A Circuit Breaker (C/B) is a mechanical device that will involve a magnetic solenoid and bimetallic strip inside. When the strip heats up due to current, it will bend and activate the solenoid to trip the circuit breaker and stop the flow of power.  A Fuse is a type of insulating material with a filament in the middle of it. When…

EECO is providing the convenient online shopping experience you’ve asked for! It’s easy to get registered at ShopEECO.com and start shopping for all your electrical equipment needs. In this short video, you can see the step by step process to getting started with . There are benefits beyond just buying online.  Order Management: Review 18 Months of Order…

Criticality assessments can be daunting even for plants with sophisticated tools at their disposal. Where to start? Which assets should you include in the assessment? This is one of the most common questions we hear. Recently, one of our customers, a large industrial facility, said that all their assets were critical. Assuming that is the case, conducting a criticality assessment…

We all know what defines critical spares, right? Those parts or components that would cause significant downtime or interruption of operations should they fail. Often, critical spares are stored at remote sites and available based on a prioritization schedule. This post looks at critical spares that neither in the storeroom nor an off-site facility. If you want help defining critical spares,…

MRO maintenance storerooms have been effective at providing everything from dust masks and gloves to repair parts to critical spares. All of them useful and necessary items in an industrial facility. This is a series that will examine what would happen if we changed our thinking about MRO storerooms and started seeing them as assets, rather than expense centers to…

If you spend time reading the social media profiles of maintenance storeroom managers, you soon learn that reducing storeroom inventory is a popular goal. The fact that it is an often-used KPI suggests the importance of reducing inventory. We couldn’t agree more. It’s important to reduce the dollar value and number of SKUs in the…

The market is experiencing a large increase in counterfeit electrical products sold through grey markets. This has been going on for a while, about 20 years. Over the last 5 years the rate of growth of counterfeited and grey market products has exploded –  up 538%. This post will address counterfeit electrical products and why they can hurt you.…

  There are many theories and a lot of good practices relating to storeroom management and more specifically, inventory management. We have written about many of these practices in this space. You can read about more about these best practices areas at the following links: Electrical storeroom assessments, what happens nextCritical spares, is your storeroom ready…

  High Bay (HB) lighting fixtures are getting facility managers’ attention in industrial, commercial, manufacturing, gymnasium and other large indoor venues. These spaces at one time could be seen lit up with other lighting choices such as traditional HID (High-Intensity Discharge) and fluorescent high bays. In recent years, HB lighting fixtures have stolen some of…

  Life in the electrical storeroom can be challenging for a lot of reasons. With orders to fulfill and check, vendors to manage, job orders to issue and more – the storeroom manager has his or her hands full. This post summarizes a recent survey we conducted of storeroom managers across our service area and…

The life of a storeroom manager is full of challenges. There is never enough hours to handle the constant changes and new activities that must be supported. In many plants we visit, the electrical storeroom is everyone’s help desk. The storeroom manager is never lonely, that’s for sure. In this post, we explore ‘a day in…

  VMI continues to be a productive technology to manage high moving items in many electrical storerooms, and for good reasons. Number one is efficiency. Electrical storeroom managers have a lot on their plates every day – from managing monthly budgets to providing the reporting their organizations expect to reconciling invoices and acting as the…

Why you should do a self evaluation of your electrical storeroom If you have an electrical storeroom that supports critical operations, chances are you’ve spent a great deal of time and money to equip your storeroom to serve those needs. You’ve reviewed the SKUs that are used on a regular basis, optimized your inventory levels…

High Bay LED Lighting, Low Cost of Ownership Dialight’s Vigilant is a high-output LED High Bay Light Fixture and an ideal HB replacement for less efficient 1,000W traditional HID fixtures. Dialight’s Vigilant high bay fixture is a groundbreaking innovation shining 125 lumens per watt at half the power consumption of standard HID lighting. The Vigilant LED HB fixture delivers about…

Lighting solutions for hazardous environments are unique from general industrial lighting in a number of important ways that makes them suited to locations where the threat of explosive, or combustible substances such as liquids, gases or ‘flyings’ are present or can be. As a result, these fixtures must meet class and division rating for each defined application. For a…

Amid all the excitement surrounding LED lighting – and there are plenty of reasons to be excited – there is also the hard reality of cost justification that customers must inevitably face and that EECO deals with in sorting out whether to recommend LEDs or another alternative that offers faster payback. To be clear, there are good alternatives to…

  Matching LED lighting to the challenge can be quite an effort especially with all the choices available for industrial and general purpose lighting from a myriad of companies offering products for this market. According to our lighting team, more than 600 companies in the U.S. provide LED fixtures for industry and general purpose. And that includes fixture manufacturers such as Acuity, Cooper by Eaton, Hubbell, Philips…

  We have all heard the advantages of upgrading industrial lighting to LEDs – lower energy consumption, much longer lamp life, reduced heat build up and better light ‘color’ among other benefits. If you’ve ever been in an older facility alight with sodium vapor lamps or other traditional lighting, you know what we’re talking about here. Odd looking,…

  We are often asked what happens a week or two after a storeroom assessment takes place. To answer this question, we need to back up a step or two – and this is very important – before we develop an action plan to manage the storeroom. First, we do our homework on what is…

  The industrial electrical storeroom is a demanding environment where there is always competition for time and never enough of it to “get to it all”. So much is changing, so many different types of projects from the usual repair and replacement work to small projects and the occasional critical repair. Plus, the continual stream of…

According to Terry Wireman, “The inventory and purchasing staff have the largest impact on maintenance productivity, more than any other support group”. The basis of this assessment comes down to wait time. While it is a bold statement, Terry makes a great point. The accessibility, ordering, and other delays associated with spare parts adds up. These…

  5 Things You Should Know About Electrical Storeroom Management. Electrical storerooms have been getting a lot of attention the last few years, and for good reason. For many of our customers, the electrical storeroom is both a significant expense and a big contributor to keeping the process running efficiently. Having the right parts, at the…

The outdoor lighting market is continuing the migration from traditional lighting sources such as high pressure sodium, metal halide and quartz to LEDs, and for some very good reasons. Phase out of incandescent lamps is not even news anymore. Plus, they were rarely used in outdoor applications. The migration to LEDs offers some very compelling advantages: LED…

Short-circuit and overload protection devices are both going to protect your motor circuit from excess current but in very different ways. Often times people tend to misuse the term ‘short-circuit’ to describe any electrical malfunction, regardless of what the actual problem may be. So it’s important to understand the difference between short-circuit protection and overload…

How innovative VFD enclosure design is helping to manage heat. VFD enclosure heat  is typically managed through tried and tested means such as forced ventilation, moving heat sinks to the exterior (through back panel) or other means such as air conditioning. Each of these are viable solutions, though environmental and operational considerations may impact suitability.…

A thermal audit of electrical enclosures can be revealing. Statistically three out of ten enclosures are too hot for the power electronics and controls inside them. But this can be easily remedied with the addition of thermal cooling systems. The trick is identifying your problem areas quickly and efficiently, which brings us to the thermal…

  On average 3 out of 10 enclosures require thermal cooling.  Why be concerned with thermal management of electrical enclosures? Based on statistics, 30% of operating systems are being heat stressed, resulting in poor performance, premature failure, and erratic operation. Nuisance drive tripping often comes to mind when thinking about enclosure heat, but the problem…