How many hands can I see for “safety device”? Now, how many of you say – no, an e-stopping device is not a safety device? I see! So the room is practically divided into two camps. One of the camps has several individuals that sit on safety standards committees and others who are suppliers of e-stopping devices. You guys have ...

Tolerable risk is the term used for the past several years referring to a level of residual risk for a given hazard after applying risk reduction measures. ANSI B11.TR3; 2000 further defines tolerable risk as: Risk that is accepted for a given task and hazard combination [hazardous situation]. However, as more focus continues to be directed at ...

I often hear discussions about NFPA 79 (Electrical Standard for Industrial Machinery) having more importance than the ANSI B11 series of machine tool standards. Conversely, there’s an equal if not larger camp of user’s that profess the ANSI B11 series as “the rule of the land” inferring that NFPA 79 takes a back seat to ...

Yes it’s true, Europe has started a two year phase out of the risk categories; B, 1, 2, 3, & 4 as established by EN 954:1996 and hence referenced in numerous US based standards such as NFPA 79, ANSI B11, S2, ANSI B155.1, etc. to name a few. A  European standard, EN ISO 13849-1:2006, has recently been approved announcing a new system ...

A while back I had an interesting conversation with a well respected burner management (BMS) expert, Mr. Mike Scott from AESolutions.  We were chatting about the requirements for PLC based BMS systems, and what the latest release of NFPA standards (NFPA 85 and NFPA 86) mandate.Something that we found quite interesting was with NFPA 86 -2007 - ...