I am trying to find a consultant to review the designs (specifically electrical safety) of a machine a client is buying. Looking for a CEng that can review the designs, assess versus both standards and good engineering (safe) designs and provide a report. Will be a a fully paid piece of work and needs to be carried out in a professional and independent manner. Timescales are quite tight.
I think some more information is required.
Is this in the UK? I would guess so by the CEng requirement, but it could be somewhere else.
Is the machine new or secondhand? If new it should already meet some standards.
Is it only LV or are there HV components?
Is ‘Electrical Safety’ just protection against electric shock and fires or also safety functions of the controls?
Roger,
thanks for the response. This is a new machine. It is a novel technology and this is the 1st industrial unit. It is being designed and built in EU for use in UK. I have raised some concerns regarding the protection against shock - relating to a key machine design feature. It is LV system no HV. I am looking for an expert, independent "competent" engineer to review the designs and to provide a written report regarding the risks present and the machine's protection against electric shock. This specifically relating a a particular single aspect of the machine design. Consideration needs to be given to normal operation and also consider the risks in the event of various foreseeable faults. There is no requirement to review the general control/safety systems - only those relating to this 1 specific function.
I do not want to report to contain any recommendations or design suggestions to mitigate the risks. There should be no design input. The responsibility for safe design sits 100% with the machine supplier and their legal duties under Supply of Machinery regulations. This piece of work is only to highlight the risks presented, to review compliance to expected standards and to provide commentary regarding the overall safety relating to protection from electric shock. It should be an objective report following an evaluation of the risks. The report would be supplied to the client. The contract for the supply of the machine is between the client and the machine designer/builder.
Due to the sensitive nature of this work anyone engaged would be subject to a NDA. The work would be paid for as a fully professional service.
Please let me know if you need any more information at this stage.
Thank you for the clarification. I don’t think that this is within my area of competence.
I can see it becoming more of a philosophy problem that an actual technical one.
Why can I have a normal socket outlet in my bathroom in mainland Europe but not in the UK? The voltage is the same. The appliances I can plug into it are the same. There does not appear to be a higher accident rate.
Roger,
thanks for your response. I would add this is 100% technical! There is no philosophical element to this. Objective assessment against standards.
Have a great weekend.
I assume you do not have a Declaration of Conformity (DoC) to place the goods on the UK market? If so you want a UK test house to test the piece of machary against the appropropriate product standards.
In respect of the socket outlet in your bathroom you can do this in the UK but you have to comply with the installtion standard which is BS 7671. Which incedently does not use the word bathroom but says a location containing a fixed bath or shower, so includes bedrooms.
John,
thanks for your message. Not sure where the reference to a bathroom socket came from - don't have any domestic wiring questions!!
The machine will be supplied by the machine designer/builder with a DOC under the supply of machinery regs. My concern however is that the machine has some very specific electric shock risks due to it's design. I am looking for a fully independent technical review of the designs to check a). compliance to standards and b) - more importantly, whether the design is considered safe by a 3rd party. I have formed my own opinions but would like a 3rd party to submit an appraisal.
I would add this is 100% technical! There is no philosophical element to this.
Ideally standards would make that possible, but often there's an amount of interpretation needed to make sense of the actual words. The likes of BS 7671 especially tend to specify what has to be achieved and leave the detail of how to achieve it open (so as not to discourage innovation) but the result is you often can't get a simple yes/no answer out of them. There was a major debate about a certain EV charge point a while ago - one set of experts claimed it complied with the appropriate standard, while another group insisted the opposite was true.
Some individual equipment standards seem not even to respect the normal standards of electrical safety - e.g. ones for lampholders or domestic toasters. So sometimes a good grounding in basic principles doesn't actually help either. It's an odd world.
- Andy.
Which incedently does not use the word bathroom but says a location containing a fixed bath or shower, so includes bedrooms.
We live in interesting times.
Which incedently does not use the word bathroom but says a location containing a fixed bath or shower, so includes bedrooms.
We live in interesting times.
