Understanding Critical Components

Learning Critical Components in Product Safety Certifications can be difficult. CEO of Product Safety Consulting, John Allen, breaks down why they are important, the difference of a listed product vs recognized components, UL vs CSA vs ETL, and much more. Understanding Critical Components Hi! I'm John Allen, president and CEO of Product Safety Consulting. Thank you for joining our first video in a series of videos we're coming up with to help engineers understand product safety and certifications. Today's discussion is on critical components. It's really important to understand critical components. There's a lot of Idiosyncrasies that are tested to different standards. We hear a lot. All our components are UL, so I should be fine getting certification, and that's just not always the case. We're going to help you understand all of that so that when you go into purchasing, you're much more confident. You go into production, you're much more confident. And when you get to the submittal, you get through first time through. So what's the difference between a listed product and a recognized component? A listed product is that that stands by itself. It operates on its own a TV, a VCR, a computer. A recognized component is just that. It's a component of a system, a switch, a circuit board, wiring, terminal blocks. Listed products get the UL mark in a circle. Recognized components get that backwards UR. Of course, there are other certification bodies that issue certifications. UL, CSA, and ETL are the big three, we call them. What's important to understand, though, is they don't accept each other's data. Most certification bodies will accept the UL recognized component mark, but if you're a component manufacturer, you really need to understand which certification body that you need to go to. I also wanted to bring up unlisted components. If your critical component does not have certification, we could still test it in the end product and on the bench. And we call that unlisted component. We'd be remiss. Not to mention all the NRTLs nationally recognized testing laboratories. If you Google OSHA NRTL, you'll see them all. The ones on the slide here are not all of them. They're great companies to work with, great engineers to work with. But they are certification bodies, and it's a total conflict of interest for a certification body to offer advice on how to change your product in order to get their mark. We are a consultancy. We don't issue certifications. We can do the consulting. That's enough for the commercial and back to components. All components have c of a's Conditions of acceptability. We call it C of A's. Common ones are use the product within its electrical ratings. Is it good for outdoor, or does it have to stay indoor? If I'm using polymeric materials, there's a bunch of C of A's relative temperature index. If I'm in direct contact with live parts, that material has to have electrical properties like HAI, HWI. So how do I find these C of A's? Well, you know what, guys? Lean on your suppliers. Your supplier should have no problem telling you what are the C of A's for his component to be used in your end product. That's not confidential information at all. UL, however, does have a phenomenal database that we're going to go to in a minute. And I just want to show you. We're going to talk about sleeving because we see a lot of mistakes with that. We're going to talk about tubing, and we're going to talk about terminal blocks. You can see here the sleeving. Before we go to UL's website, this particular sleeving is being used to hold these wires together. But guess what? I could slide it up to touch that circuit board. So there's two different types of sleeving. We're going to go to UL's website. We have a video for UL's website, but we don't want to do that today. Of course, we have a separate video on how to navigate it. We're going to log in. We're going to type in sleeving. You can see coded electrical or flame retardant. Now, remember our example. I'm going to go to the flame retardant one. And when you do learn about UL's website and the database, always go to the guide card. The guide card is like the Bible. Here's the conditions of acceptability for this particular category, but check this out has not been investigated for electrical and mechanical properties. So the application in our situation, that is unacceptable, and you would not get certified. Not only would you not get certified, but you wouldn't find that out until the 11th hour. You need to understand these things before you go to your certification process.... Website: https://www.productsafetyinc.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/SafetyTesting LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/productsafetyconsultinginc