Electrical Safety Standards 101: What You Need to Know about NFPA 70B and 70E

Another important aspect of this, you know, and a lot of work that safety professionals do is the record keeping.

And Wes, I'm curious, you know, what maintenance records or documentation from a 70B program are most valuable, you know, for safety professionals to show that they're in compliance with 70E and they're, you know, taking those steps that they should be taking to address these hazards?

Yeah, I think all the safety professionals out there watching this know that in safety world, OSHA world especially, if it's not documented, it never happened.

So no change here with 70B.

It does highlight certain things.

They really focus on what they call conditions of maintenance.

So things like, number one, over current protection device testing and calibration.

So anything that you're doing when you're actually, you know, involves circuit breaker testing, verifying clearing times, aligning to those manufacturer specifications, anything you've done, you want to document that, you know, relay calibrations.

So basically what you're doing is validating that the engineered specs on that piece of equipment, you know, it says written small letters, you're validating that that is what it's still currently able to do, which ultimately, which we've been talking about, then leads to your calculating your incident energy levels.

You know it's going to reliably and predictably operate according to those conditions.

Another thing is the conditions.

We talked about this earlier, the three conditions in there when you're predicting risk level.

We talked about physical condition, criticality of condition, and operating condition.

You want to document all that when you're going through and doing those.

So conditions is another one.

Other ones are one line diagram upgrades.

NFPA 70EE says you have to update your one-line diagram at least every five years We'd recommend any other change that you do in your electrical grid Jordan and I were talking about this earlier that you know how hard it is when you're thinking about doing a lockout tagout program and you're writing a procedure and you have to trace where that circuit goes where's that switch go if you don't have a updated one-line diagram That's the truth of source there.

That's where you go to trace where that circuit is.

If that's not updated, that can make writing procedures a whole lot harder when it comes there.

So you want to make sure you document that.

Any corrective actions that you do.

So if you fix something.

Make sure you record that.

If you fix it, record it.

Another one Jordan mentioned earlier, one of the main requirements in 70B is infrared thermography.

Another important aspect of this, you know, and a lot of work that safety professionals do is the record keeping.

And Wes, I'm curious, you know, what maintenance records or documentation from a 70B program are most valuable, you know, for safety professionals to show that they're in compliance with 70E and they're, you know, taking those steps that they should be taking to address these hazards?

Yeah, I think all the safety professionals out there watching this know that in safety world, OSHA world especially, if it's not documented, it never happened.

So no change here with 70B.

It does highlight certain things.

They really focus on what they call conditions of maintenance.

So things like, number one, over current protection device testing and calibration.

So anything that you're doing when you're actually, you know, involves circuit breaker testing, verifying clearing times, aligning to those manufacturer specifications, anything you've done, you want to document that, you know, relay calibrations.

So basically what you're doing is validating that the engineered specs on that piece of equipment, you know, it says written small letters, you're validating that that is what it's still currently able to do, which ultimately, which we've been talking about, then leads to your calculating your incident energy levels.

You know it's going to reliably and predictably operate according to those conditions.

Another thing is the conditions.

We talked about this earlier, the three conditions in there when you're predicting risk level.

We talked about physical condition, criticality of condition, and operating condition.

You want to document all that when you're going through and doing those.

So conditions is another one.

Other ones are one line diagram upgrades.

NFPA 70EE says you have to update your one-line diagram at least every five years We'd recommend any other change that you do in your electrical grid Jordan and I were talking about this earlier that you know how hard it is when you're thinking about doing a lockout tagout program and you're writing a procedure and you have to trace where that circuit goes where's that switch go if you don't have a updated one-line diagram That's the truth of source there.

That's where you go to trace where that circuit is.

If that's not updated, that can make writing procedures a whole lot harder when it comes there.

So you want to make sure you document that.

Any corrective actions that you do.

So if you fix something.

Make sure you record that.

If you fix it, record it.

Another one Jordan mentioned earlier, one of the main requirements in 70B is infrared thermography.