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Use of RCD protection in industrial and commercial installations

Andy
Hello All

We all know the benefits of RCD protection and how the regulations are changing regarding domestics. I am constantly being asked if RCDs are required for normal switched socket circuits in industrial installations apart from the obvious use of RCDs for areas likely to cause a reduction in resistance (sockets that could conceivably be used out side). So are RCDs required for general office circuits, for dedicated IT equipment (computers etc), work areas such as clean dry packing areas and so on.


Given RCDs require testing regularly and the results recorded which causes disruption to production equipment, IT equipment, Data centers etc are RCDs really required especially if they are installed within steel conduit or steel trunking on walls or under floors?


Any advice welcome


Andy
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    Ah, yes, I can vouch for air con dripping problems - everything from freezing up and melting, to condenate pumps failing to being installed with the wrong condensate tubing so it suffered from an air lock and soaked the machine room less than 12 hours after being installed.


    Best one for me was after a load of "production" systems were moved from our small office machine room (where we'd kept them running without any unplanned downtime for several years) to a big professionally run data centre - complete with redundant 1+1 UPS protected generator backed power supplies to everything - which failed completely after a few weeks. Apparently no-one at the data centre had noticed the gradual load creep to the point that both feeders were somewhat over 50% utilisation - when one failed and all the affected loads automatically transferred onto the other, it was then overloaded and tripped out an hour or two later leaving the entire data centre blacked out.


      - Andy.
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  • 0
    Ah, yes, I can vouch for air con dripping problems - everything from freezing up and melting, to condenate pumps failing to being installed with the wrong condensate tubing so it suffered from an air lock and soaked the machine room less than 12 hours after being installed.


    Best one for me was after a load of "production" systems were moved from our small office machine room (where we'd kept them running without any unplanned downtime for several years) to a big professionally run data centre - complete with redundant 1+1 UPS protected generator backed power supplies to everything - which failed completely after a few weeks. Apparently no-one at the data centre had noticed the gradual load creep to the point that both feeders were somewhat over 50% utilisation - when one failed and all the affected loads automatically transferred onto the other, it was then overloaded and tripped out an hour or two later leaving the entire data centre blacked out.


      - Andy.
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