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Three Different Types of Grounding

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Today I’m going to give you a brief overview of three different types of grounding systems that are important.

A basic representation of a grounding system

These three systems are:

  1. Ungrounded Systems
  2. Resistance Grounded Systems
  3. Solidly Grounded Systems

I’ve already talked a little bit about what grounding is, including giving a brief overview of why we do it and what it’s used for. If you haven’t read that article yet, go give it a read before continuing.
Finished reading about what grounding is? Alright then, let’s get to the meat and potatoes of today’s topic.

Ungrounded Systems

“Whoa, hold on”, you might be thinking, “We just finished reading about how important grounding is for safety! Why would we have ungrounded systems?” The answer is that we shouldn’t really have ungrounded systems, but they do exist and they do have their purposes.
You see, an ungrounded system isn’t really ungrounded. Electrically, your system is connected to ground through the capacitance between the lines and the earth, so you can say that it’s a capacitance grounded system. We just call it ungrounded because of convention, and because there isn’t a direct physical connection between any of your power lines and the ground.

Advantages

There are a few advantages to having an ungrounded system. The first is that since your system is never physically connected to the ground, you have negligible ground fault current. For example, in a 3-phase system, because all of the ground fault current is capacitive, when you have a single line-to-ground fault in an ungrounded system, the current and voltage you would lose is negligible, and is instead carried by the other two lines. This allows you to continue operation unimpeded during a single line-to-ground fault.
The other big advantage is that because of the negligible ground fault current, special ungrounded systems can be used to minimize shock risk to people. An excellent example would be medical equipment in a hospital: a patient is directly connected to the machine, and if a fault were to occur, electricity might be able to flow through the patient and into the ground. Because the ground fault current is negligible in an ungrounded system, no power current will pass from the machine through the patient into the ground.

Disadvantages

Of course, the disadvantages of an ungrounded system are obvious. If there is a fault, you are now using two wires to carry an amount of current that was allotted for three wires: the increase in current and voltage will jack up the heat, and the extra heat will wear out your insulation much faster. Worn out insulation could lead to unnecessary damage to your electrical system, particularly at motors.
The other big disadvantage of an ungrounded system is that it is incredibly difficult and time consuming to locate any faults. Each line must be tested individually, which is a very slow process that completely interrupts service. The opportunity cost of a fault in an ungrounded system is very high.
Ungrounded systems were the norm back in the 40’s and 50’s, but because their disadvantages outweigh their advantages in most scenarios, you won’t see too many new ungrounded systems today.

Resistance Grounding

Resistance grounding is when you have a connection between your neutral line and the ground through a resistor. This resistor is used to limit the fault current through your neutral line: if your voltage doesn’t change, then your current is dependent on the size of the resistor according to Ohm’s law (V=IR).

Advantages Over Ungrounded Systems

Because the current in the neutral is controlled instead of negligible, system overvoltages are also controlled. This reduced current and reduced overvoltage means reduced heat, which keeps the wear and tear of your electrical system to a minimum. This is especially important for keeping your motors safe, since the reduced current will not damage the magnetic iron of the motor (which is costly to repair). The reduced currents also reduce the risk of shock and arc flash/blast hazards.
There are two types of resistance grounding: high resistance grounding and low resistance grounding.

High Resistance Grounding

High resistance grounding is typically used to limit ground fault current to < 10 amps. The low ground-fault current also means that, just like an ungrounded system, you can continue to operate the system on a single line-to-ground fault. The low current will typically not trip your protective devices during a single line-to-ground fault.
Overall, you want to use high resistance grounding when you need low fault current and still want to operate with a single fault. High resistance grounding is typically seen in retrofits of previously ungrounded systems in addition to new systems.

Low Resistance Grounding

Low resistance grounding typically limits ground fault current to between 100 and 1000 amps. This offers a similar advantage to high resistance grounding in that you can control the ground fault current, which means you can design your system to withstand the currents without damage.
Low resistance grounding systems have the benefit of tripping your protective devices when there is a fault. Their purpose is to immediately cut the power to the circuit, and so unlike the high resistance grounding systems, a low resistance grounding system will not maintain operation during a single line-to-ground fault.
Low resistance grounding also reduces overvoltage, and is used in medium voltage systems of 15kV or less, typically where big generators/motors are used.

