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.