Retrofitting terminals

Written by Scott Mulholland, Product Manager- Industrial Components

Traditional push in ‘PT’ terminal top entry

In retrofit activity, its very easy to incur material costs and labour charges that can ramp up alarmingly from initial estimations. Replacing the terminals and conductors in a busy cabinet, junction box or machine could prove a serious undertaking. Therefore, replacing your traditional screw terminals with a more modern spring based push in terminal might be an initially attractive proposition. It then it dawns on you that the benefits of speed of installation, vibration proof etc that come with fitting a push in ‘PT’ terminal may be negated by the need to replace each individual conductor/wire to achieve the extra wire length (say 40mm for arguments sake) to be able ‘loop’ over into the top of the terminal. You would need to do this as ‘PT’ push in terminals are top entry, whereas screw terminals are side entry. This could be very costly both in time and cash.

We have developed the PTV terminal to incorporate the best features of each of the above terminals, and ensure that to move to a push in (spring) terminal will not automatically mean that you need to replace EVERY conductor that goes into a terminal.

Being part of the established Phoenix Contact ‘Clipline Complete’ terminal family, PTV sits seamlessly alongside all of the other Clipline complete terminals (whatever their size or termination technology) and utilises the exact same set of universal accessories (so no extra headache of identifying which accessory parts you are going to need, all of the bridges and other accessories are common across the Clipline range).