200 amps and Gas, No 3ph Setup?

[ZooCity]

We run on a bit less than 200a 3ph here, 2 autos, 3 quartz flashes, led expo and a 15hp comp.   

I would attack the big, sudden electrical draw pieces first and try to get more a reliable load going as the norm.  So that's comp and flashes.

A typical screw drive comp is going to punch your panel everytime it kicks on.  Do they make "soft start" or similar motor features in compressors?  Our comp is 3p on a 60a circuit and it rattles the wires in the damn conduit every time it kicks on.  Amp draw will drop way down after start though.  Finding a 1ph compressor with the soft start feature, if that exists, sounds problematic.

Next, minimize the comp air needs so that compressor motor doesn't have to be too big:
For M&R or workhorse that would be servo/ac only, servo lift would be very smart if you can get it spec'd.
For s.roque that's the You only since it has central elevation- one cyl to lift/lower all heads.  The Eco has cyls on all heads and uses much more air.   I imagine s.roques use less chopper air since it's one cyl v. four so might be worth comparing.

Might need to go IR for the flashes for the budget.  If you had a compressor motor that wasn't hitting your service hard at start you might be able to get away with quartzes but I don't even want to know what the amperage is for a full sized, 1ph quartz unit.  Look into the smart flashes if going quartz.  Way more options there to ease up on the sudden draw they have.   Ours kind of work their way up to full power, turn off after holding the set point and work their way down.

I feel like M&R has to have a sprint that fits through that opening.   1ph used gas dryers seem to be hard to find though.

LED expo.  Inferior to MH but dramatically lower amp draw.

If the budget isn't prohibitive I think you could get this done with a gas dryer, smart quartz flashes, the right compressor and the right press and have electrical overhead to spare and make it scalable for later on. 

[ffokazak]

Were pushing the limit on 100 amps every day, one thing to consider is there are time delay fuses in the mains in the building so a compressor kicking on wont trip a breaker if its for a second or so. 

For us when the neighbours AC unit kicks on at the random time our compressor does, we break a 200 amp fuse, and we just pop a new one in. We learned to have a few on hand Happens once or twice a year.

[Northland]

Like the title says, looking to get some feedback on how someone would equip a shop space that does have 200 amps of electrical and does have natural gas, but does not have 3 phase.  The space also does not have an overhead door, so everything would have to fit through a double door or roughly 6" wide.

Any thoughts?

Don't forget, if your building cooling/heating source is powered by the 200A electrical service you've got another limitation to factor in.

[mimosatexas]

Thanks for all the responses!  Much appreciated.

The single phase quartz flashes all seem to pull 50-75, so that's 75% of the buildings capacity for 2 without even factoring in press, dryer, lights, A/C, random assorted equipment, and would make burning screens and printing at the same time impossible most of the time, unless we go LED like Zoo mentioned.  I would prefer to avoid LED still at the moment, the 5k Olec is just such a great unit...

Does anyone have any ideas on max production speeds with the flashbacks or stationary infrared flashes (which all seem to max at closer to 20amps vs 50-75?).  Anything is an upgrade over our current numbers, but I hate the idea of dropping a bunch of money on flashes that are the bottleneck over slightly more expensive options that we can try to "work around" with our 200amp capacity.

[merchmonster]

keep in mind that even though they are over the rated 200a capacity a quartz flash only turns on for a few seconds at a time so the draw is not always 70a.

we run all of these at the same time off a 200a 3ph panel without tripping breakers. but not everything is running all at once.

red chili 50a, reno flash 20a, dryer 50 3ph, compressor 50 or 60a, dryer 50a 1ph, 2x flashbacks at 20a ea, sportsman ?a, manual flash 15-20a, 2 hotronix heat presses 20a each, tons of computers and lights, pressure washer 20a each, msp3140 20a

the IR in head flashes work ok, we use one in our sportsman for flashing the base and run 600 pcs an hr easily.

[lrsbranding]

I would get the specs for the equipment that you want then get an electrician to evaluate your current setup and figure in the new. 200 amps is a lot of juice. Even single phase. Our house is all electric and has a 200 amp main. When we built the shop we ran power off the same meter base and main. We can run the house as normal, clothes dryer running, lights, ac or heat and the usual plus the shop which has it's own ac/heat, quartz flash, EconoRed 1 54", 2 embroidery machines, lights, computers and whatever and have never popped the breaker. We were entertaining the idea of getting an auto and compressor and spoke with an electrician. He said he could come over and check the amp draw while we were doing business as usual too see how much we are actually using and I'd probably be surprised that it's not as much as I think. There are a lot of factors to figure into the whole equation.

[mk162]

I'm going to say that an IR unit once warmed up will flash really dang fast.  I would personally go that route to save some amps for something else.  Or go one quartz and one IR. 

When we ran the old gauntlet I had a shuttle flash setup and dang if that thing didn't keep up with just about whatever print speed I was running at.  I miss the ease of that thing.

I talked to an electrician up the street and he was saying a 3ph conversion can start at $25k.

[ZooCity]

Slo blow fuses are a must in a situation like that, good looking out Andrew.

A service upgrade to 3ph is going to vary in cost, depends on a lot of factors.   Around here no landowners want to contribute to upgrading their services but your area might be different, worth asking.  If you keep the amperage on the service at 200 you may be able to use existing hardware to some degree, when you get to higher services the CT cans and everything get expensive fast.   Also worth getting a cost on it and rolling it up into rent just to see if it is in fact worth the upgrade over the term of the lease.

[Prince Art]

When we ran the old gauntlet I had a shuttle flash setup and dang if that thing didn't keep up with just about whatever print speed I was running at.  I miss the ease of that thing.

When I ran a Gauntlet with shuttle flashes, with a loader & a puller, our dwell time was determined by our flash time - which was usually about 4 seconds. Back that out, and you're at a theoretical speed of 900 pcs/hr. We didn't really do that, but we were probably in the 700s. I worked solo with a dwell time of 7 seconds (about 500/hr), so flash time was rarely a factor.