Industrial & Motor Controls

Where the fault really is

When a machine won’t run, the obvious place to look is the motor and the power feeding it. More than once, Nathan has come in behind another contractor who’d been checking the motor’s high-voltage leads while the real problem was in the controls: a broken limit switch, for example, the kind of switch that tells a machine a guard is closed or a part has reached the end of its travel.

Older equipment makes this harder. Its controls are relays and mechanical switches, not the solid-state electronics most people work on today. Finding a fault means reading the schematic and tracing the circuit through it, one contact at a time. In Nathan’s words, it’s “a bit of a specialty skill.”

Light industrial work

We’ve done several small projects for a local woodworking manufacturer, moving machinery within their buildings and correcting safety problems as we found them. None of it is large, but it is industrial machinery, and it’s work we’re comfortable in.

On another plant job, the plant had been let down by its previous contractor and wanted someone new. The work needed more hands than we have, so we agreed that the plant would supply the unskilled labor and we’d do the electrical work. As Nathan put it, “usually there’s a way to make it work.”

The background behind it

Nathan started as a helper on a large industrial job in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He spent years after that on chemical plants, natural gas pumping stations and power plants, often in leadership roles. That’s where he learned motor controls and the control systems that run plant equipment.

It pays off outside the plant, too. As he puts it, “most residential circuitry is pretty simple compared to what motor controls are, but the theory is pretty much all the same.” There’s more on that on our troubleshooting page.

When your usual contractor is stuck

If equipment keeps tripping or failing and nobody has found out why, call us.