Sponsored by: Square D by Schneider Electric™
Every time you start a new project, it can quickly reach a point where you have to carefully choreograph your subcontractors in order to meet your budget. The faster the plumber gets done, the sooner the tile can go into the bathrooms; live electricity is better sooner rather than later. While you’re juggling all these balls, you also need to have an eye to the future, balancing budget with longevity for each and every item that’s installed.
Choosing to use a Square D plug-on neutral load-center with Qwik-Grip can give you both a budget-friendly and trouble-free load-center for any size project, whether you’re building a single family residential home or an entire apartment complex. Ask your electrical contractor about these breaker boxes – right away, you’ll start to see the benefits they can bring you. Great Price On A Great Tool – Shop Now
Earn a Five-Star Reputation with Fewer Warranty Calls
You know that warranty calls play an important part in establishing and protecting your overall reputation in the market. If your new builds require call after call to work out the bugs, even if the problem was with something a subcontractor installed, word gets around and you get the blame. That’s why materials matter so much — you simply can’t let a difficult to install breaker box be the reason you lose future contracts.
Square D’s plug-on neutral load-center with Qwik-Grip is a whole new design, made with projects both large and small in mind. The Qwik-Grip wire management system that replaces traditional metal knockouts makes it easy to see where each and every wire is, as well as increasing the speed at which they can be threaded into the box. Losing the pigtails that have traditionally taken up so much room in the gutter that it’s hard to tell what’s what cleans up the interior of the load-center, giving it a much more professional look.
And, hey, the neutrally charged metal rail that each breaker connects to helps to prevent house and apartment fires, since there’s no way it can short out or work its way loose over time. This is the pinnacle of safety, security and ease. Because the entire system is designed to replace troublesome connections with secure ones, you’ll find that you’re called on a lot less to fix past work, saving you both time and money.
Electricians Will Love These Boxes, Too!
I sometimes find that I’m butting heads with my subs when I’m on a new project. They have their favorites, just like I do. But, for example, when I explain to my electrician on my next project why I’d like to start using the Square D Plug-On Neutral Load-center with Qwik-Grip, I hope he’ll understand what I’m seeing.
The cost is the same as a regular load center, and the benefits are huge. It’s not just fancy new toys for the sake of them, these boxes can prevent more electrical fires with their neutral bars running to every breaker, elimination of the pigtails that can clog up gutters and make it hard to see what you’re doing if you have to rewire a breaker later and, of course, the Qwik-Grip wire management tool that makes the box look as pretty as a present inside.
These are a few of the points I’ll be raising with my electrician. They might work on yours, too, since these boxes:
Install faster. According to Schneider Electric, the parent company of Square D, load-centers with Qwik-Grip are 55 percent faster to install. It makes sense – the new design minimizes battles with knockouts, as well as the struggle to find the right covers for knockouts that should have stayed in. Instead, the plastic wire management tool is threaded from the front, then secured with a bar that runs across the width of the tool, keeping wires where they belong.
Reduced risk of neutral connection problems. In a standard electrical box, the gutters get filled up quickly with pigtail connectors that connect the neutral wire in the system to each individual breaker. This might have been a small problem when homes were largely powered by 60-amp load-centers that contained no more than a handful of breakers, but today’s average 200-amp system load center typically has 16 interrupters, both large and small.
When each of those pigtails are wired up, it’s nearly impossible to see what’s going on in that gutter. A loose connection or missed neutral can spell disaster, or at least an inspection that you’re not going to pass. If the problem is caught before occupancy, it’s annoying, but if that pigtail loses contact later, you may have to carry the guilt of a house fire for the rest of your life.
The new type of neutral connection inside the plug-on neutral boxes ensures that you can’t make a bad neutral connection. The metal bar that each breaker latches to is part of the neutral system, and therefore, the breaker is always automatically connected to the same neutral. It’s simple, it’s safe and it’s only available from Square D.
Fast diagnostics with TIME SAVER Diagnostics feature. It can be hard to know what’s causing a chronic breaker trip without a great deal of time spent on diagnostics. That’s why the TIME SAVER Diagnostics feature was added to the breakers that go with the Square D plug-on load-center with Qwik-Grip. Just turn the troublesome breaker off, hold down the push to test button, then turn the breaker back on. If it flips right away, you’ve got a ground fault issue. If it flips after two seconds, it’s an arc fault. A breaker that flips after about five seconds is experiencing thermal overload or a short circuit. Now that you or your electrical contractor knows where to look for problems, you can get to them faster and fix them more cleanly, looking like a total pro while doing so.
Add CAFI and GFCI protection in no time at all. Another plus that you may not have even considered yet is that you can literally skip installing GFCIs in construction in most areas by opting for the plug-in CAFI+GFCI dual function breakers from Square D. They protect just like GFCIs and CAFIs, but from the load-center instead of inside the home. They can literally offer more protection over more outlets with a lot less trouble. There’s a lot to be said for time-savers like these.
Trying out new equipment can be a big risk, there’s no doubt about it. But after your first experience with the Square D plug-on neutral load-centers with Qwik-Grip, you’ll have no doubts that this is the future of electrical installations. This is one of the first truly innovative load-centers to be developed in some time — and one that the increasingly powered world has been crying out for.
Sponsored by: Square D by Schneider Electric™