I find the German terminal block companies - Phoenix Contact, Wago, Weidmüller are all the same, you go through their rep, their distributors, their dealers etc. in some antique sales ecosystem they have. I wasn't doing the high volume purchasing but it was not direct, ist es verboten- only through distributors. Maybe different in your country?
Purchased through distributors in North America, the prices are similar and overinflated. Weidmüller was several k pieces a year but I don't know who/how we bought them from. There are always parasite middlemen I find adding some fat.
Generally speaking, companies have been shifting away from the old model of middlemen and official distributors, towards selling directly to their customers. (Not just industrial products, it’s the same with consumer goods.)
Switzerland used to be absolutely dominated by “official distributors”. Nearly every major brand had some local company as the sole importer. Over the years, more and more of the big brands they imported ended up just buying the respective distributor and turning it into the local subsidiary, or simply ending the distribution contract and establishing a new subsidiary.
We certainly aren’t high volume by any stretch of the imagination, but both Wago and Phoenix are happy to sell to us, and I think they will sell to anyone (at minimum, to companies). The big difference I see between the two is that while Wago gives bigger discounts, they generally won’t split packages, so I had to buy way more terminal blocks and accessories than I actually needed, since I have to buy the boxes of 25, 50, or 100. Phoenix has a lot more products you can buy by the piece, but the discounts are more modest. So I buy in bulk directly, but small quantities I get from distributors.
These are dollar parts used in critical infrastructure. Price only was an issue if bidding on lump sum for the panels, most of the cost is labour.
I think it more likely human factors such as bad wiring assembly or damage of the terminal block would be the Mavi issue, as a guess.
Probably. That’s why the industry has been moving steadily to technologies that reduce human labor and error. First from screw to tool-required cage clamp, then to basic push-in, then push-in with plastic button opening, then versions with levers, and now Phoenix’s latest has the clamping mechanism pre-stressed like an armed mousetrap, so even stranded wire without a ferrule can be inserted with no tool at all. The wire hitting the base triggers the mechanism and it snaps shut.
Even the ferrule crimp tool, I got in shit for buying the Phoenix Contact 6-point one but the corporate standard was the 4-point ferrule crimper. Who knows why or what, and what works with the Wago's. There seem to be undocumented practices as well. Ferrule tube thickness was also a concern of mine, less copper lower price but how's the crimp?
Ferrules are pretty standardized, at least from all the brand-name manufacturers. With that said, just to cover my ass, I did buy a Phoenix ferrule crimper and ferrules, since
as a system they have UL certification. (I.e. the certification is valid only when those products are used together.) I needed the crimper anyway, so buying a few “certified” ferrules to go with it was no big deal.
But if you look at the specs of the ferrules (which include dimensions), it’s all the same. They just follow the old DIN standards that originally defined these things.
I certainly would not buy no-name ferrules from AliExpress, since their quality is truly unknown. FWIW, I buy mostly Vogt (extremely good prices on these from Reichelt.com, by the way), with some Phoenix and Wago. (I have one set that is Knipex branded, but I’m fairly confident that Vogt is the actual manufacturer of those.)
As for the crimp shape: this is a bit of a sore spot for me, as someone who is a bit of a perfectionist and likes to have the best solution for a given situation. Clearly the existence of multiple shapes has some reason. Otherwise we wouldn’t bother having hex, square, true round, and trapezoid for small wires, and hex, trapezoid, and rectangular-ish for big ones. (And there are likely more I didn’t think of.) Yet whenever I have asked the manufacturers for guidance on when to choose which shape, they all insist it makes no difference. (If you know and are able to share, I’d love to know what the reason is that your employer had settled on the hex crimp.)
My conclusion so far has been that the only reason to choose one over another is to better match the opening the crimped ferrule will eventually go into.
In the end, the only reason I ordered the square crimper was because the trapezoid crimps are slightly wider than square ones, and one size of trapezoid crimp won’t fit into the small (3.5mm wide) terminal blocks, whereas the same size ferrule and wire with a square crimp will do so comfortably. My reasoning was that a square crimp will have more contact area in the fundamentally square spring clamp than a hex crimp. I’ll probably eventually add a hex ferrule crimper for screw terminals with round wire holes (which is what every single user-mounted Swiss mains plug uses inside), too.
In a way I wish someone would make a “mil-spec” ferrule crimper using indent crimper technology and precision. I mean, with my AFM8 indent crimper, I can crimp a ferrule for 4mm2 onto 0.25mm2 (24AWG) wire securely! But of course it’s not fully automatic (in that you have to set the indent depth manually), and in reality you’d need to change the crimp shape, since indents alone would be terrible for this application. (Too little contact area with the strands.) But it’s just a curious exercise in tool precision.
(The lack of manufacturer guidance is similar to when choosing soldering fluxes: ChipQuik has something like 2 dozen different fluxes, many of which have practically identical descriptions, so you have no way to know why you should choose one over another, among the group with similar descriptions. Same thing with MG Chemicals solder wick: multiple versions with identical descriptions. I actually wrote ChipQuik, but of course got no reply at all.)