What We Do in Warehouses
Most warehouse work is one of a handful of scopes, and a building that is changing tenants or adding automation usually needs several at once:
- High-bay lighting — LED retrofits of existing fixtures and new layouts, with occupancy and daylight controls, re-laid out when racking changes put aisles where open floor used to be
- Dock equipment — circuits for levelers, dock lights, door operators and fans, the loads that grow every time a building adds doors
- Conveyor and sortation — feeders, disconnects and connections for conveyor, sortation and packaging lines, sequenced with the integrator's installation schedule
- Forklift and equipment charging — dedicated circuits for battery chargers and charging rooms, sized from the charger nameplates rather than guessed
- Service and capacity upgrades — three-phase service, main distribution and new panels when a building's original service cannot carry the load a new tenant brings
Lighting a High-Bay Building
Lighting is where most warehouse electrical budgets start, and where layout matters more than fixture count. Light that lands on the tops of racks does nothing for the person picking at the bottom of the aisle, so fixtures are placed for the racking and the aisle widths actually in the building. A retrofit that keeps the old fixture positions after the racking has changed keeps the old dark spots too.
- Fixtures laid out to the rack plan, so aisles are lit at the pick face, not just the floor between rows
- Occupancy controls in aisles that see traffic a few times an hour, which is most of them in a large building
- Daylight controls where the building has skylights or clerestory glazing
- Lighting alterations can bring in energy code control requirements; we check what your city enforces before the design is final, not at inspection
- Work from lifts, aisle by aisle, so a building does not have to shut down to be relit
The energy code side is covered in our guide to which electrical code each DFW city enforces.
When the Building Has Outgrown Its Service
Many DFW distribution buildings were delivered as speculative shells, with a service sized for a generic tenant: lights, a few docks and an office. Automation changes that. Conveyor, sortation, charging and cold storage can each add more load than the original design assumed, and the first sign is usually a utility or inspector question rather than a failure. We start from what the building has: the service size, the main distribution, what is already on each panel and the demand history where it is available. From that we say whether the new load fits, fits with rearrangement, or needs a service upgrade.
A service upgrade means coordinating with the utility (Oncor across most of DFW) for the new service and the meter release. That coordination sets the schedule more than the electrical work does, so it is arranged before the work starts, not on the day.
Working Around Live Operations
A distribution center earns its money by not stopping. Electrical work is planned around that rather than the other way round:
- Outages scheduled into the shift pattern you run, in writing, before work starts
- Night and weekend work where picking and shipping cannot pause
- Phased scopes so only one zone, line or set of docks is affected at a time
- Lifts and work areas kept clear of active aisles and dock traffic
- Permits pulled and inspections scheduled, since requirements differ from city to city across DFW
Where We Work
We are based at 2100 S Great Southwest Parkway in Grand Prairie, inside the Great Southwest Industrial District, and work warehouse and distribution buildings across the metroplex: the Great Southwest district itself, the DFW Airport and Irving corridor, north Fort Worth, and the southern Dallas distribution corridors along I-20 and I-45. If your building is in DFW, ask.