SGT. SUDZ MOTOR CONTROL CABINETS

What do you look for in a MCC for your Carwash?

If you’re a carwash operator, you’re well aware of the multitudes of hats you need to wear on any given day of running your wash. From front-facing customer interactions to getting your hands dirty in the equipment room to stay up and running, it’s integral to understand how every component in your wash interacts with each other. And while we often place the biggest emphasis on soaps, detergents, water, and the main wash equipment in your tunnel or wash bay when thinking about carwashes, there are other critical components to your wash system, like your motor control center, that are responsible for the successful function of your wash and your entire operation!

If you’re an operator, you’re at least aware of the Motor Control Center (MCC) in your backroom and how it interacts with your wash equipment. In very basic terms, your wash’s MCC is responsible for managing, monitoring, and protecting the motors used in your carwash. Specced and built based on the needs of the carwash, your MCC is assembled in a cabinet or panel and organized in a way to make maintenance, troubleshooting, or replacing a part easy. If configured and built correctly, a MCC should help manage and protect the motors used in your wash through providing monitoring capabilities to detect if a component is not working properly, managing the power distribution to motors (often through Variable Frequency Drives, or VFDs), and offering a strong layer of protection for your motors, which are expensive to service, expensive to replace, and introduces costly downtime to your wash facility. 

Look for these points

With such an integral piece of equipment, it’s important to ensure that your MCC is both specced and built according to the needs of your carwash. If you’re building new or renovating an existing facility, keep some of these points in mind:

• Integration: While most MCCs built for the carwash industry are built with most tunnel controllers in mind, not all MCCs integrate with ALL controllers on the market --- it’s good practice to ensure that your equipment integrates with each other smoothly prior to committing to anything. 
• Monitoring Capabilities: Like mentioned earlier, while you’re required to wear a lot of hats as a carwash operator, being a certified electrician fits a little outside the scope. Choosing a MCC that has Smart component monitoring capabilities and good usability and interface is critical for eliminating downtime. Some user interfaces are only able to display whether the unit is on or off while others can display critical information about all components that can dramatically reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot and service a part.
• Reliability: All MCCs are built around reliability principles --- the purpose of a well-built MCC is to ensure uptime by powering and protecting the motors in your wash. However, again, the difference between panel builders comes in the form of the grade of components being used, the cable routing and assembly, and the added features introduced, like more reliable Smart monitoring capabilities. 
• Easy Maintenance: Some MCCs are easier to maintain and service than others. Some features, like colored LEDs to indicate a fault, glass doors on the enclosure to reduce the risk of encountering an arc flash environment, and clean, consistent wire routing are all ways to make a troubleshooting or service call quick and simple if required. 

Why trust Sergeant Sudz?

With all of these points in mind, you can see how critical of a component the MCC is to the success of your carwash. We take our role in your business seriously, sourcing the best components, building and shipping our panels out of our own facility in Greenville, TN, and including some of the most modern and essential features, like Smart monitoring and remote accessibility, to reduce downtime and keep your carwash running, business as usual. We’re trusted by and partner with some of the biggest names in the industry to run their facilities smoothly. If you’re interested in taking the next step with your carwash facility, visit us online at https://www.sergeantsudz.com/ or call us at (845)-302-7272.