Do you have a burning issue you'd like to discuss on Voltimum and to your industry peers? Get it off your chest and give us an email. This month's letter is from Technical Services Manager, Ewhen Kochan.
Regulations have always been a common gripe in the electrical industry and continue to be more so today than ever. How often do we hear, “What, again? They’ve only just gone through a change not so long ago.” There are lots of drivers for change, not one of them a need to make money off the backs of hard working electricians by changes in regulations.
Like it or not, we live in an international society where we need to exist with our neighbours and vice versa. The 16th edition started the process of “harmonisation” and the 17th is just the next step along the path of harmonisation. The ultimate aim is for contributory countries to speak the same technical language without fear of misunderstanding or ambiguity.
“Why do they need to keep changing things?” That’s called progress. Progress is often driven through technological change which itself is utilised for primarily safety reasons but also for reasons of simplicity and ease of use. The recent adoption of the RCBO, or RCD with an MCB stuck on, has been met by the usual clamour of, “the customer will never pay for something that expensive, especially when the alternative is a fraction of the price”.
How much did a flat screen TV cost when it was first introduced to the market? An inordinate amount of money. Today, in comparison, credit crunch and market forces aside, that TV will be considerably less than it was originally. The same will happen with the RCBO. Its adoption and widespread use will drive the cost down, and as a spin off, make the electrician’s work much easier.
Ok, so legislation and regulation as well as technological advances have driven the change to the 17th edition, “how am I supposed to deal with it?” I hear people ask me every day. “The training courses are expensive”, is another argument. Poor old electrician. Take a look at the gas engineers. They have to study for a “core” safety unit, rather like the five yearly JIB/ECS safety assessment as well as any other units they may work with in their job.
Take a typical gas engineer, who would typically work on gas meters, gas fires, gas cookers, gas combi-boilers. There are four types of appliance, add the core unit and that means the gas engineer will be shelling out for all five modules just to stay legal and “competent. Or more appropriately, to stay out of prison. What makes it worse, in the eyes of the electrician, is that the gas engineer has to do this every five years.
Poor old electrician? Think again. As to the cost of courses and new technology, if cost is an issue as it is for many one-man-bands, do what everybody else does, pass the cost onto the customer. “How am I supposed to fit this new fangled piece of technology?” Well, if you were a gas engineer, that wouldn’t be a problem. You would need to keep abreast of such issues to be able to pass the course, during which you would become familiar with any new technology in use.
The awarding bodies are not interested in tripping you up because you know what you have been doing has been right for thirty years. No, they are only ensuring that you remain safe. Safe to install the equipment and circuits and safe to maintain and test.
Courses like the 17th edition are designed to test an electrician’s ability to locate and understand new information. “I know what I am doing.” Nobody doubts that, what they want to know is how you would cope with an item of new equipment in a location that was once subject to the general regulations, which has now been changed to a special location. Why it has been changed is not the issue, how to keep it safe, is.
Another common problem is the failure to understand that examinations must be time constrained. Most engineers will eventually arrive at the correct answer, but not in the allotted time. Most courses are delivered under financial and logistic constraints, but most are also delivered as “there’s the book, the answers are all in there somewhere.”
Candidates should be taught content and underpinning knowledge as well as what the correct answer is. They should also be taught technique, which is often frowned upon as unnecessary and prescriptive. Would you rather know how best to pass or would you rather get every single answer correct, but run out of time. Of course we all want to get every single answer correct as often as we can, but it the real world, the clock keeps ticking.
Change has to come from within, whether that be within the electrician, or the electrical installation industry is immaterial, but it is vital for the industry to keep up with change. Change is all around us, it may be obvious or it may be innocuous, but change will happen irrespective of the driver.
Any engineer irrespective of their field of expertise, must be able to state that they know what they are talking about and to do so honestly, they need to take a look at themselves. They should not be afraid of change, they should embrace it. They should keep up to date with change, read electrically related material. This could be a trade magazine or even a flyer at their local electrical wholesalers.
It really doesn’t matter, what matters is that they are now more up to date than they were before. Training and education need not be expensive at all. We just need to learn to help ourselves. And finally, just to put things in perspective, the time interval between the 12th and the 13th edition of the regulations was just five years, whereas the time interval between the 16th and the 17th was seventeen years. The regulations are just like any other tool in the engineer’s toolbox, look after it and it will serve you well, neglect it and it will let you down. Food for thought indeed.
E Kochan
Technical Services Manager CLM Compliance
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