Dear fellow nuts, just a few days after my last post to this list my boss made me responsible for calibration of electrical measurement equipment in our department. As funny a coincidence that might be - I'd be pretty surprised if he was lurking here - this brought up a few questions where I could use some insight and comments from guys with some more experience in that than I have (which essentially is zero).
Now, as far as I understand, calibration at first sight is merely a comparison between what the meter actually reads and what it is supposed to read. As long as the difference between the two is smaller than what the manufacturer specifies as maximum error, everything is fine, put a new sticker to the instrument and send it back to the owner. Now, as usual the devil is in the details: How to establish what the meter is supposed to read. I'd be pretty surprised if it was as easy as taking two meters and measure the same thing, say, a voltage, simultaneously and compare the readings. Could some of you guys shed some more light on that? Background of my questions is me wondering if it would be feasible to do the calibration in house instead of sending equipment out for calibration. I'm not so much looking for financial savings as I doubt we get to the point where running our own calibration would be cheaper than contracting it out, even though we have on the order of fifty multimeters and about as many voltage sources listed, and probably some more sitting in some cupboards without being listed. I'm rather looking for convenience, as it is often difficult to arrange in advance when to calibrate what and send everything in time. With the possibility in house we could do calibration whenever we like, and whenever equipment is not in use, and not having to ask a commercial calibration lab to calibrate a few dozen more or less complex devices within two weeks maintenance break in summer. And not needing to ship equipment out would be a plus as well as some of our guys don't like the idea to send a few hundred kilo euros worth of equipment around just to get a fancy new sticker on it... Best regards, Florian _______________________________________________ volt-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://lists.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volt-nuts and follow the instructions there.
