2023: Awesome Tools and New Companies to Watch Out For
dude if you haven't been to Nika yet what are you doing with your life basically Nika is like nerdfest for electricians it's all the stuff that we use every day smashed into a big room so the first thing that I saw was the spider sign and these guys are a new brand so I had to go figure out what they were doing so this is our german-made patented recent blade we refer to it as a three by three because it has three cutting points on it the front the the bottom and the top so we have the patent on it so our recap saw was embedded in 1951 and uh by Milwaukee had nobody thought to patent the top side of reset blade so we have the patent on it uh and we have we've had this out now for several years and what's unique about it is we have eight percent more Cobalt in the bi-metaling of this on the three sides also you'll notice that in a traditional reset blade which is a single lineal Edge they're all manufactured same way that whether it be ours or anyone else's they have a cut here and they weld on the nose so and then they do the bi-metaling and as we were talking earlier that well point is the weakest part in the structure that's there where we don't have this in our German blade our German blades or no one else has had this either because these are stamped it's a single stamp piece of metal and it's bi-metal so we no structure where it's going to break is it going to be in the smallest point in the structure which is where it mounts and that's going to have a bind point there as well but what's cool is this is you'll notice here on the see it on this side better this is cutting on the pull right if you notice how it varies on top it's the exact opposite it's literally cutting on the push and cleaning on the pole so if you've never used the recip saw blade and you want to take it and invert it and the power two companies fixed this years ago where you could take a blade and invert it yeah you have literally more stability cutting in an upcut capacity yeah so it as we all know not everything is is easy and laying out equal some of these contractors plumbers electricians Are Climbing under houses they call small spaces and they're having to cut above them or whatever case might be this is what gives this blade an advantage over others all right well dude thank you so much for your time I appreciate it thank you yes sir there's no one next I had to check out what team red was up to of course all right so this is our fourth generation half inch hammer drill a couple of the key features don't want to call out first is what we like to call Auto Stop typically you'll see this in our threaders and our Grinders Auto Stop is an anti-bonding mechanism built into the tool think of it as a smarter tool so any kind of bind typically there's two pain points that we hear a lot one if a competitor has this it's too sensitive so it shuts off very easily the second feature would be typically there's too much swing so by then your wrist is already injured so Auto Stop will address both pain points okay next thing I want to call attention to is our quarter inch impact so on the fastening sides you're still going to get 1400 inch pounds on the hammer drill 2 000 inch pounds on the impact on the impact as well one of the biggest pain points that we have is our better lighting so typically with this on the previous model the orientation you kind of had to tilt it up with this model you're going to have a better illuminated space so there's no Shadows for your workspace that's but not least anything that fuel is going to be revlink plus intelligence so think of that as a smarter tool inside the housing here we have a microchip that microchip is going to better communicate between the hammer drill and the battery it's going to give you the right amount of draw doing exactly the application that you need to do without needing too much of that battery okay so it kind of what for whatever the load is sure you don't ever have any issues with it but miscalculating like not not being able to fulfill a load right okay there we go after that I was stopped like 37 Times by all of you people which honestly is my favorite part of all of this really I love uh being stopped and people like hey can I shake your hand can I take a selfie I love that dude and I love people like coming up and telling me their story so please if you ever see me at an event come up to me and say something but I was also stopped by a whole bunch of Brands and it's a lot of these newer brands that are like fresh you know in the beginning stages of their startup and one of them that I thought was really cool was a brand called simply count and what do we got going on here I see a bunch of colors on plans all right so this is simply count we make counting symbols on blueprints easy uh the software is a visual search engine so a lot like control F where you can type in text and find it on a PDF you can't do that with symbols so what the user does is they draw a box around a symbol that they'd like to search more of so for instance we'll we'll search for this OS symbol simply just draw a box around the symbol press search and now the software algorithms will go through the rest of the page and locate all of the the instances and then we'll load the results on the on the table automatically and they'll be able to delete along anything that they would like to exclude from the count okay and then there's not a shadow of a doubt about the quantities and their numbers and what symbols that they go to so does it actually highlight every instance of that on the plan once you do it yes yes yes so it's all