Speaker 1: Welcome to the Master of the NEEC podcast, the ultimate
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Speaker 1: Abernavi, a true authority in the industry with over thirty
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Speaker 2: That will keep you ahead of the curve.
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decode the National Electrical Code, and share the latest industry trends,
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the NEEC podcast, the power is in your hands.
Speaker 2: Now get ready. Here is your host, Paul Abernavi.
Speaker 1: What Up? What Up?
Speaker 3: Everybody? Welcome to another episode of Master the NEC where
we talk about the National Electrical Code and all things
electrically related. If you've never listened to the podcast before,
hopefully you checking me out on one of the favorite podcasts,
listening platforms that you may listen to, whether it's Speaker, Spotify, Deezer, iHeartRadio,
any of your favorite platforms that you'd like to listen,
or maybe even you're listening over on the Fast Tracks too,
which is our exclusive platform for podcasts and videos. So
either way, check it out and we appreciate you coming
and listen to the podcast. On today's episode, I'm gonna
talk a little bit about some of the things that
are coming up. There's been a lot of talk from
different people emails and stuff about this thermal Electrician, and
I'm not making it a whole episode on just the
thermal electrician and what's going on with that, but I
felt that it was important because we have some big,
big meetings coming in the next week. In fact, it's
less than a week from the whenever we're doing this podcast,
And what it means is we're meeting and hopefully we'll
be inking a deal for a major partnership with a
major manufacturer of thermal imaging products to be their exclusive
training and certification program and be able to hopefully get
good deals for you the electrician on thermal imaging products.
Things like that. I mean, that's the goal in what
we're trying to do as well as promote the certification
program that I've been working on for quite a while.
We launched it probably a couple of weeks ago, but
it's something that's been in the work for almost a year,
creating the course, kind of building the infrastructure out of it.
And so when we launched it live, you know, I
get a lot of questions from electricians out there, say,
why the hell do I need thermal imaging? And some
of you don't. So that's the first thing I want
to say to some of you out there that it's say,
you know, I do I need thermal imaging? And many
do not? Uh. And so again I want to make
that clear first up front, because you know, through the years,
I get a quite a fair amount of people that say, Paul,
you you do create ideas and you come up with things,
and you know, does does electrician necessary need everything? I mean, obviously,
you know, we create exam prep and then EC learning
programs to learn the NEC and again I think we
do that better than anybody out there. But and the
delivery of that is what I think we do better
than anybody out there. But we're always creating new things
that can help the industry, like the CMCP program, which
is a very exclusive club if you will, not everybody
can make it, and that was designed that way. I
remember saying a couple of years ago that we and
we've been doing this now for god, in two years,
it'll be coming up on a decade, believe it or not.
People are like, how long have you been doing the CMEMECP.
I've you know, been doing it quite a long time.
And people say, well, how many members do you have. Well,
at the end of the day, it's not a club
where just anybody that's a master electrician can get into it.
It's not and we never wanted it was never a
money generator. It was designed to give electricians that edge,
master electricians that little edge and marketing because that was
always my struggle as a contractor, you know, is how
do I separate myself amongst my competition and then gain
some knowledge in the process. That was the goal, right
of the CMEMECP program, And of course we went on
to get trademarks and all this other stuff for that
type program, but that goal was to help grow electricians
is from a professional standpoint, right, and so you kind
of see a progression through our corporation what we were
trying to do. And then of course the latest iteration
of that is the certified Thermal Electrician. And again it's
thermal imaging. I mean, there's tons of great thermal imaging
thermography courses out there. So I'm not here to say
that Flear doesn't have a great one, Snell doesn't have
a great one. There's other ones out there, they're all great.
I'm not here to down any of them, and I'm
certainly not going to down any of them. But what
my goal was, and again I always say this to people,
is very selfish of me in a sense that I
like to target certain things and bring the benefit of
certain things. And for me, I'm an electrician and I
always be an electrician. I'm not into building envelopes. I'm
not into looking for leaks the water leaks, and I mean,
you can do that, and there's some great inspectors that
do that. That's not my thing. My thing was when
you look at the requirements or lack thereof, of the
of the electrical industry. We have master electricians and we
have you know, what I think is the pinnacle of
that is where a master becomes a CBCP because it
tells me they go over and above the normal licensure structure,
and they the certifications are obviously voluntary. Don't anybody ever
tell you they or not. The certifications are totally voluntary.
