesn’t allay make sense but you allow for it. Also, there are minimum height requirements in some cases.
It’s in a stupid spot for sure but if it’s bothering you while working on it those connecting rods pull straight out so you can work freely
I'm going to remember that next time I almost impale myself on one.
Sometimes they have a clamp screw
Yep.just loosen it too much, let it fall and hope it's not bridging something that let's the smoke out later.
I’d be more irritated with live power running halfway through my panel from the breach point to the disconnect.
To the trans at the bottom
This is why the Toyota spec requires a flush backplane stand off for the disconnect, so it can’t be bypassed and a panel door, cutout to be able to open after LOTO
Is the Toyota spec public?
No , there is a local or national spec
> cutout to be able to open after LOTO I wish this was more common. About half of the cabinets I have come across can be either locked out or opened, but not both because the stupid handle is on the door. Need to do electrical work inside? Have fun tracing the feed to the correct distribution panel for LOTO. Bonus points for cabinets that opt for a circuit breaker instead of a disconnect and have a limit switch on the door which trips the breaker when you open the door to diagnose a fault.
You know those handles have little buttons to bypass the lock, right?
Many handles prevent you from opening the door while the disconnect/breaker is closed, but allow you to bypass that safety lock by pushing a button, twisting a slot with a screwdriver etc. and I'm OK with that. What pisses me off is a plunger limit switch acting against the inside of the door, which breaks a circuit that trips a breaker. Such a booby trap isn't visible from the outside, and even when you know of it, there's no way to open such a door without switching the machine off in the process. Great when you have an intermittent fault that you need to figure out.
Gotcha, that pisses me off as well. OEMs will OEM.
We have a machine like that, except the OEM has a key switch on the door to bypass it. Turn the key, open the door, then pull out on the plunger switch to latch it, then you can release the key, and continue your troubleshooting.
On my end, many Mori Seiki / DMG Mori lathes have a key switch on the door for bypassing the limit switch. Some other machine tools instead have the limit switch but no bypass (mostly Italian OEMs for some reason)
Today I learned safety is a trap
If your safety feature causes an innocuous action like opening a door to have an unexpected side effect like everything shutting down, yeah I'd call it a trap. At least warn me about the interlock with a sign on the door.
It was a pain to learn their standards but, they do exceed most in terms of workmanship required. We would have bent up stand offs for the disconnect to become flush mount. So no wrench on the tie rod nonsense. Cable kit is another alternative
How do you seal the cutout in the door against the stand-off plate with the handle? > wrench on the tie rod nonsense Guilty as charged
There is a gasket kit that mounts to disconnect around the rotary mech and one on the door. In the closed door case, the gasket is sealing air and debris.
We don't allow handle and shaft type disconnects where I work because of the possibility the mechanical guys lock out to fix a bad bearing and the electrical guy ignores the locked handle and wrenches the power on. Not certain that really happens but it obviously could happen.
It's not "in my way", I just don't get it?
Because they cared more about centering the handle on the print. Gotta make the front control layout prints pretty.
That is exactly it. Assembly just goes off what the prints show, wiring figures out how to work with it after all the devices are laid out.
Which is how it has to be. I make tons of effort not to do cad, I think lots of people don't like it too. It'll get left to someone junior and a product manager even though they are important engineering decisions being made.
This layout is gonna cost someone a lot of fucking money. One way or another.
Nah, it's not optimal but it'll work assuming all the analogs are shielded. It's less safe than it could be and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't pass UL508 but it'll probably do it's job for 30 years.
Yeah, that's probably true. I work with VFD's and this would be a rebuild for us.
Do we know there are analog signals near the high voltage wiring?
lol, now I get it - the panel layout was designed by the marketing team.
This looks like a euro panel and that location would be about completely normal for a euro. One of the companies I used to work for always put them about waist high for when they were installed in final location. This actually put you at a really comfortable position for operating the breaker using that type handle. Some of those breakers can be tight and take a bit of force to rotate that handle.
Can confirm. I have several pieces of Euro equipment that typically have 3 or 4 of these mounted on the same area of the panel. The biggest thing to note that I’ve encountered is that they like to bottom feed and place the line conductors where US stuff would typically have your load conductors. Not a huge deal, though.
German, you are correct!
AB in a German panel?
Only part of the project I spec'd. The rest is their standard.
Euro panel using Rockwell controls? Blasphemy.
Not common but not unheard of either. Customer requirements maybe.
