The final round for IEC’s Rocky Mountain regional competition was today. My company, Encore Electric, was kind enough to pay for my entire day-off. The contestants arrived at IEC at 11:00am and were served lunch. At 12:00 noon, the competition began. It was a very intense experience. It seemed like everyone else (the other nine contestants) immediately began mounting their control cabinet, disconnect, and start/stop stations/epo’s, but I opted to assign relay and starter numbers to everything and go over the ladder diagram a bit so that I knew how it worked.
Once everything was numbered and all the parts were inventoried (about a 30 minute process), I began to mount the cabinet and boxes. That took me two hours. I can’t believe it took that long, but with 3 pieces of conduit (two short four points and one rolling offset), the cabinet, the disconnect, and the two little boxes, with me attempting to make them perfectly level and at the desired mounting dimensions, the time just flew.
Once that was complete, I had 3 hours left and went to work wiring. I knew it would take me about 3 hours, so I was O.K. When 5:15pm rolled around with 45 minutes remaining, I was almost done with all the hot wiring and had only the door indicators, the neutrals and my wire organization to do (sticky backs and cable ties). I ran all of door wires, then the neutrals and had a whopping 15 minutes remaining. I slapped-on the sticky backs as best I could, cable-tied them, and cleaned it up considerably. I had a whopping 5 minutes to spare, which was plenty of time to clean-up.
By this point, two or three other people had finished their project and had them tested. I knew that they worked because they were not given the additional ten minutes to find and correct any problems, so I knew mine had to work right the first time, or I was out of the competition. Normally when I do a control circuit, I check a few things here and there, but I had no time to do that. Thankfully I had spent the time at the beginning assigning contact numbers to all of the contacts and the coils as well, so that the wiring was pretty fool-proof. I was fairly confident, but not as confident as I would have liked to have been.
The testing judge came over and powered-up the system. The red light came on, phew. Then he had me start it, and I watched the run indicator, timers and then the horn, starter, and contactor work and alternate like they should. Only one thing left to test. I switched the system to reverse and jogged it successfully, with the proper light illuminating. Everything worked correctly the first time.
The inspectors visited after that. Everything was mounted properly at the designated heights and spacing and was bonded properly. There was an issue with how the disconnect was wired, but I did it to how I was told when I asked as there was no direction in the instructions if it was a system disconnect or not. I was told not to worry about it as it appeared to be a common problem.
This year’s regional wire-off champion will be announced on June 4th at IEC’s graduation. Just 23 days to wait…
My muscles are finally starting to relax (and starting to hurt from being tensed for six hours) and the mental intensity I felt is now gone and I can finally just chill. I really don’t ever want to do that again, unless it is at the national competition in October =).
