I would like my shop to become UL 508a certified and had a few questions
- How long does the process take if you have qualified personnel?
- What is the cost of becoming certified?
- Is it true that to get certified i have to send my electrician to take a test and then our shop gets certified after he passes?
- Can i put the UL certified sticker on all the panels we make after we are certified and confident meet the requirment?
Thanks!
Adam
Answers.
1. A few months is usually all it takes.
2. You would have to ask UL about this. I think the cost to UL is something like 5 to 10 grand. It will cost you some money internally to set up some kind of system to deal with the way UL wants you to keep records and to add the markings to the panels.
3. I don't know how it is today but it never used to be that way. They have what's called a manufacturer's technical representative. I think every UL panel shop has to have at least one MTR. But it doesn't have to be an electrician. There is no class required to take the test unless you fail it. Then there's like some kind of refresher I think. None of our engineers failed the test so none of them had to take the refresher. My guess is the average panel wirer would have a very difficult time passing the test.
4. The answer to this is both yes and no. There's no reason why you cannot just decide that you are only going to make UL listed control panels. However, if you are making control panels for other people who are designing them and are not aware of the UL requirements it's a good bet that they will miss a lot of stuff, so you will either have to go behind them and clean up their designs or not be able to list the panels.
One requirement that people who aren't real familiar with UL requirements miss is the requirement for a short circuit current rating on panels that have power circuits in them. If you only have control circuits this is not an issue but if you have power circuits you have to have a short circuit current rating. There is a whole 40 or 50 pages I think in the back of the UL standard it tells you how to calculate this. Most of it can be safely ignored if you know what to ignore, but getting your design in line with what u l will accept is not trivial in some cases. Your response might be to just label every panel as 5KA short circuit current rating. However this might be a problem when it gets out in the field. There's also a problem that many people do not understand the short-circuit current requirements at all and trying to train them over the phone is going to be time-consuming.
Basically when you apply the label you are certifying that it meets all the requirements in a 200-page spec. If you don't know what those are, or the guy designing them doesn't know what they are, it's a good bet that you won't meet at least some of them.
And it's a good bet that the panel wirers are not going to catch any of this stuff, or very little of it.