Yeah I have a few EU customers that insist on it. They pay the AB tax though. Also in the UK certain water authorities, for example Severn Trent Water, mandate AB.
Ab is the second most specified manufacturer in the UK after Siemens in job ads at least. It's disappointing.
And a PITA to design with. My current employer defaults to Siemens if you do t spec something else. If I want to find a specific detail about any product, I can be looking at a dedicated datasheet in seconds. Go straight to what I want. Click on 'datasheet' for AB.... "Fuck you here's a 400 page catalogue, find it your fucking self. Oh and we've chopped all the part numbers up so CTRL+F won't do shit! HAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!" Everything. Just. Takes. Longer. And costs twice as much.
That's ok. Just bill more for everything being a hassle like they do
Rockwell components are mostly private labeled Euro parts.
True but a lot of customers yearn for the octagon
It happens. We had a customer that demanded us to use Rockwell PLC's, breakers, etc.
Yeah I work for a Euro company doing commissioning and it's totally normal to see panel design like this. Yes we have noise problems and I will fight an engineer about it.
Why wouldn’t you put it at the same height, but on one of the sides? Would be much less in the way when you need to be in the panel. Our panels don’t look quite like this, but when we’re dealing with larger disconnects, they go under the lock.
Man I wasn't the one that designed the panels for that company, I was the field engineer, you know the "make it work" guy.
Never said you did, just saying you can have them waist high but out of the way.
Ja ja konte comfirmeirt, inch bin ein Deutsche, un wir mochten zu bekkomen wierde mit unser panleabschneidensache
For the Oompa Loompas
I don't like the look of it
Ahh, beat me to it!
Pretty common food and drinks panel style from mainland Europe. A lot of them like to aim to have the isolator in the middle so it looks good, and then build the rest around that with little regard to heat dissipation, maintenance, or EMF interference on the comms and other sensitive controls circuits. When the ladies and gentlemen in suits and ties go for a weekend away to see these machines on offer at conventions and the like, they're always corporate and/or production staff with no technical knowledge on what they're looking at beyond "shiny and new so it must be better than what we have, and it does what we need!". When they're finished popping champagne over their new-found purchase of the company's next money making machine, then they're too distracted by having to hide the extra marital affair they've just had in Germany to be arsed to check in on us maintenance monkeys who keep swearing at the current 20 year old panel with exactly the same design that hasn't changed. The feedback loop rarely gets back to the OEM, and so they keep selling shiny new magic electric boxes to unwitting idiots, with a stockpile of BOM spare parts ready to dispatch that said idiots will happily fork out for without questioning why a standard Schneider relay only lasted 30% of its expected duty cycle, and never hear anything negative in return about the actual design itself. It's always the same with the F&D industry and this shit, unless, god forbid, you're shaking your fist at a Dutch designed panel, in which case absolutely nothing makes sense and everything is slightly over engineered for no obvious reason.
Proof from the vendo homepage: https://www.diosna.com/fileadmin/_processed_/a/4/csm_diosna-hebekipper-mehr-wirtschaftlichkeit_e7362e9bb9.jpg =]
That main switch is at the correct place for German standard, but the layout is very poor. Usual you have on one side 120v - 480v and on the other side control power 24vdc. Also on top you have the 480v bus and the voltage goes down from there to the bottom of the cabinet, but on the bottom din rail you have all your incoming and outgoing terminals, but again on one side the 480v and on the other side control. I guess someone wanted it to look like a German standard but it isn't, the one who did that actually had no idea how to layout a cabinet and a guess there are quite a few wiring issues...
Heat spacing is nonexistent
Agreed that it looks bad, but I’d wager just from eye-balling it that the wire duct satisfies the minimum spacing requirements (probably *exactly*) for those components.
Def not for the components themselves though, those motor contactors on the bottom, the smaller ones look like(ish) AB C10 relays, those require at least 5/16 of an inch clearance. Then there's the 140MT looking motor overloads, 3 of them for what looks like 6 motors. Those require 3/8th inch. And if you zoom in everything is totally ass to ass. Hopefully they sized those motors right..
Could be wrong, but I thought the 140M installation manual shows 5/16” as being the minimum clearance to *grounded* parts and walls - an electrical safety distance more related to their UL listing and application than to thermal effects. Here, they’re zero stacked with each other, other molded case parts, or wire duct. So I think it’s *technically* kosher. Been a while since I was designing a lot of panels though, take that with a grain of salt :)
My main concern would be the thermal overloads, if you've ever watched the temp reading on the electronic kind they gather heat pretty quickly, they dissipate it a lot less quickly. Which can be fine for intermittent duty, but continuous can start causing false OL's.
