International Electrotechnical Commission

This episode's ID is 508586.

IEC cables terminate, split, or extend.

Listen to the whole show at stream.myweirdprompts.com.

This episode was generated using artificial intelligence.

He's not wrong about the clover one being a trap.

He's got four questions.

First, is it viable to terminate these cables yourself? Because you never know how long you need until you've got a coil of excess on the floor, and if the answer is yes, what's the cable actually called, and what's its typical specification? Second, is there any practical difference between going direct from the UPS to a grounded device with an IEC cable versus using one of those IEC-to-plug adapters, assuming the adapter carries the grounding pins? He says a C13-to-Israeli plug adapter costs about a dollar.

The purist in him wants one connection wired straight back to the IEC, and he's not sure there's any logic behind that.

Glass is relatively easy to recover and recycle, while silicon is tricky.

Tony Sample, who chairs the IEC Technical Committee for Solar PV Systems, has put it bluntly.

It is easy to meet targets by recycling aluminum frames, cables, and glass.

The difficult part is the module itself.

Wind and solar remain fundamental tools for countries trying to meet net-zero emission targets.

The question is whether the industry treats asset lifecycle as a central design constraint.

In wind, IEC 604.28 sets out minimum requirements to extend the life of wind farm assets safely.

That is a concrete move toward keeping equipment operating longer rather than prematurely retiring it.

As voltage goes up, the propensity for that arc to leap across the surface of the polymer increases exponentially.

So if I'm a design engineer looking at a supplier spec sheet trying to prevent this, why does it matter if I'm looking at the IEC test standard versus the ASTM rating for CTI? I mean, aren't they measuring the exact same physical phenomenon?

Oh, this is a trap I see engineers fall into constantly.

What, really? Yeah.

The standards are distinct, and they test the material's limits very differently.

The IEC 60112 standard, which is mandatory for the European market, is noticeably more demanding— than the ASTM D3638 standard typically used as a baseline in the U.S.

How so?

They use different test solutions and different failure criteria.

The ventricular fibrillation zone.

These numbers became the foundation for UL standards, IEC guidelines, national electrical codes.

Every GFCI outlet in your house, every appliance standard, every electrical code on the planet is built on the assumption that we know exactly where the danger begins.

Dalziel's volunteers gave us that knowledge.

What was your role in brokering that? And more importantly, even then, Who did what? Why that announcement is important to the ecosystem?

So I think ISO and IEC are an amazing home for standards.

There are many great standardization organizations.

It's clear that ISO and IEC and JTC1 is a fantastic place.

Standardization costs money.

and someone has to pay for that money.

Either you pay by spending money to be part of an organization or the organization is funded with taxes, or you pay for standards very literally by having to pony up a fee if you want to access it.

Somehow these standardization processes need to get funded.

The landscape breaks into layers.

At the top, you've got the formal international bodies, ISO, IEC, ITU, then regional bodies like CEN in Europe, ASTM in the US, which started as a materials testing society and now publishes standards across everything from steel to toys.

Then national bodies, ANSI, BSI, DIN-N, then government and military standards, which is its own universe.

Then industry consortia, ITEE, IETF, W3C, groups that form because the formal bodies are too slow or too generic.

50 to 100? And the fuzziness comes from the nesting! Right.

The ISO is a family.

The IEC is a separate family, but they cooperate closely.

The ITU is another.

So certifications according to ISO 27001 is very good.

Any IEC 62443 certifications are good.

This is like um a very like straightforward approach and if they don't have the certifications because it's just a certifications it just tells you that um some auditor somebody audited you beforehand if that if that is not the case you can also just send them uh our supplier self-disclosure send them any questionnaire on their supplier security and if you don't even trust these documents you can you have still still the uh option to audit them yourself depending on how deeply they're integrated.

Of course, this creates a lot of overhead and a lot of workload, but in the end, it should be really adequate to the relation you have and the depth of integration into your own products, I guess, or services for that matter.

decided that the revision to ISO 9001 needed to happen and they established a working group of experts from over 70 countries or national standards bodies, as well as liaison organizations such as ASQ.

The ISO directives or IEC directives define procedures for drafting and revising international standards.

They include procedures for roles and responsibilities, project stages, the timelines required, such as a three-year requirement, rules for making decisions by consensus, required core text for all management system standards, and other requirements, such as for language translations and formatting, etc.

So, to prepare for this revision, a smaller working group of which I was the secretary drafted a design specification, which was voted on by all the national standards bodies.

So the revision was approved and then there's a structured path from early drafts to publication.

Can you maybe walk through that revision process a little bit?

Okay, so the ISO IEC directives have rules and procedures for the typical project stages for completion within three years.

And so it starts off with a working draft, then a committee draft is the next stage, then a draft international standard, and then finally the final draft international standard and publication.