Electrical contracting is all about connecting. Your company is out there every day installing, maintaining, servicing and controlling power. It’s not just about wires, though—it’s about interacting with customers and co-workers to get the job done.

In this issue, we’re talking wire and cable, which is the electrician’s bread and butter. In “The Wide World of Cabling,” Susan Bloom brings you a variety of specialized components, tools and other support products to help you do your best work. We know Electrical Contractor readers love new products, so click here to dig in.

The flip side of wired is wireless. In “When Less Is More,” Chuck Ross notes some ECs might feel threatened by the entry of these wire-free products to the marketplace. However, manufacturers suggest that need not be the case.

Jeff Gavin provides the lowdown on microgrids in “A Microgrid Landscape Emerges.” They are here to stay, thanks to an aging grid, a quest for different power solutions and the march of technology.

The connectivity theme continues in "The IoT and the EC." Susan Casey interviewed several ECs about the complexity of meeting customers’ desires to deploy the internet of things. It can be hard when you get an instruction to “include Bluetooth capability in every fixture” but not how the client intends to use it.

Susan Bloom takes a different look at electrical contractors and connectivity in “Living to Give: Contractors and Community Service.” She talked to ECs at five firms, plus students doing volunteer work abroad through ELECTRI International. If your company is out there in the community, we would love to hear about it. Please email us to let us know all about it.

With all of these different kinds of literal and metaphorical connections, it’s easy to see how ECs bring the world together more than any other professional trade. After all, even we wouldn’t be able to accomplish our mission (certainly not at the scale that we do) without effective power and communications systems. Thanks for the work you do at every level in connecting our world.