Electrical wiring diagrams US standards

Greetings,

We have a piece of equipment that was purchased from and built by a company in Italy. The machine is located in the US. The machine itself is wonderful, but the electrical wiring diagrams supplied with the machine are drawn to a completely different standard than what the technicians we employ are familiar with.

Each page of the print has one or maybe two electrical devices. One relay will have one page. Each wire going to or from the relay will then reference a seperate page. Walking through a single circuit takes a considerable amount of page flipping and time.

We are planning on ordering another machine from the same company. I have the opportunity to assist in the Standard Specifications that we will send out to the manufacturer. Although requesting certain brand of components is easy, I'm not clear on how to lay out what we expect in terms of the wiring diagrams. I definitely want to spec out a more standard US style ladder diagram.

Are there resources that lay out how wiring diagrams should be drawn in the US? Is there a resource I could reference to to show what we expect? Am I making any sense at all?

Yes you are making sense.

Other countries do things a little different. I have worked on equipment from Germany. There is a challenge in understanding their mindset and thinking much less German.

I wonder how badly we in USA confuse them?

I do not believe there is any one standard for making drawings. They all seem to differ. For all I know there is one standard and not everyone reads or much less adheres to it
OR there may be more than one (NEMA, SAE, ANSI, NFPA 70,79, UL 508 and the list goes on.

Dan Bentler

FYI, if you do end up specing out a different drawing format/style it will probably cost more.

Hydro Power Guy said:

FYI, if you do end up specing out a different drawing format/style it will probably cost more.

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But you'll get it back when the guys have understandable drawings with which to work on the machine.

Doug-P said:

But you'll get it back when the guys have understandable drawings with which to work on the machine.

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Are you trying to say that equipping workers with tools they can effectively use is cost effective even though the tool costs more?

Can the bean counters even see the concept much less accept it?

Dan Bentler

I think you will have great difficulty getting the Italians to comply with Nth American standards. It's very difficult to get Nth American companies to do that.
You might be better off accepting their standard then re-drawing it.
Roy

leitmotif said:

Are you trying to say that equipping workers with tools they can effectively use is cost effective even though the tool costs more?

Can the bean counters even see the concept much less accept it?

Dan Bentler

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I couldn't have expressed it better. I made that post based on my very limited experience with ABB robot manuals and German hybrid crane schematics.

Is it any wonder bean counters are held in contempt?

I have been confronted with that situation before. The first time we accepted the equipment as is. The next time we sent a tech with an Autocad equiped laptop and he drew the prints as the machine was being groomed and debugged. It and he arrived with prints we could read. We also had a go to guy when we didn't understand something.
His month in Italy was worth many times the cost.

gas said:

His month in Italy

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I'm sure he didn't mind. I know I wouldn't.

Roy Matson said:

You might be better off accepting their standard then re-drawing it.
Roy

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Most cost-effective option especially if its a standard machine. Consider that the OEM service techs are used to it & if there's any kind of warranty, it'll be easier for those techs to address any problems.

At my plant we have a machine with american standard diagrams and allthough i understand them i dont like them.
No offence but its like they are drawn so a child could understand them wich on one hand makes them easy to understand but on the other hand is harder to get the structure of.

European standard diagrams are drawn as one cuircit. If you have a couple of contacts needed to start a motor they are drawn together with the motor then they are cross-referenced to the page where you can see the individual relays or contactors wich in turn could have other contacts to enable them.
So its very easy to understand them when youve learned how to enterpret them.

ojz0r said:

So its very easy to understand them when youve learned how to enterpret them.

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I'm sure that goes for the North-American standards, the Japanese standards, the Italian standards (don't they use the European standards yet?) and all other standards as well. The only thing screwing everything up is that there is no standard as what standard to use. It's about time there is ONE standard for the whole world. Unfortunately, every bean counter in the world is prepared to buy the cheapest machine available from anywhere, but no one in the world is prepared to accept a standard unless it is his own.

Kind regards,

I have worked on lots of European machines from different manufacturers. I find that each company seems to have their own standard, and once you understand it, it isn't too bad. They are certainly more similar to other European Prints than to North American Prints.

IEC versus NEMA Standards?

It is much the same for North American machines. Each seems to have their own idea about the best way to represent how the machine works.

The symbols differ from Europe to North America, but it is usually pretty obvious what they are. Every once in a while, one symbol gives me a hard time.

I think we are probably a long way from a World Wide Standard, but I would settle for a North American Standard, and a European Standard for a start

Stu.....

Try Chapter nine of : http://www.moeller.net/en/support/wiring_manual.jsp.
It helps me when cases like WEVIE0037@

It really doesn't matter where your plant is. You want your drawings to match your standard so that you don't have to train your people on multiple standards.

On projects I have been involved in for plants here in the US where European equipment was involved, we redid the drawings "as-built" to match the customer's standard. Yes, it costs. If you can get it done as part of the project that installs the equipment, it's easier to get it paid for. Asking the supplier to do the drawings in the customer's format would seem to be more efficient, but it rarely turns out that way. As an engineering company we are already familiar with our customer's drawing standards and we can puzzle out any "other" standard we run into. Asking a machine vendor to produce drawings to an unfamiliar standard is much less likely to produce acceptable results. It may even impede the design of the equipment. Let the vendor use his tools to build, then convert so your maintenance can read them seems to work best. This is even true of US based machine builders to some extent.