Arc Flash Articles

As the leaders in electrical safety for businesses, Facility Results’ goal is to provide Arc Flash Articles to keep you and your team safe while you’re on the job. We achieve safety through our Arc Flash training, NFPA 70E training, Arc Flash data collection software, and our many online Arc Flash articles and resources for business owners and electricians.

Our Arc Flash articles and safety articles can be used as resources for all businesses that work closely with electrical equipment. We want to provide you with the most basic information to allow you and your team to determine whether you’ll need further training. Arc Flash articles cover topics such as proper attire, Arc Flash analysis, OSHA and glove care. You’ll also be able to readily provide safety articles and documents that correspond with Arc Flash and NFPA 70E training.

Find the answers to all your unanswered Arc Flash questions with our articles and documents.

Open the Door to Opportunity through Arc Flash Data Collection

By Bryan Rupert

An arc flash analysis (AFA) spans a number of tasks, most of them performed by electricians and professional electrical engineers. Data collection—the first phase of an AFA—must be performed by a qualified worker, most appropriately a licensed electrician. Most companies and organizations look to outside contractors to provide AFA services in general, including the data collection. As an electrical contractor, you may be considering branching out into this growing and lucrative field. Here you can read about how to propose a project scope, how to price the project, and how to discover other opportunities that result from data collection. For an overview on the different roles involved in an AFA, from beginning to end, refer to “Arc Flash Analysis: A Basic Project Overview for Electrical Contractors” in the May 2015 edition of Electrical Products & Solutions™.

Preparing the project scope

It’s important to do an accurate job defining the scope of a data collection project before you attempt to quote the work. When defining the scope, you have the opportunity to approach the data collection portion of a client’s AFA request in phases, which can help you manage your work schedule and help your clients feel more in control of their budgets. In addition, your approach can differentiate you from other contractors who only consider quoting a complete site.  You can define the scope of the project based on different criteria. Here are a few logical criteria to use as a basis for defining scope:

Voltage class: Depending on the number of voltage levels in a facility, you may want to define the project parameters based on voltage class. For example, Phase I might span from 15 kV down to 600 V class equipment, Phase 2 from 600 V to 300 V, and Phase 3 for everything under 300 V.

Equipment type: Sometimes it makes sense to define your scope based on equipment type. An example of this might be defining a phase that starts at the utility transformer and goes up to the busway or 800 amp distribution panels. The next phase might be from the busway to the floor equipment it feeds, or from the 800 amp panel to the lighting panel or other loads the panel feeds.

Number of points: If your pricing is point-based, a client may simply choose to scope the project based on the number of points that will work with his/her budget at the time.

Pricing the project

The two most common pricing models for arch flash projects are based on time and materials or cost-per-point.  There’s a tendency, especially if you’re new to this type of project, to want to price it the “safe” way—based on time and materials. While time and materials presents the least risk to you as a contractor, it will be a hard sell to your client.  Clients need cost parameters; they seldom will approve any job carte blanche.  In addition, contractors familiar with arc flash analysis know from experience that the time and materials model can limit profitability. Consider this example (using basic figures for simplicity):

HOURLY RATE                                                   PER-POINT RATE

Rate                                               $100 per hour                                                       $25 per point

Avg points collected                    6 per hour                                                       6 per hour

Total for 8-hour day                    $800                                                       $1200

The rule of thumb is that an experienced qualified worker can collect, on average, four to six points an hour—35 points a day at an average facility.  Consider that the more familiar you become with performing data collection, the faster you’ll get. Using a per-point model, you’ll stand to come out ahead as you become faster at data collection.

As you set your rate for either type of pricing, remember to account for overhead costs. The most basic tools required for AFA data collection are pen and paper. Realistically though, you’ll want to have a spreadsheet tool at a minimum. If you want to be more competitive, consider introducing into your process a data collection software tool, like FlashTrack™, which was designed to assist electricians in collecting the vital information needed for an arc flash analysis, short-circuit calculation, or coordination study.

In the case of setting per-point pricing, since you won’t be billing an hourly rate, remember to account for the cost of having an electrician on-site, including travel time, set-up time, and the planning time that went into the project.

