Winar Connection built an 80,000 square foot plant in Richfield, Ohio, and decided the production floor would be arranged around what the company makes rather than around where the conduit happened to land.
Custom wire manufacturing
Richfield, Ohio
Track Busway, 100 and 400 amp, with Critical Power Monitor
80,000 square feet
Winar Connection has manufactured custom wire and distributed electrical connection products since 1982. When the company moved further into manufacturing in 2006, its existing building could not accommodate the work, and in 2014 Winar built new: 80,000 square feet of production and office space, designed around its own processes.
The old facility ran on pipe and wire, which meant production was designed around the electrical infrastructure instead of the other way around. Buying a machine required knowing its final position at the time of purchase, and moving it later meant calling an electrician back and losing the floor while he worked. When equipment had to move quickly, the practical answer was extension cords draped across a production floor, which is a safety problem rather than a solution. As COO Jeffrey Rees described it, one machine was wired in and moved three months later.
Sixty feet of 400 amp busway and 280 feet of 100 amp busway, with 27 plug-in units, four fused disconnect units and 23 circuit breaker units. A Critical Power Monitor sits on the 400 amp end feed.
Moving a machine takes about 15 minutes: unplug the unit, move it, plug it back in. Rees described taking a workstation down on a Saturday and running it again Monday, against six to eight weeks under the old system.
Tell us what your building has to do and we will tell you whether busway is the right answer for it.
