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Have you, like me…and many other electricians, been using NOALOX on your aluminum wires for years? We’re going to go over why it’s not necessary except in specific situations – 4 of them evidently.

 

I’m guilty of this too…so let me just get that out there right now. For years I’ve been dunking conductors in this bottle and getting a fat layer of goop on the ends of my terminations without reading the bottle (manufacturer’s specs) about how it’s supposed to be used. I’ve just gone by whatever my boss had told me to do. Most of our bosses, though, have been wiring shit since the beginning of time and if the didn’t hear any different, they’ve just been doing what they’ve always done.

NOALOX

NOALOX is an anti-oxidizing compound that helps prevent the formation of oxides on the outside of a conductor. No. Aluminum. Oxidization – NO.AL.OX. Before the 60’s we’d been using actual aluminum wire for conductors, and the very nature of aluminum is that it’s a very reactive material – especially when introduced to air or moisture. It wasn’t until the 80’s that manufacturers perfected a few alloys to use in wire, that started to curb this issue.

 

GALVANIC ACTION

Galvanic action occurs when two dissimilar metals come in contact with one another for an extended period of time. It more refers to when an ACTIVE metal comes in contact with a REACTIVE metal. What happens is, over time, these conductors start to “eat away” at one another. Using an anti-oxidizing compound around the conductors helps to minimize this “rusting out” of the conductors where contact is made. This is why a lot of these No-ox brands say “for use with aluminum to copper, and aluminum to aluminum terminations.”

 

AA8800 ALUMINUM

AA8800 aluminum is what’s used in MOST of today’s aluminum conductors. I did say most, not all. There are some conductors and cables on the market that this is not true for, so you do need to use caution when deciding whether or not your conductor requires the use of a no-ox or de-ox compound. But most conductors used are now made of an alloy (a mixture of metals into a new type of metal) that doesn’t react to galvanic action or air and water corrosion like standard aluminum does.

 

HOW TO APPLY IT

Another thing MOST people do is install this stuff incorrectly to the conductor. There are manufacturer instructions that must be followed when installing almost everything in the electrical trade, because there are codes and standards that require it. The instructions for a lot of these compounds require you to:

1) clean the conductor off with a wire brush or emory cloth

2) apply noalox freely to both the conductor and the connector

3) assemble joint and wipe off the excess

I bet if you did a poll out there and asked all electricians about this method, at least 75% of them have no clue this is required, nor do they do it. The reason for this is that there’s no NEC code

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Every type of conduit has a listed approved series of connectors and couplings that are designed to be used as fittings for those specific raceways. Today we look at EMT couplings and connectors.

 

COUPLINGS

Let’s start out with couplings. A coupling is literally used to “couple” two pieces of conduit together. There are various styles of couplings, each with it’s own unique purpose that we’ll get into in this article. A coupling is the same on both sides, so there’s no right way to put it on. There are, however, some considerations that should be made when using set screw connectors for aesthetics and workability in the future.

 

CONNECTORS

Connectors look very similar to couplings but have a distinct difference. Connectors are meant to slide over the end of a piece of conduit on one side, and tighten down to the inside of a box or enclosure on the other end. You use connectors at the ends of conduit runs to land into a box. You will almost always use both couplings and connectors in every conduit run together.

 

SET-SCREW

Set-screw connectors are used indoors only. They’re not designed to withstand wet conditions, so we only use them in buildings. They work by tightening a set-screw down on the conduit once it is slid in place to keep a firm connection to the conduit. Larger sizes of couplings and connectors will have multiple set-screws that y

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Contactors are heavy-duty electromagnetic switches that are normally used in controlling large lighting loads and motors. They operate similar to relays, but often times deal with more voltage, higher amperage, and have more input and output options.

CONTACTORS

Contactors are extremely useful pieces of equipment that allow switching of several different circuits at the same time. They are flexible for logic controlling as well, so you can use many contactors for turning things off WHILE turning other things on at the same time. This is similar to how control relays work, except that with contactors you generally have larger coils, bigger contacts, and can control much larger loads than a typical relay could handle.

