Friday, May 13, 2011

Varying standards...!

Recently we installed five bays worth of equipment at a big facility - of course we did all the usual; Scope of Works, Method Statement, etc and when we'd finished all the usual test results - particularly electrical safety (since we all live in a 17th Edition world now). Now this machine room (one of several) was more than fifty cabinets and so you'd think they've sorted out all of their standards. However - when were handing over we were met with the following criticisms;
  • "You've mounted all the storage chassis flush with the front of the bays; our standard is that they are proud of the rack-strip". I went around the all other cabinets and they were an almost 50/50 mix of mounted proud and mounted flush...?
  • "You've attached the earthing straps to the front mounting-point of the bay, our standard is to the rear". I went around the all the other cabinets and discovered the only bays in the whole comms room with earthing straps were the ones we'd just installed.
  • "Our standard for PDUs is for 10-amp IEC outlets - even when they're feeding C19 (16A input) equipment, you've installed 16A PowerConn outlet PDUs" - we have to certify what we do to appropriate standards (that pesky 17th Edition again!) - no death-leads when you use us...
So I left confused, they'd taken us on to do a job they clearly didn't want/weren't able to do but they had nothing but ridiculous criticism by the end of the job. There doesn't seem to be any camaraderie amongst engineers anymore.

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