Thanks @Andrew_Gabriel, and also @Laura_Sorensen for your insights. It’s distressing if fear of litigation means that people whom I’m sure are perfectly competent and responsible are put off PAT testing. Especially since some commercial PAT testers are “label-slappers” who don’t do a proper job (for instance, I’ve seen wrong fuses and poor wiring in plugs that the last PAT tester had clearly never opened).
It’s long been a beef of mine that there’s a lot more to electrical safety than PAT covers. That’s certainly true if an appliance is old (maybe a modern version would have extra safety features) or has been repaired.
But it applies to new items too. For instance, working on a lamp that came into our repair café I’ve just fitted an LED driver I bought from Amazon. It looks quite well built – onboard fuse, decent upstream EMI filter, good separation of the high- and low-voltage sections. But I’m fairly sure the blue “safety” capacitor the vendor highlights is the usual 1 kV type, not a proper class X/Y as I guess it should be. And then scrolling down the reviews I see that someone bought one that blew up.
So, two questions. First, am I being overly cynical about the limits of PAT testing? Does the C&G qualification give a decent background in electrical safety that goes beyond the basics of how to identify and test the various appliance classes?
Second, does anyone have policies on how they source spare parts, or things they won’t touch? At our organisation we’ve cautiously worked on a few e-bikes and scooters, for instance. Then the other day we had a big battery (96 x 21700 cells) with very poor spot-welding straight from the manufacturer. It will haunt me for the rest of my days.
There’s always a risk that someone gets sued for something they did perfectly correctly, but won’t be able to afford to defend themselves. So the risk isn’t just doing something incorrectly. I’ve never been involved in the insurance side of Repair Cafes, but having insurance which protects you against this is probably important to protect your volunteers. I suspect the insurer would only protect people who it considers meet some criteria. C&G 2377 is considered by H&S Executive to demonstrate competence with a defined process. That doesn’t mean you have to go that way. The training courses offered by the kit manufacturers are not usually suitable because they’d geared around how to use a specific tester, and actually, the most important parts of a PAT test don’t involve using the tester.
C&G 2377 is split into two parts, actually doing the inspection and testing, and managing the process within an organisation, and these have separate certificates. Usually these are taught on two consecutive days, with the relevant exam at the end of each day. The management side isn’t very relevant to Repair Cafes - it covers things like the legal framework, retest intervals, etc. However, everyone does both as they’re booked as one unit, and there is some overlap. The prerequisites are to know how to wire a plug, understand ohms law, and know the difference between milli and mega. (Strangely, it tends to be the electricians on the courses who struggle the most.) You are not expected to be a qualified electrician - indeed it was originally envisaged that any reasonable sized office would likely have one member of staff who already had the prerequisite skills and could be trained and get the certificate. As I said, there’s been talk recently of revamping this though.
Ending up with label stickers in companies is common, and that’s because whoever is managing the process inside a company doesn’t know what they’re doing, and hired a bunch of cowboys. When I was at a company subcontracting a load of PAT testing, we said each tester had to bring their own C&G 2377 certificate on the first day - very few electricians have been trained or certified as PAT testers.
I get a lot of spare parts from AliExpress. This is all likely to come to an end when the government removes the de minimis customs exclusion from import duty, and imposes the new UK customs clearance charge (as per the last budget). Then many of the things I currently repair will become uneconomic to repair. Also bare in mind many Amazon items come this way too, they will also vanish. This is something the repair organisations should be taking up. It’s not actually the import duty, or possibly the UK customs clearence charge, but it’s the charge the couriers make to collect those payments which will make the items too expensive, and anyone who thinks ERVi would ever manage to handle this without losing even more items has no experience of EVRi.
In terms of banned things, these are things various different repair cafes ban that I can think of:
Microwave ovens - never permitted to remove the top cover, or any door repairs such as the hinges or latch or interlock switches, or anything else which would require testing for microwave leakage afterwards. (You can replace the turntable motor from the underside if this can be done without removing the top cover or the door).
Any item with a fuel tank (such as a petrol engine) even if the tank is empty.
Electric Blankets.
Illegal blades.
Cane Furniture (no idea why)
industrial devices
3 phase power tools
mobile phones
Items which might contain asbestos or other dangerous materials
Items which are grossly dirty (e.g. unwashed kitchen appliances, unemptied vacuum cleaners, etc).
Items which are too large or heavy to safely handle at the event.
Alterations to clothing size.