that snow you can literally even see um all of the symbols and you can see all the pages all the symbols that you've counted on the page and so there's not a shadow of a doubt about uh you know what what the name is where the count is and what color it is and so it this is really helpful for newer electricians who are entering industry trying to understand how to read blueprints because we've got a lot of experience who's leaving and so the the new Talent is is using simple account as a way to wrap their head around what's what's being looked at on blueprints well yeah in the assistive software I mean all right this younger Generations are all about software and making things fast yeah and when I came up it was like all right here's a plan I want you to count every switch on there and like take a highlighter and write down a list of every single piece of material so the just for a business for estimating this is going to make everything so so much quicker so if you if I have like a four gang and it's kind of Muddy and sometimes the numbers blend in can it recognize that still yeah yeah it can and so uh the beautiful thing about simply count is all the searches are recallable and so when when you have a switch when you have a search um like a switch where it's it's just naturally just a really challenging symbol to find yeah for instance you've got doubles then you've got four and then you've got two you could actually go through and manually uh automatically and also manually go through and edit the information so there's not a you can add additional contacts and so say you're a new estimator who they said hey go take off this project you can connect with a senior estimator and they can go through this list with you and you can note down any context for specific symbols so it's like adding meta information yeah to a blueprint yes that's insane yes as well as it does an automated General uh reporting feature so when you get done with the project you can export the PDF directly with all the markups on their full scale and so they can actually use this and not have to use the highlighters they can actually go back and edit the blueprints at any time so can they click on any one of these and anything that's annotated by anybody pops up okay let's go yeah as well as it also does a custom reporting where they can hand this off to their boss it makes them look good they they can actually have a project summary for the project so when they hand it over their boss their Boston's exactly what is actually entailed in the project and so they don't there's no guessing yeah it's a full takeoff yeah here that is a genius man that's really cool so I am all about smart Tech and new ways of doing things if it saves us time and saves US money all about it next I spotted the fluke Booth which got me really excited I'm a huge fluke user I've got tons of fluke meters I've been using my entire life so I had to stop by their booth and see what they were doing Sean nice to meet you I'm Justin so uh I'm an electrician I'm very familiar with fluke stuff I've been using fluke my whole career but what do you guys have this year that's specifically that you guys are really proud of oh yeah so a couple of things on our showstopper account we just launched the 1777 this is a three-phase power quality meter awesome touch screen color screen uh this thing will do uh logging recording transients you name it man it's a full-fledged power quality meter awesome uh it's definitely in our show stopper so this is really going to help those seasoned electricians yeah troubleshooting dirty voltage we know that renewable energy is really taking off between solar EV charging electric vehicles I think our government what issued a 5 billion dollar man you know infrastructure bill so this is huge so yeah fluke just launched our smft 1000 now this is really going to help those solar technicians out in the field this is a IV curb Tracer but it's a multi-function tester so it's allowing them to do ground checks polarity on the panel they can do a lot of functions your short circuit current voltage over voltage IB curve is obviously the key one to identify that the panel is actually working correctly now with this they need an irradiance meter because it's all about the sun we're generating electricity we're generating voltage this will Bluetooth in and Link into our our smft we can get a full analysis this will hold 10 different manufacturers of panels and all you have to do is put it in it'll automatically give you the curve of what you need so it's a really great resource that's going to help out the technician out in the field yeah so let's win on that one and then also two we launched this last year now this is not part of our uh show stopper this is actually going to be our show stopper oh it's a 1500 volt rated 1500 volt cat 3 rated meter so yeah not only does it do your voltage AC and DC it does DC power it has visual continuity and visual polarity visual continuity so what happens is because these loud environments we may not be able to hear the audible buzzer yeah this lights will display on the screen that tells you you have continuity that's so cool yeah it's a great tool does it still vibrate too no no those are the like the old wigs I liked it though yeah and then finally on this with electric vehicle charging stations running out we need to make sure that the installation of the charging station was done correctly this is all part of Standards an IEC uh standards so this allows us to interface with the charge with the charging station it it pretends to be the vehicle because we have to have that handshake to make the