Solid Grounding

Solid grounding is what you get when you connect your system directly to the ground, without any sort of resistance in the way. The ground is typically connected to the system at a neutral point, like the neutral terminal of a generator or transformer.

Pros and Cons

Solid grounding, like resistance grounding, can greatly reduce overvoltages in your electrical system. However, solidly grounded systems have the potential to have huge amounts of ground-fault current. As a result, solidly grounded systems cannot operate with a ground fault (since all of the current in the system is going from fault to ground).
Solid grounding has two main uses:

  • In systems with voltages of 600V or less, solid grounding can be used if it is not necessary to maintain operation of a faulted circuit.
  • In systems with voltages of 15kV or greater, solid grounding can be used if high ground fault currents are desirable of any reason, such as quick ground fault detection (since the high current will most definitely trip protective devices).

Recap

  • You can use ungrounded systems when you want to have negligible ground-fault current.
  • Resistance grounding offers the advantages of ungrounded systems without the risk of large overvoltages.
  • Solid grounding reduces overvoltages but has high ground-fault currents.

At the end of the day, the type of grounding you use for your system will depend on which type of grounding best suits your needs and budget.

What is Grounding?

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What is grounding in an electrical sense? Anyone with a little bit of a background in electronics will tell you that grounding is something you need to keep your circuit safe and it keeps the electrical parts of your circuit from blowing up. But what is it, exactly?

We see the symbol for grounding all the time, but what does it actually mean?

Grounding is a connection between an electrical circuit and an arbitrary reference point.
Grounding is a method of protecting your electrical system and the people using it from harm by setting a known “reference” point for voltage. When you hear someone mention ground, you should ask them to clarify: is it the reference voltage, or is it earth itself? Or is that both? In order to explain grounding, we need to know a little bit about voltage and current. Before you continue, read our article “What is electricity?” It has a bunch of the background knowledge that I’m going to assume you know when I talk about grounding.

Grounding: A History

The earliest instance of grounding that I can think of is when Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod.

A lightning rod in action

A lightning rod is a metal rod attached to the top of the house,  connected by a wire to another rod stuck in the ground. When lightning would strike, it would seek out the rod (since the rod has a lower resistance than the rest of the house) and electricity would flow into the ground. This prevented houses from burning down when struck by lightning, which can generally be considered a good thing.
If a lightning rod can be seen as the first real instance of grounding, then we can look at grounding as one part of the overall electrical protection system for your circuit. So in order to keep things safe, you need to figure out a way to create a pathway for the electricity to travel that has less resistance than your body, fragile circuit components, and building materials.
In the event that something goes wrong in your circuit for whatever reason, you need to direct the electric current along a very low resistance pathway. We’ve already talked about how to figure out what resistance is, but what kind of wire would have a low enough resistance to draw all the current?

Why not use the ground itself?

Think about it: use the planet earth as a conductor. Not only does the electricity not have very far to go to get in to the ground, but it also has a HUUUUUUUUUGE cross sectional area, meaning it has very, very little resistance. Electrons always want to go to the place of least resistance, which makes going into the ground their favourite place.
The lightning rod used this concept to great effect, and modern day power companies do the exact same thing. This also doubles as a useful way to complete your circuit: by using the earth itself as your ground wire, you can be sure that every point in your circuit (which in this case is the entire power grid) is connected to the same reference point. This means that when we now talk about voltage (for example, the 120V wires in your house) we know that we’re talking about it with reference to the voltage of the ground itself. There are 120V between the wires in your house and the ground you’re standing on, there are 1000kV between the overhead power lines and the ground, etc. What this also means is that the current in your circuit now has a clear and easy return path to its source: the current can just flow into the ground near, for example, your house, and travel back through the ground to the generators in the power plant.

But isn’t the system still unsafe?