 

THE COIL

A contactor works similar to a light switch, however rather than needing to manually touch the switch to turn it on/off, you send current to the coil inside and that acts as your switch. The inside of the contactor has 2 large iron cores that are spaced apart from one another, with a coil of copper wire wrapped around them. When current is sent to this coil of wire, the iron cores slam together (as an electromagnet is created) and the contacts of the contactor either open or close…or both at the same time depending on which type you have.

Coils come in several different ratings, so making sure that you check the voltage of the coil before you hook up to one. If you run 240-volts to a 120′-volt coil you will burn it up.

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The Kelvin Scale is used to talk about color of objects at certain temperatures, whereas other temperature scales deal with actual heat or thermal temperature. Kelvin is used in lighting especially for that reason, to talk about the color of light emission.

KELVINhttps://www.learner.org

The Kelvin is a unit of measure in lighting, but it goes much further than that. Where Fahrenheit and Celsius deal with thermal heat in relation to the boiling point and freezing point of water, the Kelvin scale deals with the freezing point of all matter. You don’t say “0 degrees Kelvin,” instead you say 0 Kelvin. 0 Kelvin deals with the absolute point in which all matter stops moving. With no movement of matter there is no way to generate heat, so while that is not realistically possible to measure, it is possible to conceptualize.

The man who came up with the Kelvin scale, physicist William Thomson, was the first person to make a correlation between heat and color. He heated metal, and noticed that at certain temperatures, the metal emitted a certain color. The lower the temperature, the more red the color – and the warmer the temperature the more blue the color.

 

KELVIN IN LIGHTINGlombardilampadari.it

In lighting, the Kelvin scale tells us at what color emission will occur in any light source. On the low end of the scale you have 1,000-2,000 Kelvin. This is comparable to a match being lit, or the color of metal when it is first heated up to a glow – a reddish orange. When you move up the scale the 3,000-4,000 Kelvin range is more of a yellow hue. Then moving up to around 5,000-6,000 scale you get to the “white-hot” zone. Above that, from 7,000-10,000 Kelvin, light appears more blue.

Most lamps/bulbs you buy from a store, nowadays, will have a Kelvin color rating on them identifying what color spectrum you can expect from them. Just keep in mind that the lower the Kelvin number, the more red the color will be. Conversely the

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A relay is a type of electromagnetic switch, similar to a contactor, that can be controlled remotely with electricity, rather than needing manual input as a standard switch would.

CONTROL RELAYS

Relays can be used to control normal loads, as a contactor would, however the benefit of a relay is they come with multiple normally-open (N.O.) and multiple normally-closed (N.C.) contacts – allowing you to use it to power some things on, while removing power from others at the same time.

The reason they are often called “control-relays” is because they’re typically used at lower voltages/lower amperages to control other devices such as contactors which are normally higher voltage and higher current. Many times you’ll find a control relay being controlled by smaller electronic circuits, events, or programs. When an electric signal is sent to engage the coil inside, it can send power to other devices which can turn them on or off – or both simultaneously.

 

THE COIL

On the inside of a relay you’ll find a coil of wire around two pieces of metal. When we send current through that coil of wire, the two pieces of metal suck together through electromagnetism. These pieces of metal that are opening or closing, are the “switch” for the relay to turn on and off.

Coils come in many different voltage ratings. There are many types of coils out there that are controlled at 12-volts, 24, 120, even up to 240. However, the amount of current (amps) that the contacts can handle flowing through them is typically lower – around 5 to 10 amps.

 

THE CONTACTS

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A lot of people still use wattage to talk about the brightness of lamps, when in reality lumens are the measure of light output. Wattage is still useful to know as an electrician, but we need to stop using it to talk about the BRIGHTNESS of a light.

Wattage

Wattage is used as a unit of measure for electrical consumption in a piece of equipment. It’s talking about how much power is being used, and has nothing to do with how much light is being put out, what the color of the light is, or how efficient it is at doing so.