Because otherwise people would try to get around the rules by claiming that an en-suite isn't a "bathroom", it's just a bit of a bedroom...although obviously no-one here would do that...
no-one here would do that...
Maybe nope, but I do have a schuko socket in shower room here in the UK, wired to the appropriate German standard of the time. I invoked HD384, I think, well the EU harmonising rule one about accepting all EU members rules as equivalent anyway, at the time to get it accepted by building control as part of the then new Part P. I did offer them a choice of paperwork in German or Englisch, but the hesitation was sub-second before taking English...
Not sure if post brexit I could now do that so easily.
It is an example of a rather odd UK-only rule - continentals don't have to remove piles of dead bodies each morning from their bathrooms, and neither do I. I note with amusement that at the last revision the distance was shortened from 3m to 2,5 as presumably someone has now measured a lead on a hairdryer and decided it won't reach.
However I think the post here is about machinery related rules and how much one can rely on live parts being not easily accessible as opposed to insulated. Again, the rules here and in Europe should be equivalent.
The problem often lies with the maker's ability to declare compliance with a lot of rules for CE marking and similar, without a 3rd party inspection. The law will often say something quite general like "reasonable provision shall be made to prevent contact" and then various standards bodies publish their preferred ways to achieve that, standards for guards, brakes or interlocks perhaps, but that does not mean you have to always follow them, you just(!!) have to show that your new and cunning method is as good or better in all foreseeable circumstances.
That, I know from experience as a design authority on a few things that have been 'released on the market' can become something of a minefield. Unlike the US, we don't have codified rules like 'all doors must be earthed by a 6" loop of wire of specified AWG' so regulations are a more like a book of good techniques rather than recipes to follow to the letter, That is good in many ways, but can make things very hard to check, and is I think what is happening here but I have no insider knowledge.
Mike
And while of course we can only draw inferences, it looks as if it could be a safety issue which is not exactly covered by the rules, where the supplier considers it to be safe but the end client doesn't - so possibly more "has safety been managed ALARP" than "has it strictly followed the rules".
I am looking for a fully independent technical review of the designs to check a). compliance to standards and b) - more importantly, whether the design is considered safe by a 3rd party.
It's sentence b) that gives that impression.
And that could get very complicated as "sufficiently safe", e.g. ALARP, is a different legal test in different countries.
Were I retired (given that this is exactly the sort of work I get involved in in the day job) I might half consider volunteering, but I'd want to know exactly who my report was going to and what it was going to be used for - if it's likely to end up in expert witness territory I'd want to know this from the off. And that I'd definitely get paid if my report gave the "wrong" answer. It's sad but true that where clients want us to help them argue that systems are unsafe (or safe) just occasionally - fortunately very, very rarely in my industry - they can get very difficult to deal with if we give them a different answer to the one they wanted to hear...we're always very clear that it is "invoice on delivery of report" not "invoice on report giving you the answer that you wanted"! (I'm only saying this for Steven's awareness of the sort of frustrating legalese that he may find himself presented with by any potential consultant, which can beg the question "so what am I paying you all this money for?" - it's not to suggest that we think any potential client will cause problems, just protecting ourselves against the tiny minority who do.)
It is an example of a rather odd UK-only rule - continentals don't have to remove piles of dead bodies each morning from their bathrooms, and neither do I.
Especially when you consider the number of houses where an extension lead is run into the bathroom to run various appliances, including in one case that I have observed, a television on the end of the bath.
Multiply my observations out across the population and there are probably a lot more sockets in 'locations containing a bath or shower' in the UK than one might first imagine!
- Ross
Maybe what is needed is a "half day" scoping exercise that would help in clarifying what could be said and not said in the RFQ (request for quotation), such that a better level of engagement can be reached.
In many senses it feels like a common problem I see when folks apply for professional registration when they feel that can't say what their work is about, yet need to say what it's about. Hence the suggestion of getting some 'limited advice' (could be under an NDA non-disclosure agreement) about what to put in the RFQ that will attract folks to quote without beating around the bush.
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