I believe everyone agrees with the statement: ‘There is no need to push your products to your customer. Solve their pain point’. This sentence resonates even more with me, as I was once a user of heavy duty connectors. I used this product so often that I have developed a love hate relationship with it. I LOVE it because of the convenience that this product has to offer, in terms of consolidating all wires from and into a panel. With this product, all the cables will be very organized, enough to make a person with OCD smile simply by looking at it. As for why I HATE it, it is the pain point that I am about to share.
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The Art of Wiring
Before going into that list of HATEs, it is certainly useful to get the generic terms right. Otherwise everyone will start calling them their brand name, much like how I used to call them back then.
 Housings and Base (with cable gland) |
 Contact Inserts |
Pins/Sockets
The NUMBER 1 in my list is definitely none other than the tedious procedure required to re-do the wrongly inserted pins/sockets. First of all, the incorrect pins/sockets have to be ejected out. This is when the ejector comes in handy, if and only if it is inside your toolbox. For my case, it was usually not inside my toolbox and I had to go through all sorts of hassle to get the pins/sockets out.
Push-in Connection Inserts
If you are a huge fan of Phoenix Contact, PUSH-IN technology is probably the most familiar term to you. YES, we incorporated that technology into our inserts and that made life easier for people like me. The only thing you need to eject out that pin/socket is just a screw-driver, or perhaps a pen.
So assume there is no wrong-doing in the wiring and everything goes smoothly until the day the panel is delivered to the end user’s place. During installation, you find that the space allocated for your panel is so limited. Worse, the space is not sufficient for the heavy duty connector because of the top cable entry direction. Squeezing it into the panel will result in over bending of the cable. This brings us to the number 2 in my list of HATEs.
Inter-changeable cable entry outlet
With Phoenix Contact EVO series housing, this is no longer a problem anymore. All you have to do is just twist that cable entry outlet gland and face it to the lateral direction or vice versa according to your space constraints. It provides flexibility, allowing the user to interchange the cable entry between top entry and side entry without having to remove the entire cable from the housing.
The one last thing in my list is the lack of flexibility of the contact inserts. Imagine you have different types and sizes of cables and wires that you want to consolidate into/out of a panel. In addition to that, it is just a few of every type and size of cable that you do not require the whole 16 poles or 24 poles heavy duty connector. I experienced that before in one of my projects whereby the panel requires 5 units of 1.5mm2 cable, 3 units of huge power cables, 3-4 units of Ethernet cables and finally, a few pneumatics hoses. Due to such a “high mix low volume” scenario, I was left with no choice but to make several cut-outs on the panel in order to accommodate all these cables and hoses into the panel.
This is what team-work looks like
This is no longer a hassle if different types and sizes of cable can be accommodated into one single heavy duty connector, and this is the fundamental concept that brought us to the birth of modular contact inserts. With these revolutionary contact inserts, users can now choose different contact insert modules and assemble it into a frame to make it into a contact insert. As for the housing and base, you can choose to use the standard housing or the EVO series because they are both compatible.
The above are just my pain points about this product based on my experience and Phoenix Contact Heavycon offers the right solution to every hassle that I have with heavy duty connectors. I believe you too have other problem with your current heavy duty connector, so do contact us with your feedback or queries and we will solve that pain point of yours. Cheers!