Hi Gary. You wrote: <Does anyone have a suggestion on the quickest way to meet the Low Voltage directive and ramp quickly up on the IEC1010? Is going to the approval agency the best way the first time around or a seminar instead? >
IEC 1010 and the LV directive is a long involved thing, and I spend much of my time advising people how to deal with it, unfortunately I'm on the wrong side of the Atlantic... What I would say is that 1010 doesn't only relate to Electrical Safety, but is a general standard describing safety in all it's aspects of equipment which is mains powered. I.e., it mustn't be too heavy, have sharp edges, give off fumes, catch fire, break easily, make too much noise, give off bright light, radiate damaging radiation (RF or nuclear), and presumeably if you eat it it shouldn't make you sick! Electrical safety requires either shock protection by double insulation to live parts, or by earthed accessible metal parts, in order to check this the standard consist of a whole load of 'Tests' which must be done and results recorded. Mechanical safety is fairly well described in the standard. What I do is go through the standard and make a list of all the relevant clauses, then make that list into a check list, and use that as the compliance statement. It will take a couple of hoursto comile the list, and allows you to ignore tests which are not relevant, e.g. the standard is very heavy on transformwer safrty, so if your equipment doesn't have transformers you leave all that stuff off of the 'check list'. British Standards have a draft 'Check List' in preparation, but it is incomplete and of course covers everything, including all the stuff not relevant to your equipment. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask. Good Luck, Chris Dupres Surrey UK.