You know, whether hj's, for example, want their inspectors to
be certified, that that's a jurisdictional thing. That's something they
write into their requirements. It's not obviously mandated, unless, of course,
the state has their own training programs that they mandate,
which they can. And again, if you want to be
an inspector for jurisdiction, you may have to go through
local training that's sponsored by your local building board or whatever,
and you get that, and that's different. But typically certification
is voluntary, but it does tell people that you went
over and above. Now, is anybody going to know about
these things without you tooting your own horn. No, they're
not going to know anything that exists. And so I
think through the years, one of the big misconceptions with
people is that people get they say, well, this person's
cocky or this person is to know. It's a matter
of how somebody markets themselves, how somebody takes the time
to build this marketing machine that positively identifies you as
the cream of the crop above the other. And so
many people are like, well, no, no, no, that's conceded.
That's what it is not. It's business, Okay. All of
your major businesses are always trying to position themselves as
above somebody else. And in business it's dog eat dog.
It is a matter of how you position yourself. Okay.
Now wrapping us back to the recent deal with thermal imaging.
So I've let people know we have offered some thermal
cameras on our website and they are amazing thermal cameras.
They're they're creating, they're made by a bank, they're H
one twenty eight. They're amazing camera. And I was recently
able to get my hands on another brand, and it's
obviously not a major brand that you're familiar with, like
a Flear, because they already got a program. But I
was able to dig deeper into some other products and
it was asked to review them. Did review them, started
looking deep into the software, started looking deep into the function,
and I started to notice some things. I started to
notice that there are ways that you can use for
electrical applications. These thermal imaging cameras a little bit better,
whether it be on a service call to sell additional services,
to just check somebody's panel, or to property maintenance or
to building maintenance, or to more volatile situations like data centers, Amazons,
the Facebook data centers and all their technicians should be
trained and doing thermal imaging, especially monitoring it because again,
as somebody who's worked in the wiring cable industry and
had been involved in situations where data centers, the wiring
and the and the systems burned down or break down
or and they've always very concerned about reliability and heat
is heat. Overloading is overloading. Poor connections are poor connections.
It's just gonna happen. Okay, it's Murphy's law, It's going
to happen. And so keeping a ongoing monitoring is a
one of those safety nets that you can kind of
forecast something's not going right. And so part of me
when I looked at that, working as a you know,
for a major manufacturer, in fact, the largest manufacturer of
wiring cable in the world, I had a unique opportunity
to understand terminations, understand wire understand insulations, understand infrastructure and
serving on code panels, I hear more of it, and
why we're pushing this code or this code or why
this is important. And you start looking at things like
parallel applications and why systems fail. And usually in big
systems they're tied to parallel applications, and parallel applications get
done wrong, loading's not balanced properly. You start looking at
these things and I start to think. I got to
thinking that as an electrician, how do I how do
I identify these issues? How do how can I be
proactively looking at identify these issues? As well as being
an electrician, I want to add to my knowledge base.
I don't just want to take a thermal camera, okay,
and just put it on something and just see a
hot spot and think that that's a problem and then
report it and then all of a sudden there's consequences.
And so I started seeing that and it started early
on back. You know, I've been with you know, the
WI and cable industry for over ten years, dedicated specifically
to that. Obviously doing my other things, but I was
dedicated to working very closely with the CEO of the
previously at Encore in you know, handling very serious issues
that would come up and identifying things that I kind
of I kind of gained this this ability to look
and perceive things that could happen and how we could
prevent them. And so that's kind of what led me
down this thermal imaging thing. Now again, great companies provide
thermal imaging thermography level one, level two, level three. So
for me, the difference was, I wanted to come up
with the first ever electrician electrically specific thermography that that
goes beyond just teaching how to identify hotspots, cold spots,
transition of heat and how I apply missivity to it
and how to you know, I wanted to go deeper.
