Craft skills taught in school/ apprenticeship are lost when never used. Most of the j-men I know stumble when confronted with even "AIC." They don't even know what exactly that means... for the very same reason.
Their lives are filled with issues of execution -- not design.
And I thought it was because the instructors spent too much time discussing ground-up versus ground-down.
Every time an electrician adds equipment they need to consider 110.9 and 110.10, not just at the design stage.
I am in the process of creating work scopes to replace breakers that were added to every building in a school district by some company installing in Classroom Instructional Centers. The breakers they put in were bought on the secondary market (some are over 30 years old) and are only rated 10kAIC even though some breakers they are installed next to are labeled 18kAIC and others 65kAIC.
I worked for a distributor for 16 years, during which time I never remember a contractor asking me for 'rejection clips' for safety switches, even though they are required for UL Listed ratings above 10kA. Eventually we stopped stocking them.
How many times have you heard an electrician say something like 'just use current limiting fuses then we don't have to worry about that 5kA SCCR on the equipment label'?
And no, I do not believe that every EC must be able to perform complicated SC calculations. Not everyone needs to be an expert on everything. But they do need to know to ask.