You might see the new problem with that: if electrons want to go in to the ground, how do we get them there safely? If you are standing on the ground and you touch a wire with electric current moving through it, won’t the current just go through you and into the ground, instead of going through the wire?
Current flows through all available pathways at once. This means that even if the ground wire path is the least resistive path for current to flow through, you could still harm yourself by adding yourself to the circuit when you touch it (making a path from the wires through you to the earth). Initially, I said that grounding was to keep your circuit safe, and I wasn’t lying to you. The reason grounding keeps the circuit safe is that grounding makes up a part of your circuit’s protection system.
Most circuits are designed so that when there is a fault to ground in the circuit, the majority of the current will flow through this fault, into the ground wire, and into the ground. Because we know where the current will flow, we can put protective devices along the ground path in such a way that as soon as the fault occurs, the protective devices (such as a fuse or a breaker) are tripped very abruptly. When this happens, the complete pathway for the circuit is broken, and current cannot flow. If current can’t flow, we have no voltage difference, and if we have no voltage difference, we have no real danger. This is the most common way that grounding protects circuits: it forces protective devices to turn the circuit off ASAP.

A fuse is a protective device that gets destroyed when too much current goes through it, cutting off power by breaking the circuit

In order for grounding to work in tandem with your protection system, you need to know how much current can be expected to flow through your ground wires in the event of a fault. You can figure out what amount of current to expect by performing a protection and coordination study. This will let you pick the appropriately sized fuses or breakers.

Wrap up

In summary, we can think of grounding as a circuit protection technique that doubles as an easy way to measure voltages. Electrical grounding can be:

  • A common point of reference in your circuit that is used to measure all voltages
  • The earth itself, when the common point of reference is stuck into the ground that you walk on
  • A technique used to direct fault current along a low resistance path to protective devices that will immediately turn off your circuit
  • All of the above

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading this article, and now know a little bit more about grounding.
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What is Electricity?

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What is Electricity?

Electricity is everywhere: it powers our homes, our transportation, and our entertainment. Electricity is the reason that you can read this article right now!
But what is electricity?

Besides really freaking cool.

The importance of understanding the basics of electricity (what it is and how it works) cannot be understated. Without understanding electricity, you could not design all of the electrical marvels of technology we have today (from the modern power grid to a cell phone). Even more importantly, you wouldn’t be able to protect yourself from electricity.
So in order to understand how electricity works, I’m going to first talk about the two key components that make up electricity: voltage and electric current.

Voltage

A multimeter can measure voltage, current, resistance, and other electrical properties. It cannot, however, do your homework.

Voltage is the difference in electric potential energy between two points. If you pick a single point on an electrical circuit and ask “How much voltage is here?” the person trying to answer you will probably say “compared to what?” Think of it kind of like distance. If you’re standing at one end of a room and I ask you “How much distance is there?” you’re going to be confused. If I ask you “How much distance is there between you and the other side of the room?” you’re going to tell me that there’s roughly 20 feet between you and the wall.
Voltage works the same way. If you look at two points in a circuit with stuff between them, you can use a multimeter to figure out the voltage.

Electric Current

Current, on the other hand, is harder to explain. Everything in the universe is made up of atoms: the building blocks of life. Atoms have three parts: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons hang out together and form a sort of “core” of the atom, while electrons float around outside this core. In an electric circuit, one electron gets bumped off its atom and moves to a new atom. The new atom doesn’t want too many electrons (it had enough before!) so it kicks off another electron. This happens over and over again millions of times in a circuit, (One amp means roughly 6.24*1018 electrons are going around the circuit every second!)
Electrons moving creates electric current, and electrons only move when there is an electric potential energy difference (voltage) between two points. The electrons are moving to try and bring balance to the system (bring the voltage between two points to zero).
Electrons are, just like that one guy you work with, incredibly lazy: they always want to take the path of least resistance to get wherever they’re going. To an electron, resistance depends on a couple of things: 
Rho is resistivity, a physical constant that changes based on what material the electrons are travelling in. L is the distance the electrons have to travel, and A is the cross sectional area of the medium they’re travelling in. Resistance depends on the mathematical equation shown above. So a really long, thin wire would have a much bigger resistance than a shorter, thicker wire.
Think of electricity like water in a pipe. It’s easier to move water a short distance through a big pipe than it is to move it a long distance through a skinny pipe.

