Controls Electrical Installation

• Control and instrument wiring — control circuits, I/O and instrument wiring, pulled and terminated to the termination schedule and labeled to the wire list.
• Network and communications cabling — industrial Ethernet and fieldbus cabling between panels, remote I/O, drives and field devices, terminated and verified.
• Conduit and cable tray — for control, signal and network cabling, routed to the drawings and kept separated from power wiring the way the design calls for.
• Panels on site — setting and anchoring the control panels we build, or the ones you supply, and landing the field control and network wiring.
• Field devices and instruments — mounting and wiring sensors, photo-eyes, push-button stations, instruments and remote I/O enclosures.
• Shielding and control-system grounding — shield terminations and grounding done the way the design specifies, which is where most signal noise problems start.
• Verification and turnover — point-to-point checks against the drawings before anything is energized, and as-built drawings at turnover.

In Mexico, we install. The work is done by our own technicians or by subcontractors under our supervision, depending on the size and location of the job, and an engineer from our side owns the result either way.

In the United States, a licensed electrical contractor performs the installation. Our scope there is the engineering and the installation package — conduit and tray routing, cable schedules, wire lists and termination schedules — plus the panels, on-site supervision and coordination with the contractor, and the checkout and commissioning once the work is in.

The difference is who holds the tools, not who owns the outcome. In both countries the commissioning engineer works from the same package the installer did.

In Mexico, installation is done to NOM-001-SEDE. In the United States, the design and the installation package are prepared to NEC. Work on equipment that is energized, or about to be, follows NFPA 70E practice — lockout, approach boundaries, and the order things are energized in.

A third-party installer checks that the wire is landed. An engineer who wrote the logic checks that the wire is landed where the program expects it. On our scopes, point-to-point verification is done by the people who will commission the system, which is why problems turn up at checkout instead of at start-up.

Where the electrical is modeled, the routing in the field matches the routing in the model, because the people who modeled it are the people who install or supervise it.