If you have ever installed an outlet, light, ceiling fan, or other electrical junction in a building, then you’re at least a little familiar with electrical enclosures.
Even if those activities sound foreign to you, enclosures are a bigger part of your life than you might realize.
In either case, it never hurts to learn more about how things work, and today, we’re going to look into some of the most common use cases for electrical boxes and accessories.
Enclosures
Far and away, the most common application for electrical enclosures is enclosing wires and junctions for outlets and switches. Every light switch, ceiling fan, and outlet in every building has an enclosure. These electrical boxes are required for building and fire codes, so there is no getting around it.
On top of that, such indoor applications commonly use non-metallic boxes, as they typically cost less and are often easier to install and use. Interior uses are also where you find many adjustable electrical boxes. Such boxes use screws to pull tighter or push out from the mount, allowing them to account for wall finishes — like tile or paneling.
The next most common application for enclosures is fuse boxes or breaker boxes. The boxes often share design elements, and once again, they are required by federal and state regulations in many cases. Every building has to have a breaker box, and many, many electrical devices need fuse boxes.
Getting away from those extremely frequent cases, you still find electrical enclosures everywhere.
Security systems typically require their own central hub, and such hubs live inside electrical enclosures. The same can be said for networking panels or closets (which are more common in business settings than homes).
At a commercial level, power systems need specialized boxes that can safely ground and house potentially high-powered electrical components. The same goes for industrial control equipment.
Even smart home systems use their own enclosures — once again frequently needed custom designs or elements.
The bottom line is that anything running on electricity inside of a building is connected to an electrical box in some way or another.
Enclosure Accessories
Boxes are everywhere, and so are accessories. There are too many different electrical enclosure accessories to describe here, so instead, let’s focus on some of the greatest hits.
Any paneled enclosure needs to open up for service and access. Because of that, door knobs, handles, and keyed latches make up some of the most common accessories.
Getting more technical, pressure compensation devices, heat vents, and moisture control systems provide essential benefits to high-end enclosures. Such enclosures typically protect specialized or powerful equipment, often in adverse conditions.
On the simpler side of things, simple front and back panels can come with custom holes or a design that makes custom hole cutting much easier. This allows for more flexible enclosure usage and proves particularly useful for larger buildings that deploy large numbers of enclosures.
Perhaps the top of the list of accessory applications boils down to mounting. You can find countless mounting kits for all kinds of enclosure use cases, each assuring a stable environment and often providing grounding as needed.
As you can see, enclosures and their accessories fill many roles, all keeping a build up to code and functioning safely and effectively. As you learn more, you will understand what you need with higher precision, and that will lead you to optimal enclosures and accessories.
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