Hello group, It seems to me that the article in Washington Post, was written by someone who really had not done their homework. It sounded as the article was criticizing UL for not doing proper testing or not being able to write their standards adequately. Like most of the people in the group, I am certainly not a fan of UL for various reasons that are outside the scope of this particular subject, but one has to remember that almost majority of the standards are written with manufacturers directly involved during the generation of the standard. Obviously those of us who are being represented in various standard committee we who are responsible for writing the standard, try to influence the standard as much as we can in our industry favor and test houses such as UL, CSA , BSI, more or less go along with it. As for testing is concerned, all UL engineers as well as their counterparts in other test houses only test the product to the clauses of the standard and they are not allowed to go any further. On top of that, the way that any of these standard are written it is widely open to interpretation so we as test engineers always try to argue with the test house engineer to try to avoid any failure. Another point to bear in mind is that the test house engineers are only human like the rest of us and can make mistake or even overlook at some points. Last but not least, most of us have seen a certified product been slightly modified/altered by someone in our company for an unknown reason and still bears the safety mark without even informing any of the test houses concerned . So I believe we should look at the root casue of the problem and try to improve the situation by (a) be honest with the test houses during testing. (b) by trying to encourage our designers to make the product almost fool proof. © do addition in-house testing that exceeds the requirements of the standard (d) by being a truly responsible manufacturer.
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