Electrical control panel & Programing

HI I have a question about how much an electrician is suppose to charge to wire a control panel and do a program for it
involves 15 motor starters an few switches
please give me some pointers

THX in advance

Panel wiring

jayala

I would say what you would have to do is to estimate the time to do the wiring at a certain rate and then programming time at a certain rate. Are you a contractor, programmer, electrician and are you working on the side or for someone else? The rate can be whatever you can get.

Are you talking about building a control panel or just wiring field devices and incoming power to a pre-built panel? Which ever case it is, I have a spreadsheet set up with cost, overhead and profit margins in place. I go by day-rates. I have a day-rate set for panel shop labor, CAD schematics / design, programming and skid wiring labor. I just enter time estimated for each unit and let excel add it all up. This breaks a large estimate into smaller estimates which I find easier to do as well as minimizing giving labor away.

Set a rate for each unit. Typical day rate (based on 8 hours, 1 man) around here is around $500.00. Those are in house shop rates. Rates for work at customer's location are around a grand. Now the tricky part is in knowing about how much time will be needed for each unit. I base mine on 20 years of doing it, experience.

Like everyone else, they charge what they can get away with....

If you have a good idea of what you want, you could probably talk to a few shops and ask how much they would charge and get some buget quotes. Thats assuming you want to have this manufactured by someone else. If you want to estimate the cost of an electrician and are running the building yourself, that is a bit harder. Basicly you have to estimate the time to build and multiply it by an hourly rate.

Good luck,

Doug

First, I usually use the electrician to wire the panel to the motors only if the system is not part of a skid mounted machine. If the motors are part of a skid or assembly a technician not a licensed electrician can wire the machine. Panel internals are almost always wired by a technician.

You didn't mention the size of the motors. I work with 75hp to 200hp motors.

Generally programming starts at $3,000 for very simple programs and runs up to $6,000 for a large program with display. The software to develop the program runs to $6,000 if you must deliver a license to the client.

Mounting, wiring and buiding a panel should cost between $9/hr to $25/hr. The panel must be laid out in advance and a schematic drawn usually by a designer or engineer otherwise you're paying your "electrician" to be an engineer.

A normal bid for building a panel with programming starts at $18,000 and goes up to $85,000. This includes engineering, hardware, assembly, programming and testing.

Hardware includes enclosure (usually NEMA4x starting at $1,000), PLC (AB SLC500 starting at $4,000), Display (Quick Panel at $1200), power supplies (UPS $150, 24V $50), I/O surge suppressors ($50 ea), Terminals, rails, fuses, switches, channels.

In 2004, I'm doing an upgrade to an existing PLC for a municipal client and the price is ~ $80,000. I have to decode existing programming which was badly documented originally. The added hardware will be about $35,000 including added instruments, PLC modules, surge suppressors, rails, terminal strips and power supplies. All of this has to be done while the plant continues to operate with outages of only 8 hours at at time. The programming and assembly will be $14,000.

CTSE