WHY CONNECTED AUTOMATION WILL DEFINE THE NEXT DECADE OF THE TRADE
DARREN HODSON, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF WAGO UK & IRELAND, ON HOW BUILDING AUTOMATION, ENERGY MANAGEMENT AND PLUG-AND-PLAY CONNECTION ARE RESHAPING THE ROLE OF THE ELECTRICAL INSTALLER, AND WHERE TO FOCUS TO STAY AHEAD OF THE CURVE.
The installers who build genuine confidence with three things in particular, plug-and-play connection systems, basic building automation, and energy monitoring, are the ones quoting on bigger jobs and winning repeat specifications.
Get fluent in plug-and-play, not just terminal blocks
Twenty years ago a connection was a connection. Today, the connection method you choose can shave hours off a programme, cut callbacks to almost zero, and let a contractor you have never met pick up where you left off. Push-in and leveraction connectors have done a lot of heavy lifting on this front, and the rise of pre-wired luminaire and small-power systems has gone further again. A site team running plug-and-play distribution can roughin lighting and final connect at a pace traditional methods cannot match, with a clean audit trail and far fewer interpretation mistakes.
Walk onto a commercial site today and the job looks recognisably similar to one ten years ago. The cables are still pulled, the boards are still built, the testing is still done. Look closer though, and the work has changed. Lighting talks to occupancy. Heating talks to weather data. Solar talks to storage. Switchgear talks to a building management system that talks to a tenant’ s phone. The installer is no longer wiring up a building. The installer is wiring up a connected system.
That shift is going to define the next decade of our trade. Smart buildings, energy monitoring and connected automation are no longer specialist work reserved for niche projects. They are becoming the default specification on commercial fit-outs, industrial refurbishments, public sector estates and increasingly on housebuilding too. Anyone working on commercial or domestic electrical jobs has a stake in where this is going.
The good news for the trade is that the path to higher-value work has rarely been more obvious.
The practical takeaway is to learn the systems properly, not just the products. Understand which connector belongs in a junction box, which belongs in a luminaire, which is rated for outdoor or harsh environments, and which is approved for the panel. Specifiers notice when an installer can answer those questions on the first visit. So do main contractors signing off variations.
Treat building automation as core knowledge
Building automation used to live in a different conversation, run by controls specialists with their own language and their own tools. That wall has come down. A modern commercial project routinely expects the electrical contractor to deliver lighting control, HVAC interfaces, metering and a degree of integration into the wider BMS. Even on smaller schemes, room automation and energy-saving controls are now standard rather than premium.
You do not need to become a controls engineer overnight. You do need to be able to read a basic schematic for a controller, understand the difference between a hardwired input and a digital one,
10 MACHINERY, AUTOMATION, CONTROL & ENGINEERING