How Control Panel Quality Impacts the Entire Lifecycle of Your Equipment

Despite being often overlooked, the quality of your control panels has a significant impact on the lifecycle of your equipment. The equipment lifecycle is generally affected by the mode and extent of use, environmental conditions, electrical overload, related overheating, and the effectiveness of maintenance. Control panels affect all of these factors; therefore, the higher the quality of the control panel, the better you are able to judge and manage the lifecycle of your equipment. 

Poor-quality panels can lead to frequent malfunctions, improper assessment of equipment states, premature equipment failure, and increased downtime, resulting in lost time, money, and productivity. In this blog, we’ll explore how control panel quality affects the entire lifecycle of your equipment and how you can ensure greater equipment longevity.

How Control Panel Quality Impacts Your Equipment’s Lifecycle

1. Installation

Setting yourself up for optimal equipment performance across its entire lifecycle begins with the initial installation. Well-built industrial control panels are designed with their purpose in mind and integrate seamlessly into the existing electrical and communications systems. With clear labeling and documentation and an easy-to-access and manage layout, an effective control panel enables installation teams to wire up, test, and commission your equipment to the highest standards, ensuring compliance with relevant regulations right from the start. 

Conversely, poorly designed control panels are disasters waiting to happen, leading to ongoing and frequent non-compliance, equipment downtime, or personnel safety issues. 

2. Startup

Several of the control panel issues that may have been subsumed into your equipment’s lifecycle can become apparent during commissioning and startup. These include issues such as faulty wiring, improper component selection, and poor thermal management. Very shortly after startup, you may begin to see the effects of these issues, including fuses tripping, improper equipment operation, and overheating.

An effective control panel will only be noticed during startup when it performs its job, which may include feeding back accurate data to control centers through its sensors or allowing operators to effectively manage post-startup optimization and process adjustments. 

3. Operations 

The majority of the impact control panels have on equipment will be during the operations phase of their lifecycle. This includes:

• Reliability: Control panels manage your equipment’s operational performance, which means that reliability issues will also likely be spotted in coordination with either sensors feeding into the control panel or with inputs being made through an HMI. If a piece of equipment consistently fails to perform as expected, it should be noted for maintenance. However, there is the possibility that the issue arises from the control panel itself, due to bad wiring, faulty relays or contacts, or thermal buildup.

  
  

• Effects on Downtime: Equipment downtime is one of the biggest costs for any business. It means not only will there be costs associated with fixing it, but staff may also have to be reassigned or be put on less productive duties.  

  
  

Having correct component selection and installation in the control panel should reduce downtime caused by preventable component failures. High-quality control panels can reduce downtime by facilitating equipment diagnostics and supporting maintenance teams in scheduling routine maintenance. 

• Reduced Maintenance: When maintenance procedures are performed well, they are very mundane; that is, nothing strange, exciting, or unexpected happens, and all processes can be followed within schedule. Quality control panels make maintenance predictable, safe, and the right kind of mundane. Logical layouts, clear labeling, NEMA-rated enclosures that keep out dust, flying debris, and moisture, and proper component selection all reduce both the time and regularity of maintenance operations. 

  
  

At the same time, built-in diagnostics and remote monitoring also inform proactive maintenance planning, so if anything unexpected happens, it can be addressed by maintenance teams as a priority before it becomes a bigger issue.

• Improved Environment for Personnel: Not only do better control panels make life easier by assisting with diagnostics and troubleshooting equipment, but they also improve the broader working environment. Industrial accidents, especially those involving machine electrification, electrical arcing, leakage of dangerous vapor, or combustion of dust present significant threats to the health of personnel working around your equipment. 

  
  

4. Future-Proofing

The rapid advancement of certain technologies, such as sensors, can mean that even relatively new equipment will need to be upgraded or retrofitted. Well-designed control panels assist with this by planning for future upgrades in advance. Some means of doing this include creating space redundancy where possible, using modular architecture, or installing extra I/O capacity than initially necessary. 

5. Decommissioning

Even at the end of the equipment’s useful life, thoughtful and forward-thinking control panel design and execution can improve the decommissioning process. This includes actions such as maintaining clear documentation of the construction process, using recyclable materials, planning for retrofitting through reusing or reconditioning control panels, or following a modular design that allows easy extraction of still-relevant components.

Conclusion

Control panels have a significant impact on the condition, usability, and downtime of equipment throughout its entire lifecycle. Careful design, planning, installation, and monitoring through control panels can greatly improve the ROI on industrial equipment and deliver reliable productivity, reduced TCO, and greater productivity across its lifespan.

At Enercon, we have five decades of experience designing, building, installing, and maintaining control panels across virtually all fields of use. To learn more about how we can deliver the control panels that help you get the most out of your equipment’s life cycle, contact us here.