As a Portable Appliance Testing company, we often meet customers who don’t appreciate how easily electrical equipment can become dangerous. In face of numerous pieces of legislation, regulation and recommendation, much of it frustratingly opaque, customers don’t always have the patience to consider the sort of basic care that the regulators are trying to promote.
For example, many customers want to know the bare-minimum “legally required” interval for testing appliances. The law doesn’t state a rigid timescale for testing, but “recommendations” for testing intervals do exist. We consider that a more pressing point is that testing and ongoing care are not the same thing. Just as it makes sense to check oil levels and tyre pressure for a car in between services, so it also makes sense to monitor electrical equipment between formal inspections. The IET recommendations (The Institution of Engineering and Technology) are made on the understanding that ongoing user checks are completed.
Here are three easy ways to look after your electrical appliances (the list is not meant to be exhaustive!)
1 – Check the fuse – A fuse is a safety feature designed to be the weakest link in a safe chain. If a fuse “goes pop”, then it has done its job (to highlight a fault and prevent damage to the equipment). If the incorrect size (or rating) of fuse is installed, then a greater amount of time will elapse between the fault and the safety “pop”. In this interval great damage can be done (overheating, equipment damage and fire). Because cables and leads are inter-changeable it is especially important to check the correct fuse is installed in every appliance. Typically, anything with a heating element (kettle, heater etc) should have a higher rated fuse (13amp), and anything which draws less power (desk lamp, TV) would require a lesser rated fuse (perhaps 3 or 5 amp respectively). Always check which fuse rating, measured in amps, is most appropriate for the appliance. This information should be listed on the equipment itself.
2 – Love your cables – In our experience, cables are the part of an electrical appliance most likely to breakdown. The causes for this are often very easy to avoid. Excessive coiling, stretching or bending of cables can result in an increased risk of fire (coiled cables can be hot to the touch) or in electric shock where the protective insulation breaks down. In addition, very often people rest heavy furniture on cables or else repeatedly run wheeled chairs over cable. In each instance this increases the chances of insulation failure. You should aim to keep your cables tidy, hanging loose and out of the way (imagine the embarrassment if you were the person in the office to break something in a trip over a cable!?)
3 – Don’t overload sockets – A standard UK socket is designed to bear an electrical load in the region of 13 amps. This equates to a single appliance with a heating element (such as a kettle or heater), or perhaps one extension with a couple of 5 amp pieces of IT equipment. However, due to the age of some electrical installations, and the increased reliance on electrical equipment, many properties do not have sufficient sockets for modern demand. Overloading sockets can be very dangerous (overheating causes fires). The worst we have seen was a company that had 78 appliances “daisy-chained” via extension adaptors through a double socket. YIKES! This is a far greater load than the adaptor equipment or the mains wiring is designed to bear. Overloading increases the risk of fire, the risk of having to pay lots of money to replace equipment, as well as the risk of disruption to a business (it’s always the sockets with vital computer equipment that tend to get overloaded!) Extra sockets are not, in the scheme of things, a great cost. Especially when compared to the worst-case alternative.
Please email if you’d like more information on this matter (info@lsc-electrical.co.uk)
