Bordeaux red. Kromezone silver. Forest emerald green. Safety yellow.
Choices in a Sherwin-Williams aisle?
No. Those are some of the many color matches ABB Installation Products has produced for customers who want an aesthetic pop, a perfect color match or a color-coded system in their sturdy Ocal® rigid electrical conduit and fittings.
For engineers, Ocal® conduit and its corrosion-resistant PVC coated construction is a go-to product to protect wiring from heavy weather or chemical exposure. For designers, one of its lesser-known features is ABB’s ability and willingness to mix custom colors for the final finish.
For example, when architects needed a mix of silver Kromezone, Safety Yellow and certain shades of gray to match the unique colors of a major expansion of Toronto’s bustling Union Station transit hub earlier this year, Ocal® product managers obliged. Using a tinting mix provided by a trusted vendor, they matched the color of the conduit’s PVC coating perfectly to the project’s palette.
As a result, Canada’s busiest and largest intermodal transit hub got the beginnings of an eye-pleasing makeover, along with nearly indestructible protection for its electrical wiring. And ABB won one of its biggest Canadian conduit orders in years.
“It’s not something we can do for every order,” said Jeffrey Ice, Applications Specialist — Conduit & Fittings for ABB Installation Products in Memphis. “But if the order size is right and the customer has a need for it, we can produce about any color of the rainbow and any mix in between to make sure our clients get just the look that they need. All we need is a color reference code such as Pantone or a simple swatch.”
The colors may be pretty, but they coat some tough, rugged conduit.
A piece of Ocal® conduit starts life in ABB’s factory in Jonesboro, Arkansas, as a 20-foot stick of raw steel shell. The shell is cut, threaded and prepped for a hot-dip bath in zinc galvanizing material, which coats every surface of the steel, including the threads, and penetrates it to form the best possible protection.
After its bath, super-heated steam is blown through the interior and over the surface to remove any slag that might compromise the final coat or threads. Once the galvanized piece is clean, it gets a 2-mil coating of blue urethane on its threads and interior. Then it is heated and rolled through liquid plastisol until it is covered in 40 mils of corrosion-defeating material.
The result is a conduit and fitting system that has proven to give decades of corrosion-free service in some of the toughest conditions the world can throw at it, including exposed bridges, marine installations, oil & gas facilities and factory floors.
Standard Ocal® conduit is gray, white or blue with blue threading and blue interior. It is UL® listed both for its zinc galvanizing and its PVC coating. It meets the requirements of NEMA RN-1 without exception, along with ANSI C80.1, UL6 and Federal Specification WW-C-581.
Color matches require only a color reference code or a swatch.
