Why do we need PAT?
THE SCARY TRUTH IS…
No matter how good or well maintained you think your appliances are, someone may have innocently or even through uneducated ignorance, made them unsafe. Have a look at some of the following examples of the faults or unsafe situations we have seen. All examples have been used with our clients kind permission.
Click on the example title to see the full text.
We found printers with holes in the case, leads with plugs held together with Sellotape and extension leads with masking tape around the socket end because part of the case had melted and burnt out. Four gang extensions with the live & neutral wires reversed, IEC leads with their earth wire pulled out of the plugs, grazed flex with live wires showing, cord grips missing - the list was endless. We particularly liked the computer powered via a length of BELL WIRE!
Then came the shop floor... We found employee owned radios with their case back covers missing; fans with no front guards; hand-held grinders with hardly any flex left because the cutting wheel had been catching it; smashed plug tops still connected to the mains; live & gashed wires in puddles of water and extension leads with the outer insulation torn and missing for OVER A YARD'S LENGTH! Metal hand held inspection lamps with the earth bond broken and sockets severely overloaded. We even found a wall heater that caught fire when switched on - it had too much dust inside it from being installed in the wrong kind of environment for which it was designed.
Management were amazed... why had none of this been reported to the supervisors and replacements issued? The answer was simply laziness on the equipment user's part. It was not the employee's personal equipment, so why should they (the user) worry?
When the management and supervisors were informed of all the faults we found, it was pleasing to see that all our recommendations were taken seriously and steps were taken to ensure many of the faults we found should not occur again.
Err... NO. We pointed out that in an emergency situation there was no means of turning off the power to any appliance because the plugs were all neatly hidden away. (Never mind the IEE code of practice stating plugs & sockets should be readily accessible.) We also found that the way the plugs had been hidden meant the staff would never switch any of the appliances off at night - never mind half term or summer holidays and so unbeknown to them, this was causing an overheat problem with the small moulded "plug in" style power transformers for the computer speakers. They were getting so hot that the case was now splitting open leaving the live inner parts (transformer) exposed. At this point you may wonder how we found this fault - after all, with of all the computers and monitors sitting over the lift up flap and the worktop not being strong enough to take my eleven stones of weight, I couldn't see any of the plugs or sockets but still had to unplug each item to test it. The answer to this was simple! True, I could not see the fault but I certainly felt it as 240 volts jolted its way up my arm when I tried to unplug a transformer! A hazard of the job you might say...
The school did take note and as a result of our visit, there is now a main isolating switch fitted for that room and the speaker transformer units are plugged in elsewhere.
In nearly every room we found the wall mounted trouser press units wires had been pulled from their plugs and the cores were just about hanging onto their terminal screws. To overcome this problem these appliances were fitted with different design plug tops that had better cord grip provision. We also found hand held steam irons with burnt flex, broken plugs and hairdriers with faulty switches or sticking motors. All of these items were in daily use by the guests and any one of them could have caused a fire or electric shock situation.
So as you can see, portable appliance testing really is an important part of any business' safety policy and practice. There are so many more horror stories we could tell or pictures we could show, but importantly, the point we are attempting to make is that by employing a reputable and experienced company to take the burden off your hands, your company's appliances may never get a horror story attached to them, an expensive insurance claim or worse still, a claim on a human life.
