Sixty years of connections: Homac® brand celebrates a legacy of reliably powering communities

Through storms, floods, fires, outages and growing demand for electricity, ABB Installation Products’ Homac® connectors and systems have helped distribute electrical power essential to the operation of homes, businesses, communications and transportation systems.

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Founded in 1963, the Homac brand began with flood seal technology that protects underground installations and electrical circuits. Homac was acquired by Thomas & Betts in 2008, and the complete line of Homac solutions became part of ABB’s Installation Products portfolio in 2012. Over the years, the proven reliability and longevity of Homac products have earned trust among utility companies, making the brand one of the widest product lines available today.

To accommodate continued growth, Homac opened its Ormond Beach, Florida facility in 1972, and built the business on the principle that the best innovation comes from partnering with utilities to better understand and address their needs and pain points. Some of the most notable Homac products began as custom solutions for utility partners, including product configurations for transformers, hand holes, pedestals and other applications.

Connecting power and communities

Soon after setting up in Ormond Beach, the organization quickly began forming connections of the personal kind with the local area. From being a founding member of the Volusia Manufacturers Association and the Florida Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education to supporting robotics programs at local high schools and academies, the people behind the brand have worked to strengthen their community.

This is a natural outgrowth of a business that delivers products vital to maintaining and restoring electric power service.

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“When a storm hits, my top priority is safety and restoring power as quickly as possible,” says Ormond Beach General Manager Rick Hall. “We’ve seen the damage a storm can do here in Volusia County and the incredible work that gets done when people work together. If there is a storm, whether it be in Ormond Beach or across the country, trust that the team in Ormond Beach is working diligently to produce the essential products utilities need to turn the power back on after a storm.”

People make the products… and the company

Long-lasting relationships are the cornerstone of the brand’s success, and the business gets its drive from longtime team members like MaryAnne Howell, who recently celebrated her 48^th year with the company.

“I’ve had the unique and special experience of being with the same company for 48 years,” she explains, “witnessing moments of true community, innovation and success. From my first day here through today, I have felt a sense of pride being part of a company that puts people first and plays an integral role in supplying communities with reliable power.”

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Brothers Mike and Matt Cawood met the founder of Homac while still in college and joined the company after graduation. Although they serve in different areas of the business—Mike as a Product Manager and Matt as R&D Manager—both focus on customers’ needs and innovation. They both describe Homac with one word: Quality.

"Homac is built on relationships,” says Mike, Product Manager for Utility Solutions. “Even now, when the utility industry is more dynamic than ever, open collaboration with utility and channel partners is what enables us to develop standard and custom solutions to address the utility’s evolving needs.”

Brother Matt, R&D Manager for Utility Solutions, agrees.

“Over the course of my engineering career, there has been an evolution of wildfire mitigation and grid hardening efforts. With new standards, regulations and infrastructure investment, it’s an exciting time for us. It’s our innovation and creative solutions that ultimately help protect communities and enhance grid resiliency,” he says.

When the Cawood brothers are not working with utility partners, they take their problem-solving skills to the race track. Along with Product Application Engineers Jorge F. Vigo and Jonathan Mahany, they modify cars to compete in the ChampCar Endurance Series across Florida and the U.S.

Partnership in practice

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One example of the Homac brand’s partnership ethos involved going beyond the role of equipment supplier to take on a multifaceted upgrade project. One of the nation’s largest investor-owned utilities was seeking to reduce maintenance and improve reliability in developing a power distribution system for a large commercial and residential high-rise building from a below-grade network vault.

The utility’s internal resources produced a common bus network to serve as the connection point between multiple transformers and all cabling. Knowing that each project would be slightly different based on the needs and physical space available in each case, the company turned to ABB Installation Products to consider taking on a larger role.

A team of ABB engineers responded by developing a custom 8,000-amp common bus network system, built it in sections at the Ormond Beach plant, and shipped it to the site for assembly. The Homac common bus network system provides reliability, which reduces the need for system maintenance going forward and simplifies future upgrades.

Another partnership success involved going not just underground but underwater. One of America’s largest energy holding companies needed secondary connectors for its submersible transformers and modified an existing two-hole spade to serve as a connector in the interim. The company requested a spaded solution that could be installed side-by-side on the transformers.

The ABB Installation Products team designed a custom Homac submersible transformer spade connector that could be easily installed with existing tools and components. The design fits side-by-side onto the transformer and can easily withstand wet and corrosive conditions. Customer crews successfully installed the initial units and on the success of those installations, ordered more. ABB also worked with the customer’s Standards Engineer to expand the designs to a wider variety of cable sizes.

The customer noted the importance of ease of installation, noting that “installation of the new connector saved the crew nearly 75% of the time it normally takes to perform the task. This is huge, especially during an outage when restoring power is critical.

“ABB really knocked it out of the park with this design, and the Homac Flood-Seal® technology and custom solution worked perfectly.”

With results like this, the Homac brand and the ABB team are well-positioned for another sixty years of service.

To learn more about Homac, visit https://electrification.us.abb.com/products/utility-distribution-connectors.