A friend, an electrician, ran the local electrical and PAT training courses for a large training company. The company contracted an external company to PAT all the companies appliances etc. My friend was surprised to find the tester passed all his faulty, deliberately induced faults, cables and appliances that he used for the PAT training. All had big red labels on saying "faulty do not use" but they still got passed. Obviously the contractor was "invited" to come back and do the job properly.
My view of commercial PAT is that it is usually a futile exercise to absolve blame in the event of a problem. I do testing for existing customers and charge for my time rather than by item and the few problems I have found are usually by inspection rather than testing. I also explain to my customers the risk analysis process they should be following and they usually put an inspection process in place rather than PAT everything every year. They are however at the small end of the commercial scale and are able to take responsibility for doing it properly and have few appliances that need inspection.
A friend, an electrician, ran the local electrical and PAT training courses for a large training company. The company contracted an external company to PAT all the companies appliances etc. My friend was surprised to find the tester passed all his faulty, deliberately induced faults, cables and appliances that he used for the PAT training. All had big red labels on saying "faulty do not use" but they still got passed. Obviously the contractor was "invited" to come back and do the job properly.
My view of commercial PAT is that it is usually a futile exercise to absolve blame in the event of a problem. I do testing for existing customers and charge for my time rather than by item and the few problems I have found are usually by inspection rather than testing. I also explain to my customers the risk analysis process they should be following and they usually put an inspection process in place rather than PAT everything every year. They are however at the small end of the commercial scale and are able to take responsibility for doing it properly and have few appliances that need inspection.