The Danger

As far as electricity is concerned, your body may as well be a glass of salt water

This is where electric current gets very dangerous. Your skin is a great insulator, which means that it has a really high resistance. But the human body itself is a great conductor, which means it has a low resistance. Think about thunderstorms: why is it always safer to be away from the water? Especially salt water? Salt water is a great electric conductor. To electricity, the human body looks like a big bag of salt water: if you can get past the plastic (insulator), you can zip through the water (conductor) to the other side with ease.
When the current moves through your body, it can do a number of things. The heat from all those moving electrons can cause serious internal or external burns. Even worse, the electric current coming into you can interrupt the electric current that keeps your heart pumping!

So how can we keep ourselves safe?

People haven’t been sitting on their haunches for the last 200 years since electricity was discovered. The most common ways of protecting people from electricity involve proper grounding and insulation design, appropriate personal protective equipment, and safe working practices. We’ve come up with things like equipotential zones and isolation transformers that greatly reduce the risk involved with working on or around electric equipment.
These are just a small sample of ways that we stay electrically safe today. What could you do to keep yourself and your designs electrically safe?
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6 Reasons to Have an Electrical Safety Program

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When I first started researching and writing about electrical safety, I didn’t really know what an electrical safety program was or why someone would need it. I had a gut feeling that if you were someone working with electricity, an electrical safety program would keep you safe. I felt like that was enough. However, all safety programs help keep workers safe, so why would a business specifically want an electrical safety program?

Overhead power lines are the number one cause of electrical work fatalities

According to the ESFI, between 2003 and 2010 there were 1,635 workplace fatalities related to electricity in the private industry. Between 2003 and 2010 there were also 20,150 nonfatal electrical injuries involving days away from work in the private industry. Although the number of accidents related to electricity has been dropping steadily every year, the fact is that one accident is one too many. It is very important for your workplace to have an electrical safety program to help lower the risk when working around energized equipment, so here are 6 great reasons why you can benefit from an electrical safety program:

1. Employees will be well educated.

An electrical safety program will ensure that employees are well informed and have up-to-date training for their jobs. The two major causes of electrical accident fatalities are contact with overhead power lines and contact with wiring, transformers, and other electrical components. Well trained, well informed workers will cause fewer accidents and be less at risk.

2. Fewer accidents means money saved.

Statistics gathered by the NFPA show that the average electrical accident costs $80,023. This cost includes both workers’ compensation (medical bills and wages while unable to work) as well as equipment costs.

3. It can increase productivity by causing you to schedule your work better.

Accidents are time consuming. Before you work on it, equipment should always be de-energized when possible. Having a procedure in place for scheduling this type of work ensures that work on one system is not impacting the operation of another electrical system. This leads to greater uptime for your facility.

4. It makes it easier to adapt to changing safety standards.

When you’re on the bleeding edge of safety progress, it will be easier for you to adapt to changes to any standards you currently follow. When it comes to safety, you want to lead from the front, not follow behind.

5. Having an accident free workplace builds trust.

This might be one of the most important points. You won’t have unexpected shut-downs and won’t be incurring high accident costs. Your leading stance on safety puts you ahead of the competition. People will want to work with you, for you, and will want to invest in you because being accident-free makes you reliable.

6. It’s very easy and simple to do!

There is a wealth of tools and information available to you when creating your electrical safety program, and they’re easy to combine with whatever current safety program you might have in place. IEEE, NFPA 70E, and CSA Z462 can help get you started, but there’s all kinds of information out there on the internet if you take the time to look.
And those are 6 great reasons why an electrical safety program can benefit you. Thanks for reading! If you liked this article be sure to share with the buttons below and sign up for our newsletter where you will get these posts in your inbox and special offers. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and like our page on Facebook.

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Electrical Safety Program Wrap Up: Documentation, Evaluation and Corrective Action

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Now that you’ve finished with Implementation, you electrical safety program is almost complete. The only things left to do are to figure out how to keep track of your electrical safety program, and how to improve it.
You can do this with Documentation, Evaluation, and Corrective Action.

What's left to improve upon?
What’s left to improve upon?

Documentation

Unlike our article on Document Housekeeping, Documentation is a section of your electrical safety program that outlines how you’ll be recording everything. You’ll need to sort out how it is that you will be documenting your safety program. This includes training manuals, energy study reports, safety meetings, and accident reports.. You’ll also want to define who is responsible for keeping this documentation up to date, and you’ll want to figure out the optimal documentation format to make sure that everyone is compliant with the electrical safety program.

