The phone rings on my desk. It’s an engineer from a manufacturing company in Colorado calling to ask for advice. He wants to know if a contactor should be applied to an output circuit to achieve a safe circuit? What’s wrong here? Yea, the first question is where’s the risk assessment? What level of hazard are we dealing with? Is it a Cat. 4 or a Cat. 2? Can you utilize a safety certified drive (according to NFPA 79, 2007) that has the safety circuit designed into the drive? The risk assessment isn’t just an obligation per standards requirements – it’s also a tool to help address these issues and get the answers to the front of the table.

Doesn’t everyone understand this?