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I am 1.5 years into my career as an electrical design engineer doing MEP/architectural-type engineering, with a BSEE and I passed my FE exam. We do equipment design, power, lighting, feeding from utility, etc. I am very frustrated by my lack of progress and feel thoroughly unprepared by my degree education. Are there references or guides for having a better understanding of these concepts? I know it is a vague question, but after over a year, I still feel like I'm fumbling around in the dark with every task I'm assigned. Some contextual reference, ideally that can drill down to fundamentals, is what I need.
[Everyone at my job says college didn't prepare them for this position. My university was an IBM feeder school. I know how to make semiconductors from the molecular level upward, but still don't have a practical understanding of AC circuitry. I can make and program robots, and even process communication signals... It's incredibly frustrating. The problem I had, even in school, is the textbooks never made sense. I'm a visual learner, and I never forget when I truly, actually learn something, but I never really learned power. I could switch careers, but I like being able to help build hospitals, and I'd rather remedy my ignorance than try and work around it. It doesn't seem like my supervisors expect more from me than I currently provide, but it is incredibly demoralizing not being able to live up to my own standards. An example I just ran into is LSIG breakers: When are they required? Why? What regulators dictate their use? And isolation panels: How do I know what equipment should run through one (I am still bad at understanding the role of 1, 2, and 3 pole circuits). I was on a survey the other day and don't know what made one panel preferable to another (I am aware of emergency, critical, and differing voltages, but not how upper stream distribution panels are organized), or what might have been out of the ordinary in the space we were surveying. I dont know what to look for. How do you track panel loads for existing panels, how do panel loads affect upstream power, etc. I purchased the electrical engineer handbook, but it is more high level jargon, which would be fine if I had a better fundamental grasp on everything.]
Is there a resource for a straightforward holistic explanation of power systems? And is there a good resource for understanding AC power?