Evaluation and Corrective Action

Finally, you need a section for Evaluation and Corrective Action of your electrical safety program. At a minimum, electrical safety programs should be reviewed annually, but this timeline can be customized based on your business.
You need to define how you’re going to measure the success of your electrical safety program so that you can come up with a plan to correct any problem areas. Processes like safety audits and accident investigations (including who is responsible for each) can go here.
The best electrical safety programs are not designed perfectly on their first attempt, iteration is key to keeping your work environment safe.

Closing

Above all, know that this guide is simply a brief overview to help get you started on the right path, and is not even close to an exhaustive list of procedures for creating your electrical safety program. Always consult your national and local electrical safety standards, as well as any extra guides that delve into more detail on the specifics of how you should go about pursuing each of the topics listed above. A great starting resource is “Electrical Safety Handbook, fourth edition”, by Cadick, Capelli-Schellpfeffer, Neitzel, and Winfeld.

This is part of our Electrical Safety Program Series.

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Electrical Safety Program: Training and Clear Communication

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The previous two articles talked about planning your electrical safety program, and included hazard identification and risk assessment. This article is going to talk about putting your plan into action.
The next section to include in your own electrical safety program is Implementation. As they saying goes, you’ve planned your work and now you have to work your plan. This involves checking all of your available resources (electrical system data, personnel, equipment, cash, etc.) and getting to work at making your working area safe. This phase should outline any precautions and preventative measures that need to be taken, such as setting up warning signs and labels, and making sure all equipment meets the safety regulations defined in the planning phase. You’ll also want to make sure you have enough personal protective equipment and insulated tools and have a way to obtain them and a method for approving them. PPE should be examined before each use and should be replaced if there are any abnormalities or damage to the PPE.

On the job training is an important part of your electrical safety program.

Training

The implementation phase is also where you’ll outline your electrical safety program’s training plan and schedule. Training methods are varied and can include a healthy mix of classroom and on the job training. Job specific training should be mandatory before performing any new job. If the job is performed infrequently, you should establish a set period of time that can pass before it becomes necessary for an employee to repeat the training for that particular job. Something to stress here is diligence: complacency with work can be just much of a hazard as anything else. Everyone should always be up to date on their training for any job.

Job Planning

Speaking of jobs, you’ll also want to outline processes for job planning meetings. These should take place before a job dealing with energized equipment begins. You need to determine who should hold the meetings, identify the hazards involved with the job, perform a risk assessment, develop a plan for actually performing the job, and identify any PPE or tools required to complete the job. An example can be found in CSA Z462.

The Importance of Communication

You’ll also want your electrical safety program to stress the importance of clear communication and awareness here. If an employee doesn’t understand something related to the work they are going to be doing, they should be encouraged to ask questions. Any questions should only be answered by qualified individuals who are sure that they know the answer. A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t know something, confess to not knowing and find someone who does. Never give a false or incomplete answer. Likewise, if a job is going to be performed around heavy equipment, make sure the communication protocols are clearly defined so that people don’t misinterpret information: confusion will lead to human error. And please, try to avoid jargon. You can find our article about the evils of jargon in the workplace here.
Finally, your electrical safety program will need to explain your emergency prevention and response system for when things eventually do go wrong. All employees should have some basic form of emergency training, but job specific emergency responses (such as responses for accidents around high voltage equipment) should be outlined.
Now that you’ve got an idea of how to implement your electrical safety plan, you’ll want to start thinking about Documentation Methods, Evaluation and Corrective Action.

This is part of our Electrical Safety Program Series.

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Electrical Safety Program: Planning Risk Assessment – What Makes an Electrically Safe Working Condition?

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In our previous article, we got started with the Planning section of your electrical safety program, which included legal standards and hazard identification. This article will cover the planning portion for risk assessments.

Is there a risk associated with this wet outlet?

Probably the most critical part of the planning section is to define what makes for an “Electrically Safe Work Condition”. Your electrical safety program should explain procedures for de-energizing equipment here. This section should also outline safe working distances from currently energized equipment including transmission lines, as well as safe practices for testing to see if equipment is still energized or can be confirmed to be de-energized. In order to determine whether a working condition is truly electrically safe, your electrical safety program needs to explain how to perform a risk assessment.