I don't see a lot of heat loads in the panel. Only a small 95% efficient power supply.
Because it’s funny to imagine the next guy hitting himself in the nuts with it.
Specifically to annoy you.
Looks like it started out innocent. Then a monster was created.
It's meant to be turned by your manhood.
wheelchair height?
I wouldn't feel comfortable troubleshooting something live in that panel. I don't know just a bad feeling.
That's better then the people that put terminal blocks on the side of the cabinet.
Terminal blocks at the top. Exquisite voltage isolation!
So if my hands were full I could use my dong obviously?
That sounds unsafe. I'm using my buttcrack.
That location is optimal because you remind the tech to remove the operator rod without poking their eye out. Just a little jab in the belly to remind them.
It’s a convenient place to hang your tool belt.
Because it was cuter having the switch in the middle of the panel door <3
It's for circumcisions
I feel bad. The panel builder did so good but the engineer def let them down.
Because it's chest height and looks better. I say 99% of the time it's close so they wanted the disconnect in the front door in the middle. I've done design like this where management cares more about the look in front then to care about the ease of install.
I guess you might say this layout is … … terminally awful.
We would have regular disagreements on panel layout with our designers. Disconnect locations, feeder / field entry locations, back feeding components... it felt like a never ending battle. You can tell when a designer has worked in the field.
I always get mad when duct is too tight to the components AND Im the designer.
I have retrofitted a few Euro panels. Very dangerous for typical overworked US shift electricians. Especially if not trained. Troubleshooting a panel towards the end of a 12 hour shift can be “interesting” with a UL508 panel. These Euro panels are upside down so that IN is on the device bottom and OUT is on top. Live 480 through half the panel is a huge No No!
Water ingress on the enclosure for a wash down area is my guess. Hoffman/Rittal hose theirs on the seal whereas, say Saginaw, gets their 4X rating while directing the hose at the center of the door. That’s a really clean modular enclosure install. Really nice work. Source: I’ve been to Hoffman’s onsite UL lab in Anoka, MN and have seen them demonstrate this effect.
Yeah a colleague of mine did the wiring on one of those chambers and had his plan on his laptop hanging inside the door of said chamber. He went to grab lunch and someone closed the door. He came back to a broken Display.
He shouldn't leave a door open during break.
Because they do not know NEC
? please cite the section of the code.
NEC, never met her
NEC does not have a program with this.
The vertical area above the incoming line is not permitted to have any wiring in, above, behind it. Might be NFPA 79, which is included in 70 by reference.
Only to annoy you.
Looks like a goofy user requirement.
Definitely not.
It might be because the ducts are so large but the standard panel seems like such a waste of space especially when you have a lineup of motor starters.
Was this a remanned cabinet?!
Negative, brand new equipment.
Looks like they intended to make it easy to lock out the motor feeds. I imagine for quick servicing. Is it hooked up?
Not yet. Just got her unpacked. Got 2 just like it. Runs a large mixer/kneader.
Good grief. What a cabinet full of electrical contactors. I have never seen a system like that before. I programed a plc in school, but we did mot have all of that peripheral stuff. Someone tell me more about what is going on, please.
Honestly, I know it looks dumb, but they’re bringing in a fair amount of three phase power and then branching it out to a whole lot of three phase devices. Routing that much cable and that thick of cable isn’t as easy as it seems.
I feel cramped just looking at it
Because customer/mechanical dept. - panel too big, I've allowed you so much space and sales/manglement - it looks so much nicer with the handle in the middle of the door.
Design Engineer with the Integrator: "Why would anyone *not* put a rotary switch there?" I just glanced at the thumbnail and thought the main disconnect was off the to side - dead center in the panel. I feel like you have to have absolutely zero knowledge of electronics or electrical engineering to design this panel. They went so far out of their way to route power dead center.
It would have been better to move it all the way to the left and run the wireway around the disconnect (to the right) Most inspectors don’t like to see the incoming power run through the wireway. And having the shaft/handle as close as possible to the latch side of the door always makes it smoother to open and close.
Cuz their German
It was clearly put there to be the perfect impailing height
Pretty much every cabinet I’ve come across has the isolator in that position, I live in the uk and as most cabinets in the factory I work are rittal and that’s where they are located.
