Top 8 Electrical Control Panel Components

Okay, in this video, you can tell I'm getting serious again. We got three cameras. We're gonna look at the top eight electrical control panel components found in this control panel right here, this real world control panel. And what you'll find is these eight components are common across the board. So understanding what these components are, how they work, where they're used, will help you on all control systems, on all control panels. And if you're ever reading schematics or fault finding or even designing, modifying your own system. So let's have a look at what those are. Oh, and just so you know, these are in no particular order. They're all equally as important as one another. So this component here is your main isolator. So this is where the main feeds come in, the cable feeds come in, and then they go through this isolator. That's on, that's off. And you can also control the on, off position on the door as well. And this shaft here should interlock with the door so you shouldn't ever be able to open the panel up as it is at the moment with it being on unless it's been switched on manually like I've just done when you're already within the panel. And what this does is, it's pretty obvious, it switches on or off the main incoming supply that then is distributed across the panel. So L1 and neutral, you can see the neutral goes up here and then L1, that's distributed down to some MCBs. So the next thing are your terminal blocks. And I absolutely love these terminal blocks. They're by Wago or Vargo. And the reason I like them so much is because they're great at saving space. As you can see, these triple and double terminal blocks here, they're like double stacked or triple stacked, meaning you don't have to take up more width with these single terminal blocks because if I was using these single terminal blocks, it would stretch much further along and use up more DIN rail space. It might be self-explanatory what the terminal blocks do, but ultimately, this is where your equipment out in the field connects to the panel. So whether that be motors, pumps, boilers being controlled outward, or sensors feeding back information coming inward. And another way that I'm using terminal blocks is distribution. So you can see here that we've got our 24 volts and our 10 volts being bussed and distributed across the whole panel. So that's another way you can use terminal blocks. Just so you're aware, we help businesses, self-employed contractors develop their business in scale in controlled automation and BMS. So if you're interested in potentially getting our help, there's a link in the description that you can click and it will take you to our page and we can explain more on how we can help. Okay, the next component and pretty obvious, pretty common is our circuit protection. And in this panel in the form of MCBs, miniature circuit breakers. And these are obviously for protecting against short circuits, overcurrents, et cetera. So as you can see at the moment, they're all in their off position. You've got a little green indicator here. And if I switch that on, it goes to red. You know that that MCB is now in its energized position. So now what that's doing is it's distributing that main 230 volts across all of these on the incoming side and then going out to wherever they're going on the outgoing side. And let's say that there's a short circuit or overcurrent on this cable here, this MCB will detect it and then automatically switch off and mean that there's nothing happening on this cable or affecting the equipment out in the field or wherever that is. Okay, the next thing is our transformer. So this is stepping down 230 volts AC to 24 volts AC. So you can see this is the primary side with our incoming 230 volts AC. And this is our secondary side, stepping it down to 24 volts AC. And you can see these purple cables, you can see them across the rest of the panel. This is our control circuit. So a safer voltage to use when doing the controls as you can see other components and equipment, sensors out in the field possibly. Okay, the next component is our PSU. So power supply unit. And as you can tell by this PSU, it's actually adjustable. So this is like a little potentiometer that can adjust the outgoing voltage. So this is a zero to 10 volt DC power supply. Similar to the transformer, we've got our main 230 volt coming in this side and then our variable zero to 10 volts coming out on this side. And at the moment it's set to 10 volts. At the moment now it's set to five volts, two volts, et cetera, et cetera. So depending on the application that you're controlling or feeding voltage to, you can adjust what that outbound voltage is gonna be. Okay, our contactors. And on these ones you can see that they've got overload relays attached to them. Contactors, very much like relays. You can almost think of these as three phase relays. But in this case, how we're using them in this panel is we're actually using them as you can see just with single phase. And we tend to use contactors over relays when we're controlling larger loads and there's potential sort of inrush that could potentially burn out relays. So these are designed for motors, fans, pumps, et cetera. And then the overloads here, the overload relays sense when there's a thermal overload on that pump, on that motor, on that fan that will then automatically trip out this contactor if it senses a thermal overload. Okay, and what panel would be complete without a set of relays? And in this case, 33 relays. Again, really nice component done by Vargo. And you can see with these relays, they are double pole relays. And where relays come in handy, well, they come in handy for various reasons, but an example of how we're using them in this system is on one pole, because these two poles are galvanically isolated from each other. So when this relay is energized or de-energized, and depending on whether you've got it wired normally open, normally closed, but on one side, where this purple cable goes, we're switching on a light on the front of the panel. And at the same time, when this relay is energized based on a state or a condition of something else out in the field or something else in the panel, we're also sending a signal to the PLC on this white cable. What's nice as well about these Vargo relays, and it is quite common on other relays as well, is two things. One, we've got an LED indicator light on here so we can visually see when that relay is energized, and you won't be able to see it with the camera angle, maybe you can here, but we've got these bridge connectors as well, which saves additional wiring. So we can, if there's a common, we can bridge it across using these bridge connectors from Vargo. A good example of this is, you see this zero volt cable here, there's a bridge going underneath these, bridging that zero volts all the way up to relay eight, and then, because there's only a bridge of eight, and then we're starting again when we get to nine. So that's a nice little feature of these relays from Vargo. Okay, and the eighth and final thing that you'll, again, see in any modern control system, control panel, are controllers or PLCs. And you can see that these ones are by Zennio using the KNX protocol, and we're using these for signals coming in, as you can see with the white ones, and then controlling things going out from these purple cables, orange cables, and gray cables over here. Ultimately, any PLC, any controller, it's the same thing. You've got inputs coming in, doing some programming, PLC, so programmable logic controller, you're doing some programming, and then you're doing things on the output, you know, whether it's zero to 10 volt analog control, or you're switching some relays back here, they all do the same thing, ultimately. The only difference is the application that you're using them for. So we've chosen Zennio because they're very good at doing HVAC and BMS and smart home automation control. That's not to say other systems aren't, but we like Zennio, and so we chose to use them as our control units, our PLC units.