Industrial electrical isn't installation work that happens to be in a warehouse — it's a different discipline. The plant runs hot, the supply is three-phase, the loads are inductive, the safety isolation has to be documented every time, and a quote is judged on whether the line keeps running while the work happens. We do the install side — high-bay LED, MCC modifications, VSD wiring, sub-mains — and the unglamorous side too: tracing a nuisance trip on a 30-year-old conveyor at 11pm so the day shift can start on time.
Three-phase plant and motors
Most of what we do on the plant side is around motors — soft-start and VSD installs, replacement of failed star-delta starters with modern drives, dedicated supplies for new presses or pumps, and the cabling that connects all of it back to a properly-sized MCC bucket. VSD work isn't just dropping in a drive: the right shielded motor cable, a dedicated earth back to the MCC, and a Type-B RCD where the drive's earth-fault leakage profile demands one (per AS/NZS 3000 clause 2.6.3) are the difference between a clean install and one that trips adjacent equipment for years.
High-bay lighting upgrades
A typical metal-halide or HPS high-bay draws 400W and gives off most of its energy as heat. The 150W LED replacement gives the same lux at the floor, lasts 50,000 hours instead of 8,000, and loses the warm-up cycle that costs you 15 minutes every shift change. For a warehouse on two shifts the energy and lamp-replacement savings usually pay back the conversion inside two years. We size the new luminaires against a photometric plan, not against the old fixture count — old metal-halide installs are often over-lamped to compensate for end-of-life lumen drop, so the LED count is sometimes 20–30% lower. See our commercial LED lighting service for the broader scope.
Power quality (PFC, harmonics, VSD impact)
If your site has a power factor charge on the bill, or capacitor banks that have stopped switching, or a VSD-heavy load that's drawing harmonics back into the supply — those are all solvable. Power factor correction sized against the actual load (not against the connected kVA) usually pays back inside two years on a site large enough to see PFC penalties at all. Harmonic mitigation is more case-by-case: line reactors on individual drives, an active filter at the MSB, or in some cases just splitting the offending drives onto their own transformer. We measure the supply first and propose against the measurement, not the worst-case spec sheet.
Maintenance and breakdown response
Production-critical sites usually want both: scheduled thermographic surveys of switchboards and MCCs (we use a calibrated FLIR camera; survey output is the same insurance-grade report we deliver to FM-Global insured clients), and an after-hours contact for the things that won't wait. For sites where the cost of downtime is high enough to justify it, we'll combine quarterly thermographic inspections with annual switchboard servicing and a documented on-call escalation under a maintenance contract.
Standards the work meets
Industrial installations are wired to AS/NZS 3000 as a baseline, with motor and drive circuits picking up the additional requirements in clause 4.13 (motors) and the supplementary IEC 60204-1 where applicable to machinery. MCC assemblies meet AS/NZS 61439. Earthing and bonding follow AS/NZS 3000 section 5. A Certificate of Electrical Safety is lodged on every job that requires one.