charging station actually work correctly now we can use a DMM or a scope meter hook up and make sure that we have correct voltage either single phase or three phase and we can check the control pilot so the control pilot signal is it actually charging out correctly there's so many charging stations out on the market and each One's Gonna send out so much amperage this will allow you to determine that based on your duty cycle and everything so key win this is pretty much the standard the 1772 J plug but yeah key win on that so definitely here at Nika our showstopper is going to be the smft 1000 and that cool 1777 power quality meter all right well thank you so much for your time yeah I appreciate it nice talking to you now something else caught my eye each time that I passed if there was this company called pen aluminum and they just had EMT and I'm like well what's so awesome about EMT like emtzmt well they have aluminum EMT and aluminum rigid a Dustin what do you guys had her for a long time but we decided to get into the aluminum conduit business about a year ago okay it's gone very well for us the benefits of aluminum make it the smart choice and uh I appreciate you stopping by to see what we're doing yeah so you guys like aluminum is your thing yeah aluminum extruder in Southern Illinois serving uh much of the country right now and hoping to expand soon even more if you're used to your your galvanized steel oh yeah EMT yeah the EMT thank you aluminum's one-third the way to steal so it's a much safer product holy crap less expensive so it's a good comparison you feel a lot better at the end of the day yeah come with aluminum all day I bet that Bend's so much easier too yeah it's been in great we put a lot of work into that um it's it's critical that it bends well as well as the wire pooling and we've developed blue Lightning which is a product we have in the showstopper area if you've been over there which is a teflon-like material that we put on the inside based on customer requests some people don't need it Some people prefer it so it's available on the market right now and we're happy to share it with different contractors around the country for their jobs yeah it's like a blue haze sort of a thing so that's where we came up with the blue Lightning yeah supposed to make it less drag on the pool that's right so what is it inherently about aluminum that makes it more difficult to pull through like typically well galvanized EMT already has a coding in the manufacturing process oil wire pooling okay yeah it's it's part of the Standard Process aluminum does not it's an extruded product it's very smooth on the inside and the fact that it is a little softer metal it can drag on your your pulling devices I'm curious what that blue lighting is it a drastic difference to pull wire through oh yeah is it really a much better deal yeah and now we've provided it to some very large projects hospitals you know we've sold millions of feet of it in the first year wow we've sold millions of standard EMT as well so it it's all the preference of the customer really on what they like to work with is the blue Lightning the combination of the coating and the kind of rifling inside of it there's not really any rifling in it well it's like a weird kind of spiral thing that I noticed when I look that might have just oh it's not a rifling process oh okay a rifling yeah so it's a smooth extruded and we just it's just on the inside the coating yeah interesting so it's like like I said it's a Teflon type of material it's not Teflon but it's like that provides that lubricity for the wire coin operations so it's worked out very well and a number of big contractors that we've provided it to on hospital jobs and others have really appreciated the savings that it provides in the in the effort for the wire pulling device and you know it's besides aluminum is uh relatively inexpensive compared to galvanized steel EMT it's really a lot of these contractors have been focused on the safety factor of the weight which really means a lot to them that's a huge job site safety is huge and we we recognize that so there are plenty of other benefits as you know with aluminum I'm sure you've used it before but this is a new product we've really put a lot of effort into it as far as um obviously the wire pulling but also the Bendy which is critical well even just having like like loading a whole bunch of this conduit onto a trailer oh yeah job site seeing a forklift pick pallets of aluminum off and just dump it like it's nothing and the weight going down the road is so much difference for you know the steel that's right and I mean I guess you know the the standard and it's a safety standard is about 51 pounds a lot of contractors use 50 pounds as a maximum carry weight yeah you can carry a lot of aluminum yeah compared to uh and we're always trying to carry like way too much I mean how many bundles can I get yeah I wanna I wanna actually work with it and see just how drastically different my day is working with nothing but aluminum whether it's a hand bender or machine Bender you're good to go either way but you should give it a try Justin thank you I will thanks for your time and then after that I was walking by the Southwire booth and these huge barrels these big drums caught my eye so I had to see what that was all about all right Aaron so what does Southwire have what's the newest latest greatest this year all right Dustin so uh what I'm gonna show you today is uh is our barrels and our coil packs and um when it comes to the barrels barrels are definitely going to increase the productivity efficiency and safety on the job site