And then when I started going deeper and thinking, you know,
we don't want to cry wolf, but electricians can apply
this to every day applications. And so then there was
this thing where people would say, well, you know, how
does it how does this apply to residential? Well, there's
a way you can apply it to residential. Uh, And
it takes a little bit. There's a process that you
would do and it does require pre loading and how
you would do that the best you can and you'd
be amazed lose connections over time. I squared are heat
will build up and send a signature, but you got
to know what you're looking for. And so the thing
about using a thermal imaging our camera is that a
lot of things may not always be what they seem,
whether you're picking the the improper color scale, uh, or
you're you're not in you know, you're not reading it correctly,
or you're seeing something that that you're crying wolf and
you know it could shut down a system and uh
and you be blamed for it, and you you increase
your potential liability for that, especially if it's something that's
an infrastructure like a data center and you cry wolf
and they shut something down, and you know, I mean, look,
look what happened recently when just uh cloud Fare went down,
or prior to that, the Amazon thing of servers went down.
It CAUs a lot of money, a lot of infrastructure headaches,
It caused people to get fired. It was it was.
It shows you how volatile it is of an industry
that if something could go down and it takes everything
else down. Also, a lot to more people are really
concerned about the insurance consequences of systems being reliable and
being maintained and so I started to see a lot
of the industries, like the in the insurance industry, who
really rely on annual maintenance reviews. And I got to
looking at it, and I said, you know, why don't
I create a process and base this process on an
annual preventative maintenance program that gets added into your normal
maintenance program for insurance purposes. You know, I tell people
all the time if if you torque things correctly, you
have less of a problem. But it doesn't eliminate the
fact that whether it's copper or aluminum, that it needs
to have for these big systems, it needs to have
an an or even a bi annual inspection just to
try to head off any problems. And there's certain things
that you can look for, but you can do it
without crying wolf. And I think that the problem that
I saw in normal thermography programs was that it was
level one introductions, Level two S, Level THREEES is more
dealt for overall building systems, thermal envelopes, the building envelope, mortar, mitigation, migration,
structural and I am not about any of that. I
don't I really don't care. Now I can't say the
company won't grow to add that type of training, but
that's not what we're about. It's not what I'm about.
I'm one hundred percent electrical. So what we've done is
we want to create programs that training, courses, training elements
that are very much focused on not crying wolf, but
being able to identify potential issues, whether it's residential, commercial,
or industrial, whether it is a maintenance exams, whether it's
a maintenance protocol. Whereas you set up what we call
black body emissivity dots on an initial installation that allows
for ongoing biannual quick inspections of systems to make sure
that the loading is right, that we're not overloading, because
the first source of breakdown is the weakness that we
have in our thermal insulation, and the insulation that we
put on conductors is usually in an overload situation, one
of the first things that fail, if it's thermal plastic
usually I have is you'll have a migration of plasticizer,
which is a compound that adds flexibility. But what happens
when you lose plasticizer because of excessive overloading and mutual
heating as well as ambient loading and heating, is that
you get a conductor whose insulation becomes brittle, and you
can augment that by getting something that does not have plasticizer,
using a thermos set product like an XAHHW. The only
problem is as that heats up, it crystallizes and also
starts to break down if it's heat cycled an awful lot.
Although it is better for heating in abnormal conditions than
you would be for a thermal plastic Both are great products.
But if you're really worried about the reliability of a system,
whether it's a data center, whether it's switch gear and
a multifamily building, whether or not it's big industrial complex
that has this real defined infrastructure of switch gears, switchboards, panel,
whatever it may be, reliability is key because it's much
better to head off a problem than it is to
wait until it fails and then you have to react
to the problem. And in industry, one of the big
issues that we have is everybody is so reactive, and
there is ways that we can be proactive. So by
creating a concept of a program like we have that
not only teaches you about thermal imaging, how to understand it,
how to do peer review, how to you know again
not cry Wolf, but a program that is set up
to not just do that, but teach you the concepts
of thermography from an electricians perspective. And so it really
was the only program out there that that brings in
the National Electrical Code, that brings in seventy B, that
brings in n FPA, seventy E, brings in a lot
of these things. And it's a perpetual program. Means that
we're constantly adding to it. It's not a one and
done type of thing. And nobody had done something like that.