When estimating your time for the project, remember to set an expectation with your client that the project size can change.  When you visit a site in preparation for quoting a job, you don’t always get the complete picture. During a facility tour, you’re typically not going to open enclosures to see what’s inside.  The fact is, points exist within points.  For example, a power distribution panel or motor control center (MCC) may have a protective main, which would be two points.  Or perhaps you’re quoting based on an “as-built” one-line for the facility. (Always keep in mind that as-built one-lines never represent reality.) Either way, the number of points can often turn out to be higher than you originally thought.  Therefore, it’s always a good idea to make an allowance for providing a Project Change Notice later to account for additional points not contained in the original estimate.

Receipt of order

When branching out into this growing, lucrative market, it’s likely you’ll need to spend considerable time planting seeds for new business before you get your first contract. You may be pleasantly surprised to find an occasional client who has budgeted funds “shovel ready.” But it’s more likely that, regardless of whether the project scope is 80 points or 800 points or more, you may have to wait months or even years to hear back that an order has been approved. When you do hear back, especially when a year or more has passed, be sure to review your original estimate with the client to account for any site changes. You’ll also want to account for any price increases that may affect your original estimate.

Data collection as a bridge to new opportunities

Don’t forget about other opportunities tied to the arc flash study data gathering.  As an electrician performing data collection, you have a unique perspective for identifying additional opportunities to assist your client with electrical needs.

Site Training: When it comes to electrical safety, qualified workers are required to be trained. OSHA and the NFPA 70E standard stipulate that businesses must have a written safety program and training shall be provided at least every three years. Even unqualified workers are required to be trained on electrical hazard awareness and symbol recognition. As an electrical contractor familiar with your client’s electrical system, with the right training, you can help to train those workers. The best safety training programs are site-specific and focus on practical application for the qualified worker. If you intend to branch out into electrical safety site training, it is not enough to sit and read the training standards to your students. Design the training program to be useful and effective. Done correctly, the training should be able to be accomplished in four hours or less. Training of qualified workers should include, but not be limited to:

• Understanding how to interpret label data
• Inspecting and caring for personal protective equipment (PPE)
• Field inspecting and testing gloves—the correct processes and intervals—and dielectric glove testing requirements
• Evaluating risk associated with the tasks at hand

Code Violations: You’re bound to come across code violations during data collection. It’s extremely rare to complete data collection without identifying any electrical code violations. In fact, in October 2014, OSHA cited electrical-related violations in three of its TOP TEN Most Frequently Cited Violations.¹ Specifically, these included Lockout/tagout (#6), Electrical: wiring (#8), and Electrical: system design(#10).  Not surprisingly, number two on the OSHA list was Hazard communication. All of these point to arc flash data collection as an opportunity to identify future opportunities for performing repairs to ensure worker safety and the integrity of the electrical system.

Mitigation/Coordination: As an electrical contractor, mitigation and coordination can also open doors to new business. Early in the arc flash study, determine if your clients are more interested in equipment reliability (coordination) or life safety and equipment protection (mitigation). Examples of sites that focus on coordination are data centers, research and development labs, and defense contractors. Examples of sites more interested in mitigation are manufacturing facilities and office buildings. Ensuring your client sites conform to their needs—whether coordination or mitigation—can lead to additional income opportunities.

Managing Change:  OSHA isn’t going away. Considering that every facility is dynamic, updates will always be necessary. The NFPA 70E standard stipulates that an arc flash analysis requires periodic review and updating during a timeframe that is not to exceed five years, or more frequently if the system is modified. Use this as an opportunity to set up a regular schedule with your client to update their one-line diagrams and labeling. It’s not cost effective to be called out every time the client reports a single change. Instead set a reasonable threshold for visiting after a recognized minimum number of changes.  Based on the rule of thumb that a qualified worker can collect at least 35 points a day, consider re-visiting after 15 or 30 point changes, thus ensuring at least one-half to one full day’s work. In a perfect world, your clients would contact you when they’ve added or subtracted components. But the reality is, you’ll most likely need to contact them to remind them of the need to update their study.

Maintenance:  The NFPA 70E and the NFPA 70B standards stipulate that maintenance is required for equipment directly associated with employee safety. Performing arc flash studies also leads to maintenance opportunities, especially for infrared and ultrasonic testing. As a field electrician, you’ll be close enough to identify some loose connections or see obvious signs of electrical tracking.  Any anomalies should be recorded and documented during the data collection phase. These visual observations should also be reported in the final Arc Flash Analysis report. Later, you may have the opportunity to, at a minimum, return and do a thorough pass using infrared and/or ultrasonic testing.