You really only need to know wattage for 2 reasons. One is to calculate how many lamps you can install on a circuit. For instance say you have a 20-amp, 120-volt circuit that you need to install 10 60-watt lamps on. You can do the math using the PIE wheel to figure out how much wattage you have to work with on a full circuit. To do this you’d multiply 120v x 20a = 2,400 watts max. Then you’d take 10 x 60w to calculate how much wattage your 10 60-watt lamps will use – and you get 600 watts. 600-watts can fit into a 2,400-watt circuit so you know you won’t trip a 20-amp breaker with this installation. Again, this is simply telling you how much power the lamps are consuming, not anything about their brightness.

The second reason you’d want to know watts is for calculating your energy bill. Every electrical meter uses total wattage-used over time. So you’re charged based on watt-hours. If you know how much the power company charges you per watt-hour, as well as how many watts your building/home uses – you can calculate your electric bill within a reasonable amount of certainty.

 

LUMENS

Where brightness of a light-source is concerned, you want to use lumens as the unit of measure. Lumens tells you how much light is coming out of a light-source, not how much energy it is consuming to do so. A 500 lumen incandescent lamp at 25-watts will be relatively dim. However a 12.5-watt LED that puts out 1,000 lumens of light, will be far brighter even though the wattage is lower.

I like to think of lumens as a flood or “flow” of photons. If you have a really hig

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There are so many different types of lamps out there that having an understanding of the “lamp families” helps you understand how to troubleshoot them easier. Let’s dive in.

 

Incandescent

Incandescent lamps are probably the most known lamps out on the market. When the average person thinks about a light bulb, they tend to imagine an incandescent filament bulb. Incandescent lamps have been used for decades to illuminate homes, roads, businesses, and much more. They were the most widely used lamp of the 20th century as they led the way in illumination from the origin of the light bulb until now.

Incandescent bulbs use a tungsten metal filament on the inside, that has a certain amount of resistance from one end to the other. When you send current through the lamp this filament gets so hot that it begins to glow. This glowing is what the lamp uses to illuminate a room. Every type of lamp has some sort of inert gas on the inside that helps create a “jacket” around the tungsten filament to minimize oxidization. In incandescent lamps this gas is argon. Some other lamps like high-pressure sodium HID’s use xenon instead.

To find out if an incandescent lamps is good you can normally visually inspect the filament. If it appears broken then most likely the lamp is bad. If you’re unsure, or you have a frosted lamp, you can take your tester out and switch it to “continuity” and test from the metal tip of the bottom side of the lamp, to the metal screw-shell. You should hear a continuous tone from the tester. If there’s no tone, then more than likely the filament is broken and the lamp is bad.

 

Halogen

Halogen’s are a slightly different “family” of lamps than incandescent but they operate very similarly so often times they’re still considered incandescent light sources. A halogen lamp still has a tungsten filament inside of them, but they normally put this filament inside of an inner quartz tube deep inside the lamp. The quartz tube is typically filled with an amalgam of Halogen gasses rather than Argon. The halogen gas does a couple of things – it helps reduce breakdown of t

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A lot of people get really confused by contactors and relays and tend to treat them like some kind of mystical magic device without understanding what exactly they do. They have some similarities but still have very distinct differences.

Contactors and relays are simply switches. They differ from a standard switch, however, by being able to be controlled with electrical current rather than your finger. Both operate with a coil on the inside that, when energized, sucks contacts closed or snaps them open. It would be as if you were able to zap a normal light switch with a bolt of lightning to get it to change states….kind of.

Both relays and contactors are also multi-pole switches. This means that they can control several circuits, rather than just one like a normal single-pole switch would do. A typical 8-pin cube relay can control 2 circuits, while an 11-pin can control 3. General-use contactors can control anywhere from 2-4 whereas lighting contactors can control from 6-12 circuits/loads. All with the flip of a single action (bump of current).

What makes them different are a few things. First off, relays are typically lower voltage applications as well as lower-current applications. Relays you may come across could have coil voltages of anywhere between 12v and 240v on average, and can control loads in the 5-15amp range. Contactors tend to be more stout and can handle higher amperage through the coils and contacts. You could see coil voltage ratings between 120v-480v, and contacts around 30-50amps on average.

General-use contactors are set up to function either all normally-open, or all normally-closed. When you energize the coil, all of the contacts change states in the same way. With relays you have the option of both normally-closed and normally-open so you can change the states of two circuits in the same, or in opposite directions. This means you can turn something on, WHILE turning something else off at the same time. This is an extremely useful thing to be able to do.