Nobody has created a program that was geared specifically towards
electrical professionals. So that so that's what that's kind of
in a nutshell, what I set out to do is
create that type of program. Now, one of the things
we're really excited about is not only did we create
the program and it's doing very well, we're excited about it,
but we also are looking at venturing into a major
partnership with one of the leaders of thermal imaging technology
around the world. Okay not just in the US, but
around the world. And this is a big step for
us because you know, we still the ink still has
got to be put on paper, and we still have
to do it and I'm not you know, I'm not
naive enough to say in my job up in the
gun even talking about it. But y'all know I wear
my emotions on my sleeve. I talk about things. If
it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't. We're
pressing forward. But a unique partnership in this scenario is
what's going to create credibility in the industry that our
program is going to be offered, and we're going to
offer a great product, and it's going to be a
full line of products from your basic thermal imaging all
the way up to a really high end that you
might get a little more features, a little more customization,
a little easier for a maintenance technician to be able
to record data, a little bit easier, a little more
editing software. There's elements to this, and again the whole
point was to be able to do this and offer
something that people can now afford, because for years thermal
imaging cameras were not affordable, and even now some of
the lower quality ones are more affordable, but they're not
as detailed, and there are certain things that you don't
need a lot of detail for if you know how
to read a thermal image, and you know how to
read it, and you know how to position, you know
how to remember that reflectivity can cause a problem. Emissivity
has to be set right if you understand your distances.
I see too many videos out there where people are
shooting thermal imaging cameras from twenty feet away and thirty
or trying to shoot it through walls and thinking that
that's accurate like you see on TV, and that is
so not how you do thermal imaging. I watch people
selling them that are using them in applications and just
people are seeing this image and they're thinking, well, that's cool,
let me get a thermal camera, but they're not really
learning how to use it. And so I think that's
what our goal was, is to create something that shows
somebody because you know what all the manufacturers will tell you.
They all make great cameras, they're all using technology that's
really cutting edge, but it's only as good as the
hand that it's being that it's in, right, and so
that was my focus on trying to create it. Again,
I am not trying to be the expert on building envelope.
I'm not trying to be the expert on migration of water.
That's not what we do. I am an electrical expert.
I've been doing this nearly forty years. I know conductors,
I know terminations, I know wires, I know equipment. I
know overcurrent devices. I know how they heat up. I
know what the standards are. I know how you should
approach a customer. I know how you sell the product,
market the product. I know the benefits of certification and
how you position yourself with it and how you can
use it in your marketing. Okay, don't sell that short
That's a major thing because it says that you have
been trained. And somebody else besides you may offer the
same thing, but have they been trained properly, especially specifically
for electrical And that's all we're interested in. I'm not
interested in home inspectors. I'm not interested in uh building
people that do the building envelope stuff. I'm not into that. Right,
people say, well, you're you're shortening your market. I don't
care that. I don't care that. I have zero interest
in that. Now, whether home inspectors get our program, or
inspectors get our program or people buy, that's up to them.
That obviously they can learn something from it. But that is,
that is not my focus, right, that is not trying
to be everything to everybody. The very type market that
we're trying to raise the element of knowledge for electricians,
electrical professionals, design professionals, engineers, people. That's all we're after.
That's what we're trying to do, raise that level. And
that's all I've ever tried to do. Uh. So, hopefully
that the you know, next week or week after that,
I can make a special announcement, a very big announcement,
a very you know, global announcement for our corporation. It
changes everything for me, It changes everything for our company,
the people here, Jeff Darlene Brittany, it changes everything. When
you do partnerships, and their solid partnerships means you can
if you can trust the people you're working with. That's
the key. You got to have a trust. You gotta
have that trust. Right. So, again, nothing's going to stop
from our exam preps, our courses. We feel they're the
best in the industry. If you're trying to learn the NEEC,
whether you're getting a license or you're already in the field,
are mastering the NEC course is the best I believe
it is. It's it's basically putting an expert in your pocket.
Our trade hog is great, still works out amazing. We
keep updating that every time we have a new model
come out. That's just done behind the scenes. It's just automatic.
You don't even have to worry about updating anything. It's automatic.
We appreciate everybody that subscribes to that. The fast Tracks
Tubes going great. It's our exclusive video platform. We love
it and it's amazing, so we're excited about that. Still.
It's a great platform, subscription platform, ninety nine bucks a year.
It's wonderful. You know, you get rid of all the
bs that you have over on YouTube and it's only videos,
no commercials, that type of thing or no ads, I
should say. And then of course here we are with
the certified Thermal Electrician and it's quirky name, but it
is what it is, and that's all we're actor is electricians.
That's it. That's it, and we hopefully people will be
interested in it and determine and call us, call me,
call me directly and ask me, do you think thermal
imaging is something you want to add to your program?
You could be a one man, two man shop. And
I'm sitting there thinking if you go do a service
call and you get out of there in thirty minutes,
and you're thinking, well, I'm being paid by the hour.
