PAT Testing a Figure 8 cable

[SimonH2]

What, continuity of L&N doesn't matter ?

 

[JohnW2]

What, continuity of L&N doesn't matter ?

If 'continuity' of either L or N were not present, I doubt that anyone would submit it for a PAT!

Kind Regards, John

 

[Iggifer]

You should see some of the stuff we have to ‘PAT’ in some student flats every summer

Not a job we do a lot of thankfully but there’s all sorts of broken stuff left around to ‘test’. Unfortunately, some of it even belongs to the landlords!

Highlight from this year was a 4-way lead missing the terminal plate from the back of the 4-way covered in a couple of wraps of insulation tape and in-service supplying the wifi and tv booster

 

[Grizzly]

What, continuity of L&N doesn't matter ?

That's what yer functional check is there for!

 

[ericmark]

I am mainly concerned about what happens if some thing faulty is PAT tested and in error passes? Assuming the worst, it means a court case and an investigation to decide who was at fault.

With a scheme member it would be either the scheme operator or the guy doing the testing and it would depend on what qualifications the guy testing had, unlikely he would be unqualified so it would likely be the testing who would be blamed.

With a non scheme member and for PAT testing no need for membership, then it the testing guy is qualified it again is down to guy testing, however if he is not qualified we need to look at who employed him to do the job, now we have to assume anyone employing the electrician is doing it for a commercial reason so they should no better than employ anyone would is not qualified. Or should they?

Until there is a court case and it becomes part of case we can only speculate, but if some one does not know how to test a fig of 8 cable that is rather serious, both for the tester who is clearly not trained and for whoever is employing him/her both could end up with custodial sentences.

 

[flameport]

I am mainly concerned about what happens if some thing faulty is PAT tested and in error passes?

Nothing happens - no way to know or prove whether the item was defective at the time, or was subsequently damaged or became faulty after the test was done.

Given the massive prevalence of class II items, there is little or nothing to test anyway. Mostly visual inspection only.

 

[conny]

We used to have an ex-military 'electrician' who purportedly had qualifications as long as your arm. One of the other resident sparks gave him a drill to PAT test one day. Half an hour later he handed it back stating it had passed the test. Upon taking the drill back he gave the power cord a tug and it came right out of the drill.
Hardly surprising as it was an air drill with a cable shoved up the air inlet. The military guy no longer works for us.

 

[ericmark]

Nothing happens - no way to know or prove whether the item was defective at the time, or was subsequently damaged or became faulty after the test was done.

Given the massive prevalence of class II items, there is little or nothing to test anyway. Mostly visual inspection only.

It will depend on the fault, I came to test a rotary broach with a magnetic base, it was basically two separate items, however wired together so not possible to separate for testing, the drill part was Class II but the magnet base was Class I so as a whole it should be tested as Class I, the earth had become disconnected on the magnetic base, which I repaired and it needed to be retested to move it from the quarantine register. It was tested with a Robin tester which held the details in the tester, as a result it became rather obvious the last tester had tested it as Class II, no way did it change from Class II to Class I between the tests.

It had come in because it had been dropped, it was running off a generator which with no load would go to tick over, to start with there was a 300 watt work light and the drill being run, but while the drill was being used the bulb failed on the work light, so as the drill was switched off there was not enough load to keep the generator revving, so the engine went to tick over and the voltage dropped from 55 - 0 - 55 to around 7 - 0 - 7 as a result the magnet released and drill fell off, it was brought in as having a faulty magnet so I opened the magnet to check for loose wires, and found the broken earth.

It was only when I came to return the drill and saw the generator being used did I realise what had gone wrong. On that job in our workshop we only PAT tested items being repaired, the standard 3 monthly PAT test was done by a contractor. We had to submit a floppy disk end of each week to update the computer records. To my mind this was a real pain, as testing a radio with a figure of 8 power lead I had to do it twice in order that the info was written onto the floppy disk, even though as already said really it only needed a visual inspection there was not really anything to test other than when switched on it used power.

On a building site it was common to go into the stores and test items which had never moved since the last test, so when finding a fault it was quite clear the last tester had missed it, since not repaired in the stores the items had to be entered onto the quarantine register, as a result there was a record of errors made, OK we did not alert management, we took the attitude we were not the appointed manager it was up to him to do his job, however had an accident been caused I am sure the HSE would have looked at the records, and it was easy to see which testers had made regular mistakes, it was all recorded.

However on another job using the same PAT tester, there had been an error on the auto recording, we were to enter our code before we started, then enter a generic code when finished so if another electrician used it without entering his code the generic code would come up, before the floppy disk was put into the PC and loaded into the program it was easy enough to correct mistakes, but once loaded into the Robin program there was no official way to alter the entry, however it used Visual Basic and it was easy enough to write your own program to alter the entries so the entry was not really secure, so the short report was printed and electricians had to sign it to show they had tested it, after the foreman was caught altering last years entries to make it look as if they had all been retested by the same electrician as last year.

I never trust computer records, just too easy for some one to alter them, or incorrectly enter them with wrong name for example. However although it may look OK to me, I am sure there is some meta data that the HSE can find that would show some one had been altering records.

 

[SimonH2]

... foreman was caught altering ...

A friend of mine was contracting at a well known nuclear site a few years ago, working for one of the electrical contractors there. When it came round to PAT testing time, the manager didn't want to pay my mate weekend rates to do it. He got back after a short break to find new test labels on equipment with HIS name on them.
After informing a more senior manager that a) my mate could prove he wasn't on site when these devices had supposedly been tested by him, and b) he was going to report it to HSE ... my mate got told to do some weekend overtime and retest everything. The issue of not wanting to pay weekend rates for it never came up again while he was working there

And at a previous employer, we used a lot of water for process heating and cooling - and periodically had it tested and dosed for legionella control. Every time the maintenance manager went to get the order signed, the factory manager would question if it was needed - but quickly signed when reminded of a local outbreak that resulted in 7 deaths.