Understanding the NEC Rules for

Backup Power Systems 2008 Edition – Part 1 of 4

Download Part 1

We at Mike Holt Enterprises try to provide as much as we can to the industry at no charge. For this reason we’ve created a free Understanding the NEC Rules for Backup Power Systems textbook. The material in this textbook was extracted from Mike's Understanding the 2008 NEC, Volume 1 textbook.

Emergency and standby power systems are those that supply power to certain loads when the normal supply of electricity (typically a utility service) to a building or other structure fails. The National Electrical Code has three primary articles providing requirements for these backup power systems:

Article 700—Emergency Systems

Article 701—Legally Required Standby Systems

Article 702—Optional Standby Systems

In addition to these three specialized articles, many other NEC requirements also apply to the installation of emergency and standby power systems—rules in other articles dealing with conductors and raceways, branch circuits and feeders, grounding, enclosures, working space around electrical equipment, and much, much more. This free PDF download from Mike Holt Enterprises gives you the “big picture” overview of everything you need to know about installing Code-compliant emergency and standby power systems.

Because of the size of the textbook we’ve decided to make it available in four parts. We will be sending these parts out over the next 4 months. Here is Part 1.

Scope of Part 1 of 4 - Articles 90 and 110

Scope of Part 2 of 4 - Articles 220, 230 and 240

Scope of Part 3 of 4 – Article 250

Scope of Part 4 of 4 - Articles 300, 310, 312, 408, 445, 700, 701, 702

Click here or on the image above to download Part 1 (4.3 MB), but be advised that this download may take a few minutes to download depending on your internet connection speed. If you encounter a problem opening this file, be sure you have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat installed on your system (click here).

Next month will be sending Part 2, stay tuned.