| General > General Technical Chat |
| Not sure how I feel about this. |
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| Someone:
--- Quote from: Halcyon on January 11, 2024, 11:21:34 pm ---Companies and government agencies waste thousands upon thousands of dollars every year for what is basically pointless and could essentially be carried out by a visual inspection. There might be some merit to it in some industrial or high-risk workplaces where cables are frequently being moved or used in harsh environments. --- End quote --- Visual inspection is actually most of the work in meeting the applicable standard, but in the world of useless box checking where the person demanding the testing doesnt actually care about the result or ever has audits of the testing, the low cost operators just do the automated electrical test (often incorrectly) and attach the automated label to the object for the $/unit rate. The vast majority of people doing this as a service are passing+tagging equipment which should be taken out of service from visual inspection. Things like missing/unreadable load plates, frayed or cracked mains leads, or one particularly egregious example: exposed terminal connections for the mains input. Also as they get paid $/unit, of course the test intervals are usually far more often than actually required. Desktop PC's and other stationary equipment should really be 5 yearly/once, and dont need a test on bringing into service (as theoretically a new appliance should have had those tests already done by the manufacturer). |
| themadhippy:
--- Quote ---That earth pin seems dodgy, it should be a rated plug or adapter with insulated leads. It's only a matter of time before the PAT testing technician finds an incorrectly wired socket --- End quote --- Then the pat tester deserves everything he gets for being an idiot who shouldn't be any anywere near a pat tester. --- Quote ---and dont need a test on bringing into service (as theoretically a new appliance should have had those tests already done by the manufacturer). --- End quote --- Disagree,something could get damaged in transit,also 5 years down the line when you test you have something to compare the results with and maybe spot a problem in the making. |
| coppice:
--- Quote from: Shock on January 14, 2024, 10:32:37 am ---PAT testing has without a doubt saved lives, prevented fires and damaged equipment, china is doing it's best to counteract that though. --- End quote --- That's definitely true. I've seen some pristine things that returned from PAT testing damaged. :) |
| Bud:
You were the millionth customer and they sent you a bar of gold on a string ? :box: |
| Infraviolet:
"PAT testing has without a doubt saved lives, prevented fires" (My emphasis) For the most part, no. PAT testing is largely worthless because the testing involved only detects for conditions likely to cause electrical shocks to humans, conditions which are relatively rare given most mains devices thesedays are a switched mode power supply which then provides an isolated lower voltage to the stuff which actually powers everything the device does. A device can easily have a multitude of internal faults which could lead to high current draw and fire, a PAT test wouldn't spot them. A fuse should stop some of those though, a superiority of the UK plug design over countries which have fuseless plugs. But even then, a device can consume a current within its fuse rating, and concentrate enough heat within it at some particular location to get hot enough to set itself alight. Add Lithium batteries in to the picture, now contained in so many devices, and you're often looking at non-mains devices being more dangerous than mains ones. A PAT test also makes very little sense when a device has internal states which can change and control higher powered parts of it, via relays or such, which mean the exact configuration of the device during a test might be quite different to what a device might have when in use, because perhaps the device switches some functionality on after 5 minutes, or when an internal temperature passes a threshold... The test gives no indication of what the device may do in that state. And such tests on a device, which merely prove shock is unlikely, not that is safe from fire and such, only show it passed when the test was done. Any accident with someting faulty is likely to happen immediately after the fault develops, the chance of a fault developing, then being spotted in a test before the fault has a harmful consequence is negligible. Checking something looks in good condtion, and is from a decent manufacturer makes sense, but the formal tests are frankly focused around the designs of devices from a historic era, and overly focused on shock a relatively minor risk (worse case person holding it dies) as versus fire a much worse risk (the whole building burns down and multiple peope die). |
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