At McClone Electric, WE KNOW AG
Farmers were the first customers this company had, and they still are.
Chris McClone started McClone Electric in 1981 and the work started on farms. His son Dustin runs it now, out of the same county, and farm work is still what we know best.
Grain
Legs, augers, conveyors, dryers, bins, fans and sweeps. Commercial elevators and on-farm systems, and we do about as much of one as the other.
We make all of our control boxes in house, so the panel running your leg and augers comes out of our own shop, tested, with every circuit numbered and labeled.
That panel interlocks the motors so each starts in the right order, and custom controls explains why that is the part that matters.
We work on new systems and on systems that three different people have added to over thirty years, and the second kind is most of the work.
Dryers are usually a new install rather than a repair. A new dryer arrives and needs power, a disconnect and a place in the sequence.
Poultry
In a poultry barn the electricity is the climate. When it stops, the birds have no margin while somebody finds out why.
Ventilation fans and the inlets and curtains that go with them. Feed lines and augers. Watering systems. Lighting, and the controls and dimming that run it. Heaters and brooders. Alarms and monitoring.
An alarm is only any use if it is still live when the thing it is watching stops, so on a poultry barn it belongs on the standby side of the transfer switch. Settle that when the generator goes in, not afterward.
More on that in Mentone, where a lot of it is.
Standby power that carries the building
On a poultry barn near Mentone we wired standby power that carries the whole building at once, split across six automatic transfer switches, and the whole job is on the Mentone page.
A standby generator can run on propane, natural gas or diesel, whichever suits the barn and what is already on the farm. See generator installation.
Livestock buildings
Ventilation and fans. Lighting. Waterers and feed systems, and the controls that run them.
Three-phase, and what to do when there isn’t any
Out in the county three-phase does not go everywhere, and what you can run is decided by what is on the pole at the end of your lane.
Where the utility has three-phase, we put in the services and feeders for it. Where it does not reach, we install phase converters so a three-phase motor on the farm can run off a single-phase service. Out here that is often the answer, when the alternative is asking the utility to bring three-phase all the way down the lane.
Farm shops and outbuildings
The shop has its own page: sub-panel, high bay lighting, a welder circuit, an air compressor, a heater, outlets at working height, lights outside. We trench the wire out to the shop.
Getting power to a new building
A new building is fed underground, in a trench, and the feed ends at distribution gear and a panel. Size those for the load the building really carries and leave room, because more always gets added later.
When it cannot wait
A dryer that quits in the middle of harvest cannot wait until Monday morning, and a barn with no ventilation cannot wait at all.
Call whatever the hour. We have been answering farm calls since 1981. See emergency electrician.
Where we go
Warsaw, Pierceton, Claypool, Mentone, Silver Lake, Milford, Leesburg, North Webster, Syracuse, Winona Lake and Atwood — all our service areas.
And we will travel for farm work. That takes in Etna Green, Akron and the ground in between. If you are further out, ask, because the answer is usually yes.
Questions people ask
- Do you build the control panel or buy one in?
- We build them ourselves, in our own shop, with every circuit labeled.
- Do you work on a system somebody else installed?
- Yes. Across this county most grain work is on systems that have had pieces added over many years.
- Can you carry a whole barn on standby power?
- Yes. The poultry barn near Mentone is one we wired that way.
- Do you work on the farmhouse too?
- Yes, usually on the same trip out.
Get a quote
Contact us today for a free, no hassle quote on your upcoming project.
Call (574) 594-3532 or send us a message.