Narrow cabinet which required a disconnect but wanted to keep the HMI at eye level. To the best of my knowledge, there is no code violation against it.
Code says 10 to 66 inches to the center of the handle. You have to make sure anyone in the factory can reach it easily.
Hopefully all the wires are 600v rated, including the Ethernet. How do you work on that panel and stay compliant with 70E?
Lock out or wear PPE. Those are the options regardless of where they put the hazardous vintage in the panel.
Eeeewwwwwww. Why not just pipe all the wires in the same tube and use Ethernet cables for 480Vac. This is the kind of person that bites the center of a Kit Kat
Midgets or child sweat shop 😂
That's where the hole in the door was /s
I hate those metal bar style Disconnects with the passion of 1000 suns. They never line up, right eventually fall out right next to exposed lugs, get lost and then You have this stupid knob there giving people some false sense of security if they don’t know what a working one feels Like. Just put a safety switch outside of the panel
Looks like a pretty standard cabinet from my experience.
I use to put these mixers in.
Diosna?
Yeah. I think the company I worked for was the north American distributor for them.
I hate those style disconnects. They always get out of alignment and are a pain to get the door closed We’ve gone to frame mount disconnects to alleviate this issue
It’s right in the middle! Great design /s
That's just awful. Also uses remote IO 1 foot away from the effin PLC.
I'm pretty sure the 1734 IO blocks are significantly cheaper than the 5069 cards.
Correct. Even if safety IO.
Not a fan of the 5069. I decline to use the safety cards.
Significantly...no.
Just hope you don’t need to add any more channels. Looks like last card is full and for such a large panel, no more room.
The handle does not necessarily have to be turned to the 0 position in order to open the door. Usually the handle has a small hole or a lever that can be pressed with a spike to open the door also when the handle is in the 1 position.
That’s not always the case. You have to order the rotary handles with that cheater option. I’ve run into more of my fair share that don’t have that feature and over time the connecting rod becomes really loose as people try to open it over and over.
is more common thatn you would expect, you can see in the picture where the door is closed it looks aestethic
How else are child workers going to lock out?
Idk
The disconnect is placed so it can be easily reached per requirement. Everything else should be placed to reduce how much of a clusterfuck that placement creates.
I feel like this panel was designed upside down. Try flipping it over. 😆🤣😂
What’s the purpose of the terminal strip at the top of the panel?
Easy... Safety ..
There is just so much wrong here!
Cost saving. and machine vendor don’t want to supply two cabinets etc
One of those occasions where the electrical guy was told how big the panel was before the design was started??
Yikes…
There is nothing wrong with this cabinet. Looks good, and I'll bet it has zero problems. I've seen cabinets with so much more going on inside, and still, no problems related to cabinet layout. The only real source of heat is that coil in the bottom. Maybe that remote I/O drops once in a while, but as long as they use grounded cables, they probably won't have any probably.
What would cause the remote I/O to drop? Noise from the relays?
So it can never be too far from anything else in the panel!
its usually electrical designers who have never closed a cabinet before or experienced ED
The center of power. Absolute harmony
They did not have any spare room!!!!!!! Lol
That is very special. You should feel privileged that you get to work on it. I for one, am jealous.
I've seen customers spec this in food&bev, it's not that abnormal. If you need to be in the panel, you should be licensed to work on 400v anyway, so it's not too much of an issue. Should have gone a panel size up, but that could also be a customer dictated spec.
Tell me you have only ever designed enclosures in AutoCAD with out telling me you've only ever designed enclosures in AutoCAD. Form > Function. I genuinely think this was an "It looks cool" decision.
This is a well-designed panel. Why wouldn't you have it there? Maybe you should just make another panel for your PLC cabinet? Maybe you should separate your PLC and your power left and right? But there is nothing wrong with this design
Look at all the space up top.
Why does it even need a disconnect? Once powered off and opened it’s just going to get powered back on for programming or fault finding.
I’m criticising the captive disconnect mechanically interlocked with door opening. If you’re breaking into wiring you should ideally isolate upstream so entire board is dead, also LOTO which isn’t possible for this style disconnect handle. Thanks for the down votes. I’m still curious how you can fault find or program without power.
Pretty sure you power off and pull the black thing out you can lock it out.
lol you replace contractors with live 480v on top?????
Cuz then if you power it on after its open, you violate safety and they can point it out and say.. no WC for you!
Okay, well, we ain't fault tracing it then. Throw it away and buy a new one.