Saint Paul, Minnesota – October 15, 2026 – PRESSADVANTAGE –

Holton Electric, a commercial and light industrial electrical contractor serving businesses and institutions across Minnesota, has published guidance that identifies five situations in which an arc flash study should be reviewed or updated, along with the steps a complete study includes, written for facility managers preparing for OSHA inspections. The guide appeared on the company’s website on September 2, 2026, and is aimed at the people responsible for keeping arc flash documentation current in manufacturing plants, warehouses, health care facilities, and commercial buildings.

According to the guide, NFPA 70E, the consensus standard for electrical safety in the workplace, calls for facilities to identify arc flash hazards on electrical equipment and document them with labels. The company’s position is that a study is only accurate for the electrical system it was based on, so a facility can hold a completed report and still have labels that no longer match the equipment on the wall.

The five triggers named in the guide are new equipment installations or panel additions, renovations that change how power is distributed, utility service upgrades or transformer changes, an electrical incident, near miss, or equipment failure, and a study that has gone five years without a review. The guide recommends a review on that cycle even when nothing in the system has changed, because utility fault current values can shift over time. As an example of how quickly a study can fall out of date, it describes how adding a single new motor control center can change fault current values, and with them the incident energy figures that existing labels in the building were based on.

“A lot of facility managers assume the study they had done years ago still holds,” said Ted LaFrance, Owner of Holton Electric. “It holds for the system it described. Add a panel or change a transformer and the numbers move, and the labels are the last thing anyone goes back to check.”

The guide describes an arc flash hazard analysis as a sequence of four steps rather than a single inspection, beginning with field data collection in which every piece of electrical equipment is documented, including transformers, breakers, panels, conductor lengths, and settings. A short circuit study then calculates the maximum fault current at every point in the system. A protective device coordination study checks that breakers and fuses are set to trip in the intended sequence, so a problem in one circuit does not take down the whole building. The final step uses that data to calculate incident energy at each piece of equipment, determine the protective equipment workers need, and produce the equipment labels.

Workers rely on those labels to know what protective gear to wear before opening a panel, which is why the guide places so much weight on keeping them current. The guide also lists documentation gaps that come up in inspections, including missing or outdated labels, incorrect breaker settings, missing one-line diagrams, and equipment added after the study was completed.

Holton Electric performs arc flash studies for commercial and industrial facilities across the Twin Cities metro, from single-building operations to multi-site campuses with older distribution systems, and reviews existing documentation and protective device settings as part of that work. According to the company’s website, its arc flash assessments also include mitigation recommendations and training for facility staff. The company says data collection for a single facility typically takes one to two site visits, with the full analysis and labeling completed within two to four weeks depending on the complexity of the system and whether existing documentation is available, and describes the guide as general information for facility managers rather than an assessment of any particular site.

“The useful question is not whether a study exists but what has changed since it was written,” LaFrance said. “If the answer is a renovation, a service upgrade, or more than five years, the labels in that building are due for a second look.”

Holton Electric was founded in 2007 and in 2020 joined with A-1 Electric Service of Waconia, Minnesota, which has served commercial and industrial clients since 1982 and whose name remains on trucks working in the Waconia area and the western metro.

The team-operated company provides commercial and light industrial electrical contracting, including electrical design and installation, repair, preventive maintenance, infrared thermal imaging, arc flash assessments, standby generator installation, commercial LED lighting, and electric vehicle charging station installation, with emergency service available around the clock. Its clients include manufacturers, educational institutions, health care facilities, restaurants, and other businesses throughout Minnesota, including Minneapolis and St. Paul.

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For more information about Holton Electric Contractors, contact the company here:

Holton Electric Contractors
Theodore LaFrance
651-769-4110
tlafrance@holtonelectric.com

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