There are contactors out there that allow you to do this as well, these are typically lighting contactors. Lighting contactors allow you to have several different circuits turning on while several turn off simultaneously. Some of these devices are mechanically-held as well meaning that you can lock the device in one state regardless of whether or not power remains present in the coil circuit. I talk more about this in a video coming up in the next couple weeks.

 

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A lot of apprentices (and journeymen) have trouble understanding what makes HID lighting any different than regular lighting so troubleshooting them can be a bit confusing.  Let’s talk about it!

HID lamps are easy to understand once you wrap your head around the idea that the light inside of one is produced from an arc inside of a tube.  There are no metal wires inside of an HID lamp, like you’d find in a standard incandescent.  In fact this is the philosophy behind fluorescent tubes, neon signs, and compact-fluorescent as well.  It’s just an arc being struck in a tube, then the arc mixes with certain chemicals to form an arc-stream to produce visible light.

All HID lamps have a few things in common.  1) They use an arc to illuminate rather than a piece of metal. 2) They all use ballasts.  3) They are all used in relatively the same places – sports arenas/stadiums, street lighting, and parking lot lighting.

How these bulbs differ is where things get interesting:

 

Metal Halide400w MH – M47

Metal Halide lamps use halide salts on the inside of the arc tube.  Halide salts such as fluoride, bromide, chloride, and iodide are deposited around the inside of the inner arc-tube and when an arc is stricken through the tube, the halide salts start to vaporize into the arc stream.  Each halide salt has a certain color profile that it adds to the finished light output, and a specific temperature has to be maintained in order to keep the lamp at the same color consistency.  This is achieved by painting the pinched edges of the arc-tube white to reflect light back into the chamber.

 

Mercury Vapor400w MV – H33 Lamp

Rather than having any secondary elements in the arc tube to control the light color, a mercury vapor relies solely on the blue light emitted from vaporized mercury (which all 3 of these lamps have).  What makes mercury vapor the most recognizable is the white coating around the inside of the lamp’s outer envelope.  Much like a fluorescent lamp, a mercury vapor lamp utilizes phosphorescence to control the color.  Phosphor glows when introduced to UV light, so this coating helps to make the color of the glowing mercury less blue, and more white.

 

High-Pressure

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It’s an electricians job to be able to identify what’s going on in an electrical circuit, and sometimes this can be a difficult task. Having a firm knowledge of how to use various pieces of electrical test equipment can be the difference in solving a problem and making a guess. In this episode, I cover all of the pieces of test equipment I believe an electrician should know how to use.

#1 Basic Jaw-Type Multimeter/Tester

This is a pretty obvious piece of equipment for an electrician to have, but you’d be surprised at how many electricians and apprentices out there don’t know how to use one.  Well, let’s dive in!

For starters this is not “technically” a multi-meter.  Fluke calls it a tester, but most of us in the field still call it a multi-meter, so for the sake of this article I’m going to continue calling it a multi-meter. It has multiple functions, which is why we call it a “multi-meter.”  It can read voltage (difference of potential), amperage (current flowing in a conductor), resistance (opposition to current flow in a conductor), and continuity (whether or not you have a complete loop.

Most of the time, this is all an electrician will need to know.  This Fluke T5-600 fits in your back pocket, has detachable leads that can be snapped into the tool, or used hands-free, and a backlit LED display.  This model is one of the most used testers on the market, and because of its rigidity and reliability will continue to be so for quite some time.

 

#2 Clamp-on Ammeter

The clamp-on ammeter is similar to a standard tester or multimeter with the addition of a clamp/jaw that reads amperage on large diameter conductors. What the clamp provides is the ability to measure larger size wires for use on feeders and service-entrance conductors. In addition to measuring amperage, this tester also allows you to read voltage, resistance, continuity, and capacitance.  This specific model (Fluke CL323) does not allow you to snap the leads to the tool so it can be a bit cumbersome to use when testing voltage – unless you have something nearby that you can clamp on to, allowing the tester to hang in front of you while you use the leads with both hands.

 

#3 Pocket Voltage Tester

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