The Importance of Portable Appliance Testing

If you own and run a business with numerous employees that use a number of portable electrical appliances, PAT inspections are not something to be ignored and should be one of your top maintenance concerns at regular intervals. It goes without saying that safeguarding your team from potential electrical disasters is paramount and any neglect can lead to serious incidents or injury, not to mention potential lawsuits and loss of business.

According to The Electricity at Work Regulations 1989, the duty holder must ensure that “All systems shall be maintained so as to prevent, so far as is reasonably practicable, danger”.

The above statement is however, merely a guideline to demonstrate a means to an end, and provides effective proof that regular maintenance was carried out, should the need arise. Strangely enough, there is no actual law that enforces regular inspection and testing of portable electrical items to be carried out at all, only that precautions were made which is a very grey area.

Because of this ambiguity, the industry has recently given rise to a number of cheaper PAT testing offerings and what’s more concerning, a downward slide in the quality and standard of work carried out with notable shortcuts being taken. As tempting as they may seem, cheap PAT testing is not for the faint hearted.

Just by our own observations having checked electrical equipment over they years, we have repeatedly seen a number of concerning incidents of:

• PAT engineers writing and sticking labels to items without any testing at all
• non-portable hard-wired items inappropriately affixed with PAT labels
• sealed plug tops (where fitted) not being removed
• wrong size fuses fitted to plugs
• detachable appliances not separately inspected or tested
• old PAT test labels not being removed causing confusion

One of the key reasons for these alarming developments is the fact that many PAT engineers are paid on a “fixed fee per item tested” basis and thus, only serves to lead them to rushing the testing process to cram as many tests in at any given time.

In such scenarios, quality control and due care and attention gets overlooked. This is a worrying development.