Panel Wiring Regulations

Hi All,

We have just purchased a lathe from Rafamet in Poland. The machine has just been installed and I noticed the machine does not have any labeling on the wires.

All the components are labelled and the terminal points at the bottom of the panel have numbers.

The Drawings show the wire going to each device and terminal number. But if someone had to change a wire it would almost be impossible to find.

The machine has the CE mark on it.

What I would like to know is if there are any regulations that require the wires to have labeling on them.

Not marking the wires is fairly common in the EU.I worked for a Austrian company that did the same. Only the terminals were marked. It can be a bit frustrating to troubleshoot.

Not impossible to trace the wires (if you have the drawing) But the ones that don't visit the bottom terminal like inter-relay connections can be tricky to locate. Iv'e seen it many times and you think you have found the wire only to realise that it is going through a N/C contact on the relay and giving you a false 'beep'

It's bad practice not to number every wire at it's termination though

There are no regulations requiring it. It's common courtesy and probably should be in procurement specifications if you want it, but otherwise there is no compelling issue requiring it.

You might find, however, that many EU suppliers use a different type of wiring schematic than you may realize at first glance. In IEC world, all terminals on devices have a numbering system that is very specific not only as to the function of the terminal on the device, but also to the specific location on the device. Prefix 1, 2, 3, 4 is used on the fist set of contacts from left to right, then 5 thru 8 on the next deck etc., then function is designated on the next decade in the terminal number, with even-odd meaning NC and odd-even meaning NO. So for example (don't quote me on the, I'm going from memory) on a control relay, terminals 13 and 14 are ALWAYS a Normally Open set of contacts, and are supposed to be located on the lowest deck of a relay on the far left side (1x = first deck, left side, x3 & x4 = odd-even, so NO contact). 21 and 22 would be NC contacts, immediately to the right of 13 and 14. Then if there are more than 4 sets of contacts, those on the second deck would be 53/54 for a NO on the right most side, 61/62 for a NC to the left of it, etc. etc. etc. Once you understand the conventions, it's not at all difficult to follow, but we in North America have never been trained on those conventions. So the wiring diagram is not just a ladder logic diagram, it is a combination ladder / point-to-point.

The machine has the CE mark on it.

Click to expand...

I think this doesn't mean anything in this matter.
IMHO, this doesn't mean a lot at all.

I totally agree with the point wires should be marked. We do not always do that ourselves out of laziness but we regret it later. We encounter some (EU) equipment which is very well and utterly documented but the wires aren't marked so still (a *****) [hard] to troubleshoot

If we build a large cabinet we mark the cables and if we build medium to small cabinets we don't mark. If the customer want to get the marked wires we do it but it cost time, and time is money. I've had customers that buy very small cabinets (600$), there is almost no way you need marked wires in this one, and they happily pay 100$ more to get a marking on the wires. Makes no sense to me.

I don't see the problem that you describe either, if I have a scheme (correct word?) in Sweden it's no problem to search for faults in a cabinet. It clearly states what points the wires are running between. That being said, you have to have a scheme and not a bad one as you many times get with unsatisfied information in it.

However, this may be diffrent in certain countries and regions depending on that schemes you got.

My buddy is a electrical repair technician here in the USA for a Swiss machine builder. He recently attended some training in Switzerland. He said his company is changing their standards and will no longer be putting wire#'s on wires.

He about flipped out when he heard this as the trainer was saying it was going to be such a huge improvement to NOT have wire #'s.

I do not understand how anyone could believe this is better way.......unless you are a bean-counter or have never tried to troubleshoot an old cabinet with a production supervisor breathing over your shoulder.

rQx said:

If we build a large cabinet we mark the cables and if we build medium to small cabinets we don't mark. If the customer want to get the marked wires we do it but it cost time, and time is money. I've had customers that buy very small cabinets (600$), there is almost no way you need marked wires in this one, and they happily pay 100$ more to get a marking on the wires. Makes no sense to me.

I don't see the problem that you describe either, if I have a scheme (correct word?) in Sweden it's no problem to search for faults in a cabinet. It clearly states what points the wires are running between. That being said, you have to have a scheme and not a bad one as you many times get with unsatisfied information in it.

However, this may be diffrent in certain countries and regions depending on that schemes you got.

Click to expand...

The problem with that is the definition of "Large", "Medium" and "Small". I agree with you that if you had just like one VFD, one Circuit Breaker and say a simple start/stop switch for the VFD then wire numbers would not be needed. But what to you defines a "Large" panel? For me once I go above about 2 or 3 VFD´s or 16 IO I would use wire numbers. Otherwise things start to get complicated.

dogleg43 said:

My buddy is a electrical repair technician here in the USA for a Swiss machine builder. He recently attended some training in Switzerland. He said his company is changing their standards and will no longer be putting wire#'s on wires.

He about flipped out when he heard this as the trainer was saying it was going to be such a huge improvement to NOT have wire #'s.

I do not understand how anyone could believe this is better way.......unless you are a bean-counter or have never tried to troubleshoot an old cabinet with a production supervisor breathing over your shoulder.

Click to expand...

The only way it could be a huge improvement to not have wire numbers would be if there were constant mistakes in the wire numbers. (I´ve seen this where on one end of the wire it was 327 and the other end was 326 and vice versa. That was a painful troubleshooting day!)

We don't need no stinking labels. We always keep a clean updated and easy to read copy of the schematics in every single panel, so who needs them? You just get out the drawings and lay them out on the nice brightly lit table that is always readily available at working height and then troubleshooting without labels is simple.

No drawings? No problem. Tracing the wire is rarely time consuming enough to justify the one time expense involved in putting on all those labels in place, just so a few hundred times in the future, some dude with a meter and a clue could save ten minutes and troubleshoot controls paperlessly over distances both large and small by glancing at some numbers on a sticker. [/sarcasm]

I don't recommend troubleshooting more than a few minutes without prints even if you DO have labels, but I loathe label-less panels, and I still think NEMA and JIC drawings standards whip the dog snot out of the tree-killing, sideways IEC (how little info can we give you) schematic standards. I have one machine I promise I could put on ten pages the OEM has stretched out to over fifty with most of the input devices drawn as the same looking switch on a page by itself with tiny reference numbers...

It would be nice if we could present some samples of the drawings we talk about. Since our experience is very mush diffrent and I don't think we talk about the same sort of drawings here.

If your machine is CE marked then there is a requirment to not only mark the terminals but also the conductors according to the technical documentation, theres several standards relevant to this including EN60204-1:2006+A1:2009 which makes it a legal requirment.

Buy American next time.

Buy American.... LOL, I've lost count of how many systems weve had to redesign and repair from the US.... Buy British !!

British? pfft, everybody knows Swedish is the best

ROTFLMAO.... Swedish, we all know the only good thing to come out of Sweden is blonde !!!