Let me go on and offer them a thermal inspection
of your panel, you know, take a heat source there.
There's many different options for that. I tell people, just
the standard hair dryers. Fine, put it on the branch circuits,
you know, you know, if you want to load it
up that way. I tell people they're cheap. I tell
a lot of technicians, you'll get you three or four
hair dryers, right, And simply get three or four hair
dryers and take them and put them on the different
circuits and let them run while you're doing inspections, are
looking around, and let them pull the load at least
forty percent of the loading on that circuit, which you
will get from a normal just a normal resistive load
hair dryer. And if they're a poor connection, it won't
take long to be able to identify it. So there's
different tips and different things that you can do while
you're there, right, And so you know, and there's either
people that are clever enough to say, well, I'll just
I don't want to put hair dryers they have heat boxes,
little ceramic heaters and little when they fit in a box.
So they got a little kit of multiple ceramic heaters.
That's totally up to you how you want to develop.
And look at me, I'm just a simple guy. Okay.
I need something that creates a load. That's it, and
I want it to be at least forty percent of
the circuits rating. That's it, and so everybody can. You know,
you develop your own way. But when somebody calls you
and says there lights flickering or there's something that might
be a loose connection. Thermal imaging can be very beneficial
if we start getting into a bunch of crap, so
you start opening up a bunch of worms and things
like that. If you know how to do it properly.
That's just the low end, you know, making you know,
going after projects, whereas you're trying to get big companies
to hire you as a as a you know, come
in twice twice a year and do a thermal imaging
and then you keep this data and you see how
it changes over time. Can be a good a good
extra business for a company if you market it right.
You got to be good at marketing. It's not one
of those things that you just build it. It will come.
You have to sell your service and you have to
come up with ways to sell your service. And so
if you're not a creative person and you don't really try,
then you're not going to be successful. And you're probably
not going to be successful in business either, right, and
some people are meant to be business owners and some
people are not just that simple anyway, I just wanted
to give a quick one today. Let you know we
got some big things coming. There will be deals that
we hopefully will be able to get for students that
are in our program right now, if you're hearing this,
I have a very limited supply of our H one
twenty eight thermal camera that is perfect for our program.
They're available on our website fastracksystem dot com. If you
want to pick one up, it's below MSRP check it out.
I have a very limited number once we sign this partnership.
If we do, we're going to be bringing in or
we're gonna be using those thermal cameras. Are they any different, No,
it's just another brand, But this is more of a
strategic alignment with a partnership. The these thermal cameras work great.
I use this one H one twenty eight. It's perfect
so and it's affordable. It's a no brainer adding it.
But you shouldn't be adding thermal imaging to your company
unless you truly understand thermal imaging so that you're not
crying wolf. Because if you go in and you tell
a customer they need to do this or that, and
it come to find out they didn't, then you open
yourself up for problems. Okay, so get trained properly. And
that's what our course is all about. So I just
want to tell you a little bit about it. Hope
it'll be something that when the partnership gets done that
will it'll roll out nationwide. That partnership will be announced
to press release. They will be marketing it. We will
be marketing it. They will market our course, will in
the certification, we'll be marketing their products together. It's going
to be a great partnership. I hope seems to be
that will we'll have a lot of videos that are
going to be coming out using their products and creating
this these training with the products so that you can
get more intimate with the product, understand the features and
what it can do. And it'll be at different price
levels for the products, because there are some that are
better than others. Okay, some of the products that are
a little more advanced are for more features or more
pixels or a higher definition camera view that you may
or may not need, depending on what you're dealing with. Okay,
depends on your business, how you want to promote your business. Right,
So again, all of that's to come in the future.
But again I appreciate you folks following us in subscrip.
Make sure if this first time you've ever heard, make
sure you subscribe whatever platform you're on, because you have
a lot of great things coming. All right, folks, until
next time, stay safe, God bless them. We'll catch you
on an upcoming episode of Master the NEC.
Speaker 1: Thanks for tuning into another electrifying episode of the Master
of the ANEC podcast. We hope you're feeling more powered
up and ready to tackle the electrical world with the
knowledge and confidence you need to succeed. Remember, in the
electrical trade, knowledge is power, and we're here to make sure.
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Speaker 1: From all of us here at Electrical Code Academy, thank
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on the next amazing Master of THENEC podcast episode