Data collection is only one part of the arc flash analysis process—but it’s a critical part. When it’s done well, not only does it provide your client with the basis for completing a successful AFA, it also has the potential to protect your client from unnecessary risk. In addition, doing a good job with data collection can lead to additional revenue opportunities for electrical contractors.

¹“Top Ten Most Frequently Cited Standards,” OSHA, October 28, 2014. https://www.osha.gov/Top_Ten_Standards.html

 

Arc Flash Analysis: A Basic Project Overview for Electrical Contractors

By Bryan Rupert

For those contractors who are considering undertaking an arc flash analysis for a client, the process can be daunting. An arc flash analysis is initiated to evaluate the potential incident energy of an arc flash occurrence. Companies use the findings from an arc flash study to set arc flash protection boundaries and to help prevent injury by designating the appropriate level of personal protective equipment (PPE) required to interface with a particular electrical circuit or conductor.

Here we’ll cover the basics, enough to get you started on assessing your suitability for performing the study. The goal is to provide you with enough basic information to determine where you may need more training and when it makes sense to subcontract parts of the study to more knowledgeable and experienced electrical safety workers, electricians, and/or engineers.

Important Questions for Scoping the Project

As with most any project, an arc flash analysis begins by determining the scope of work. When you work with client companies to define scope, it’s important to ask these three questions:

• Will we be breaking the project down based on equipment voltage levels? Any facility could potentially have three or four voltage levels, or more, so a project could be scoped based on those levels. For example:
  • 15 kV to 600 V.
  • 600 V to 300 V.
  • Under 300 V.
• Will we proceed through small transformers? Two things to consider when making this decision:
  • Keep in mind that “small” is relative, and the client’s decision can have a profound effect on cost.
  • In addition, a circuit feed from a single transformer equal to or smaller than 112.5 kVA @ 208V is currently exempt from arc flash engineering studies, although this may be changing. Refer to IEEE 1584, published in 2002, for current information.
• Will the project be rolled out in phases? If so, where does each phase start and end.

Estimating Points

When you’re ready to estimate the number of points in the study, it’s important to clearly define terminology. For our purposes, a single, electrical data-collection point includes feeder wires, protected devices, and the load—in other words, one complete circuit that requires a label.  Although point count figures prominently in the estimating of a project’s cost and time, keep in mind that actual point count will most likely change by the end of the data collection process; therefore, it’s important to keep your estimate flexible to allow for additional points discovered during data collection.

Gather as much point information as possible up front to ensure accurate project estimating. The value of a thorough walkthrough with a knowledgeable person from the client site cannot be overstated.  In addition to the walkthrough, the following can also assist in scoping the number of points in an arc flash study:

• Evaluating an existing one-line diagram of the facility.
• Reviewing an asset list and/or floor plans that include electrical distribution.
• Studying diagrams or lists for a building with a similar footprint.
• Researching historical electrical maintenance reports.
• Reviewing existing photos of electrical distribution.

Data Collection

Data collection refers to the start of the field work portion of the arc flash analysis process.  It involves locating and identifying electrical data collection points by a qualified data collection worker. This person should be familiar with the design and construction of the electrical equipment in the facility and knowledgeable about the level of risk associated with the equipment and the appropriate PPE required to mitigate that risk.  A rule of thumb in the industry stipulates that a qualified worker should be able to collect at least 35 points a day in an “average facility”—roughly four points an hour. Recognize, though, that it is more complicated to collect data and rate arc flash potential in facilities like hospitals and other vital installations that require maintenance staff to service equipment without powering it down.

Following are suggestions for implementing a successful data collection effort:

• Use available tools for performing data collection. Examples include:
  • Templates or spreadsheets that are available online or on paper.
  • Software tools designed for data collection (like FlashTrack®).
• Log all point data in a neat and uniform manner.
• Collect photos of each point, including existing nameplate information from the device and breaker settings. Although photos are not required, they are considered a best practice in the industry. Photos are especially useful for two reasons:
  • Engineers can more readily evaluate the state of the equipment.
  • Downstream label installation and asset management becomes much easier.
• Create a field one-line diagram or use an area of your template or spreadsheet to establish the relationship between sections of equipment.