These are ones I haven’t seen any rule about, but should probably be added to the list:
Any Lithium battery intended to run a motor vehicle such as a bike, scooter, mobility chair, etc. must not be brought indoors. (Might impose a maximum energy capacity, as airlines do.) Some sites might consider repairing such items outdoors with extra risk assessment, or repairing the items indoors if the batteries are never brought indoors, and then tested outdoors with extra risk assessment.
Anything containing a transmitter or laser above milliwatt levels, or any ionising source (UV or X-rays, or any radioactive substance, old clocks/watches/dials with radioactive luminous displays, BT Trimphones, etc).
Any safety-critical appliance (e.g. medical appliance, fire or smoke detection, etc).
Most of the things on this list seem sensible, for example our insurance specifically forbids us from repairing petrol or gas powered items.
But I’m confused why alterations to clothes sizes should be problematic, or cane furniture!!
And why not repair electric blankets? We’ve repaired a fair number, most often a thermal fuse in the controller, a cheap and easy fix with little risk imo.
Our stitchers object to alterations, arguing that it’s a bit of a cheek for people to buy a wrong sized item then expect us to resize it, which seems to have happened once or twice. I’ve pushed back, saying if an item is going to be thrown away because the owner has gained or lost weight, is that any different to an item that will be thrown away because it needs repair? But they say there are professional people who will do alterations. Yes, but at a cost, though we can’t judge whether someone is needy, on a tight budget and couldn’t afford it.
Cane furniture - no idea. Electric blankets, yes, I can understand. Any chance of it becoming live or catching fire, and it’d be worse than a bad dream! The risk from changing a thermal fuse is fairly low, though are you absolutely sure it’s the right temerature rating? Did it come from some unknown source in China? (Why is there a thermal fuse in the controller anyway? It shouldn’t be dissipating any heat.) I guess the controller might often also include a Class X2 capacitor, and you could get a reliable replacement for that from RS or Farnell. Minimal risk there, provided you can avert all risk of it coming apart (inadequately glued back together?) and exposing live parts.
Good point. Unfortunately the (perfectly respectable) insurance policy for our repair café is worded so generally that I’m sure the insurer could wriggle out of practically any difficult situation we might find ourselves in. We’ll continue to work in good faith and do our best.
That will certainly be a shame, though for me AliExpress is more often a source of tools than of spares. See also Philip’s comment about thermal fuses. A while back I I sourced a Chinese power supply board for a thermoelectric fridge. It was pretty horrible, and I can only hope that when it fails it will do so safely. But the board it replaced looked equally dubious, so what does one do?
I can see why most of those might raise red flags at least some of the time. But rather than blanket bans, our approach is simply to use common sense and let our volunteers do what they’re comfortable with. We don’t currently have anyone who’s willing to work on petrol engines, for instance, and we certainly wouldn’t do that indoors, but if someone has the skills and a safe working area, why not?
I’d have been wary of electric blankets, not that we’ve ever been asked to repair one, but it’s interesting to know that they can sometimes be fixed. And I reckon a look over to check for fraying and other damage would be well worth doing. We certainly sometimes tell customers that their items are unsafe, can’t be fixed, and they probably shouldn’t continue to use them. I think it’s a big part of the service.
In principle we don’t take jobs that can be done by a local professional who does it for a living, and that’s one of our few actual rules. It certainly applies to quite a few sewing jobs. But in practice that can depend on how busy we are, whether the customer can afford a professional repair, and so on. One of our stitchers lined a pair of curtains the other day, which I thought was maybe pushing it a bit.
At Fleet Repair Cafe, recently had a vacuum cleaner come in. Bag wasn’t fitted correctly and loose in the cavity, and the whole cavity was jam packed full of dog hair and a cloud of dog dander (and possibly worse) came out when it was opened. Could be quite an issue for anyone who was allergic. I’d just been given a nice piece of home made cake (a nice feature of that Repair Cafe), and I couldn’t face touching it after being contaminated with dog detritus. It’s different if a hose or pipe which is blocked - that may not be obvious, but emptying the dust bag/compartment is pretty basic.
At one of the very early Restart events in London, I recall a guy coming in with a small radio he used with ear pieces. I opened it, and loads of little insects came running out. I pushed it away out of revulsion and he said, “Oh yes, I see those in my flat”. A terrible urge to have a shower and burn my clothes came over me…
Had many kitchen appliances with enough old food or grease stuck to the insides, that you could generate a meal without adding any new ingredients, not that I’d eat anything prepared in them.