InfoPower

Deep inside the bunker of Interpower’s testing facility in Ames, Iowa, (Area 51²?) is an array of testing apparatus for the testing of electrical cable and components to push both newly manufactured and warehoused cable, cords, and components (and cutting-edge prototypes) to extreme limits, often well beyond UL and IEC standards for product compliance. For much of his 20 years, Ron Barnett, Interpower’s Product Development Manager, has procured specialized testing equipment to ensure Interpower’s power cords, cords sets, and components exceed all testing criteria standardized by worldwide agencies such as UL and VDE while personally conducting thousands of tests.

In hospitals and clinics, production floor areas, and standard brick-and-mortar offices, the spatial relationship of heavy machinery, diagnostic equipment, and peripheral devices and their AC power outlets can become a tricky geometric problem to solve—equipment placed tightly against walls where odd angles and tight corners loom. Even when designing and building your own facility, local building codes and other present mechanical infrastructure can pose challenges when it comes to positioning AC equipment in optimal areas.

Cable is a sleek composite of resins and metals which are vital materials of making world-class power cords and cord sets. While dependable and durable, even essential to modern-day life, cable is also susceptible to acute bending, especially near the point where the cord exits the equipment. Underneath the smooth resinous skin of our example cord, lay three conductors of extruded copper wire. If those wires are extremely bent or otherwise damaged, the result could be loss of electrical continuity or shortened lifespan—protecting your cord’s bend radius helps maintain connectivity. And understanding your cord’s recommended minimum bend radius for cable is critical to the maintenance and longevity of the cable and the machines and equipment powering them.

At 7 a.m., Jess, an Interpower Level 2 molder, prepares the ENGEL injection molding machine to mold Continental European (CEE) Cord sets. The CEE plugs will be molded onto 1 mm² international cable, and Jess checks to make sure the 100-lb. CEE mold and proper steel inserts are in place. An additional team member verifies that the correct mold inserts are in place.

Before cord sets are ready to be boxed for shipping, the colorants used in the resins, and the shiny brass and alloys of blades and pins may often resemble an electrical work of art that catches the eye—especially the orange and red cord sets preferred by Australian and Denmark hospitals respectively. Or maybe it’s a clear molded plug, or a hand-wired plug where one can see inside to tell whether every wire retains electrical continuity around the stainless steel ring that binds the conductors. Even standard colors like black and gray offer a semblance of eye candy while manufactured to carry hundreds of volts to equipment across multiple environments.