Engineering Evaluation and Interpretation

Now, it’s time to hand off to a licensed engineer for evaluating and interpreting the collected data. It’s important that contractors engage experienced and knowledgeable engineers trained in assessing power systems. For this reason, many electrical contractors subcontract this work to appropriate sources.

The licensed engineer is responsible for performing the necessary incident energy calculations and establishing whether each circuit meets the national electric code. These incident energy calculations will be used to determine arc flash boundaries and PPE required at each point location. In my experience, approximately 90 percent of code violations are due to protective devices (i.e., fuses or breakers) being mismatched to the associated wire. Other benefits of the engineering portion of the study include the opportunity to evaluate the equipment’s ability to contain a short circuit and finding hints that the system may have potential coordination issues. These are just a few examples that illustrate why the engineering calculations and findings are crucial to a successful arc flash analysis.

Besides interpreting the data and creating the incident energy calculations, the following also result from engineering collaboration:

• Arc flash one-line diagrams are created, usually with the help of an arc-flash evaluation software program.
• Electricians review the arc flash one-line diagrams for accuracy
• Client representatives review the one-line diagrams for correct nomenclature. (According to code, every point is required to be named.)

Once the client has signed off on the engineering review, an analysis report containing findings and recommendations can be created and you’re ready to print labels for installation. However, an experienced contractor would instead use this time to perform mitigation or coordination, as these activities will most definitely impact the label outcome.

Mitigation or Coordination

Working with the engineering reports, an experienced contractor, typically with the help of engineering, reviews the incident energy levels to determine if they are acceptable and typical for each device in the system.  Depending on the facility type and the purpose of the device, you may arrive at a decision to mitigate the findings—in other words, look for ways to reduce incident energy of an arc flash and thereby increase safety. Or you may choose to completely focus on coordination—protecting wires and devices without regard for life safety.

When mitigating, you might find opportunities to de-energize, if it makes sense, or increase working distance and/or ramp up PPE. Any of these changes will impact label content, thus the reason for delaying label printing and installation until after mitigation.

Label Installation

Once labels are printed, it’s important that they be installed in the correct locations; therefore, the task needs to be assigned to someone familiar with the facility and the equipment. It’s here, during label installation, and also during asset management, that the contractor and the client realize the full benefit of the time taken earlier to photograph and catalog each of the points. Following are standard guidelines and best practices for label installation. (For complete information, refer to the NFPA 70E 2015 electrical safety standard.)

• Affix each label to the appropriate device.
• Place each label so a qualified technician working on the device can easily read the label.
• In addition to the required label information such as date, voltage, highest hazard risk category, etc., as a best practice, you should also ensure that each label contains the following:
  • A name that matches the nomenclature from the arc flash one-line diagram.
  • Glove class.
  • Approach boundary indicators.
  • The name of the upstream protective device.

Training

All of the work that went into collecting, cataloging, mitigating, and labeling points is only useful if your client understands the importance of training qualified workers to read the labels and implement the necessary boundary information and PPE guidelines. Therefore, any thorough arc flash analysis process should include a training program for qualified workers. Per the NFPA 70E 2015 standard, this training must be repeated in intervals not to exceed three years. The program should educate attendees on the guidelines for what constitutes a “qualified” worker and to what extent a worker is considered “qualified.”

• The requirements for being considered a qualified worker:
  • Worker recognizes the degree and extent of an electrical hazard.
  • Worker understands the PPE requirements for performing a task safely.
  • Worker is capable of implementing job planning and preparation steps for minimizing risk.
• Who is not a qualified worker:
  • Someone who does not have the skills and knowledge to operate the electrical equipment.
  • Someone who has not had the training to recognize hazards associated with a particular task or equipment.

Additionally, the client needs to understand the importance of PPE in the safety equation. To assist in that understanding, experienced contractors should collaborate with their clients to determine what level of PPE should be provided to a client’s qualified workers.  PPE decisions should take the following into consideration, within reason:

• The budget limitations of the safety program.
• The incident energy levels contained in the resulting arc flash report.
• The skill levels of the workers involved.

PPE technology changes frequently, so it’s also important for contractors to stay up-to-date on the latest offerings with regard to new products, materials, and fit and to share that information with clients.

When an arc flash analysis is handled well—from project scope through employee training—the contractor and the client can rest easy knowing they’ve done their best to minimize the risks associated with arc flash.  For more information or answers to your questions, feel free to contact us at Facility Results

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