right because really what we're doing is we're taking you away from those individual spools of 2500 which are are pain they're a pain to use right um you drop them they crack they over spool there's back weight that you gotta fight you know the setup time and all that so the nice thing about the barrels when you go to pull in your home runs THHN everything is in a barrel you've got your dedicated neutral right to go with your phase wire and everything also has the simple technology on it as well that simple coat that goes on the THHN it reduces the amount of resistance as you're pulling through your conduits okay so the nice thing about the barrel is when everything's set up right now again you're not dealing with individual spools at 2500 you set the barrel up and you start to pull okay you see that now as I'm pulling you could tell I'm only pulling the weight of the wire itself right so there's no back weight that I'm having to fight as you're coming off your individual spools at 2500 so you're reducing the amount of material Management in terms of taking those spools from point A to point B on the job site those individual spools and now you only have one barrel that you're working with now when you pull from a barrel though you're going to want to have a tap right whether it's built into the cart or an individual tap which I'll show you in a minute the nice thing about the cart it allows you to get the barrel from point A to point B on the job site you've got your dual axle uh four rubber tires on the back side of the cart right but once you get it set up you're only dealing with one barrel so what we're doing at Southwire is we're reducing the amount of material that you're having to work with right again if you if you're if you're taking it back to weight and capacity and trying to plan for that you're looking at about 700 pounds but per wire your your five thousand feet per wire that's 35 000 feet that means you're reducing your spools from from dealing with with 14 individual spools 2500 down down to one barrel the next thing I saw at the Southwire booth that I thought was really cool is their coil packs um you know barrels you gotta you got a little bit more restrictions a little more planning as far as like what your your conduits are going to take and your panels how the panels are wired up uh with coil packs more flexibility in here right they don't weigh as much obviously right but again this is an alternative uh means and methods of installing wire when you're comparing to your traditional spools which are bulky right so we'll offer coil packs in number tens 12 solid or stranded again 10 to 12 solar stranded is what we stock it's the same premise though when with coil packs you're pulling and you're only pulling the weight of the wire itself right so there's no back weight that you're having to fight so I'm kind of going slowly here but you can see that now typically with a setup like this where you're pulling multiple spools you'd have a guy right sitting there that's babysitting these things to make sure they're not over spooling right as you're doing as you're doing constantly getting tangled yeah constantly getting tangled yeah so the way we've designed the coil packs is to allow the the user really to bypass that the hassle of having to deal with an over spooled spool right so with the coil packs they feed from the inside out right and it again only has that it's got that simple wire so it's feeding from the inside of the pack to the outside of the pack as it's rotating okay that's that's number one number two is with the coil pack they all weigh 50 pounds or less right so if you're comparing this to a 2500 foot spool 25 or 2500 foot spool of number 12s weighs about 90 pounds right coil pack weighs 50. I can carry it on my side I can carry two so you're gonna get about 2 thousand feet of wire for sink for a single circuit two thousand feet so I can easily carry two thousand feet here and two thousand feet here compared to only being carrying 2500 foot spool right which weighs 90 pounds they're awkward yeah like you said I mean you're not necessarily getting rid of the person but you're making it easier for them and it's just increasing the efficiency on in all aspects on the job right yeah so there's some also some accessories that we offer with uh with coil packs and barrels that's like the the Home Run uh grip it so yeah these are the uh these are the South wire drippets right guys love these because typically when you're making up ahead you've got you know you've got multiple circuits that you're having to strip back and you're having to make your head up right but you're just stacking in you're staggering in your circuits tens or twelves oh what yeah and you're just folding them back just like that but and I've had some guys will that'll still tape up you know tape it up toward the back but you know you hook up your your pull line right no tape and you pull out of here yeah and and just send it through and I'm telling you this thing is a ticket because it's saving you so much time as far as making up your head nice thing about off at the end too once you get it all the way through it's little things like this that save you so much time that is the coolest thing yeah how did I not know that this existed myself all right that's pretty much it next year it's going to be in Philly so make sure if you have any interest in going to Nika that you come out shake my hand come meet me come look at all the crazy tools and stuff that's being developed in your industry thank you for your attention I love you crazy people and I'll see you in the next one
2022-11-20 18:10
