Encore Wire Wins 2002 EC&M/CEE News Product of the Year Award

Encore Wire Ltd.'s newest line of color-coded cable won the 2002 EC&M/CEE News Product of the Year.

The company's line of NM-B, THHN and XHHW-2 building wire was selected as this year's winner by the judging panel at the Electric West 2002 trade show and online voters through the EC&M and CEE News Web sites. The product line beat out several dozen other products in the Product-of-the-Year competition. Bill Kincaid, marketing manager for the McKinney, Texas-based Encore Wire accepted the Product-of-the-Year award at the Electric 2002 trade show in New York last month.

Encore began manufacturing color-coded wire for the residential market in December 2001. The company now colors all of its 12/2G NM yellow and 10/2 G NM orange wire, after numerous requests from electrical contractors and distributors. Vincent Rego, Encore Wire's chief executive officer said customers wanted a safer method of identifying wire and cable on the job. Several years ago, he and Dan Jones, the company's president, were at a meeting with electrical inspectors, maintenance engineers and electrical contractors who said they were paying electricians $50 per hour just to wrap colored tape around conductors to identify them. Soon after returning from the meeting, Encore Wire began test runs of colored feeder cable.

“The safety engineers loved it because over time with the heat or cold, the tape tends to drop off,” Rego said. “When they come back in for maintenance or upgrading, the tape might not be on. They had to start from scratch to see what was hot and what was not. Making the colored wire is so much safer.”

The EC&M and CEE News Product of the Year Award was established to honor excellence in new product development in the electrical industry.