Risk and Risk Assessment

First, let’s talk a little bit about risks.
A risk is the chance that a hazard could be unmanageable and therefore cause harm to personnel or equipment. For example: energized equipment on the job site is a hazard, but working on energized equipment is a risk. A good electrical safety program identifies all of the potential hazards on the job site and assesses the risks involved with working on or near the hazards.
Once a hazard has been identified, your electrical safety program needs to outline a risk assessment procedure. Assessing a risk involves determining the possible injury to a worker, and weighing that against the likelihood of the injury actually happening. Here’s a fairly basic example:
An employee is required to work on a piece of equipment. That equipment is energized, and the risk associated with the hazard of working with energized equipment is fatal shock with a fairly high chance of occurring. If you de-energize the equipment, the shock hazard has been removed, lowering the risk associated with the task, and the equipment can be deemed safe to work on.
If the equipment could not be de-energized for whatever reason – such as testing electrical circuits – a worker can reduce risk by wearing the appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE). Unless absolutely necessary equipment should be always be de-energized before work is performed.
Your program should clearly explain who is qualified to assess risks and should cover any training a person might need to become qualified to assess risks. Ideally, all employees and employers should be trained and qualified to identify hazards and assess risks. A more thorough explanation of hazard identification and risk assessment can be found in Annex F of CSA Z462-15.
Next, you’ll want to get started with implementing your electrical safety plan.

This is part of our Electrical Safety Program Series.

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Electrical Safety Program: Planning Standards and Hazard Identification

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So you’ve gathered your data and finished up with the housekeeping portion of your electrical safety program, and you’ve now also gotten your program’s roles and responsibilities clearly defined. The big question now is: what comes next?

A potentially hazardous work area

Planning

The next thing you need to include in your electrical safety program is the Planning section. Here you should outline all the safety codes, regulations, and standards that your electrical safety program adheres to. You want to make sure that your electrical safety program is, from a legal point of view, bulletproof. The odds are high that you will need to adhere to one of CSA Z462 (if you’re in Canada), NFPA 70E (if you’re in the United States), or EN 50110 (if you’re just about anywhere in Europe). Broader organizations that produce standards include OSHA, IEC, IEEE, and ANSI. This is in addition to any standards specific to your location, including provincial and state regulations.
Your planning phase also needs to have some occupational health and safety objectives and targets. Consider the types of things you want to prevent, including things like physical harm to workers and damage to equipment. In essence, the question you’re trying to answer here is “What is my electrical safety plan going to do to keep people safe, and what kind of safety goals does it have?”
To expand on this, an important part of the planning phase is Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment. These topics go hand in hand, so we’ll get you started on Hazard Identification, and will cover Risk Assessment in a later article.

Hazard Identification

A hazard can be considered to be anything at work (an item, a condition, an action, etc.) with an unacceptably high potential to cause either bodily harm to persons on the job, or damage to equipment. Your electrical safety program should clearly outline how to identify a hazard. One example would be a procedure that must be followed to safely determine whether or not equipment is energized. Your program should also indicate who is qualified to identify hazards before work is to be attempted, and should cover any training a person might need to become qualified to identify these hazards.
Now that we have hazards out of the way, the next thing we want to talk about is Risk.

This is part of our Electrical Safety Program Series.

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Electrical Safety Program: Health and Safety, Your Roles and Responsibilities

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Now that we’ve gotten all of the data gathered on your current working situation, and we’ve finished with all the preliminaries, we can get started with the General Occupational Health and Safety section of your electrical safety program!

This should be your most important concern when developing your electrical safety program.

Your General OHS should reiterate the purpose of your electrical safety program. It should begin with a general explanation of what your electrical safety program is intended for. Feel free to re-state the Scope here. You can then talk about Roles and Responsibilities.

Roles and Responsibilities

The roles and responsibilities sub-section explains who is responsible for establishing, maintaining, and reviewing the electrical safety program, and outlines the process by which the electrical safety program is measured and monitored. For now we will assume that this person is you. The team creating the electrical safety program should be a healthy mix of corporate management and ground level employees, as well as safety officials. You want to be able to cover as many scenarios as possible, and a large team with a broad range of different experiences can help accomplish that goal.
This section will outline how affected workers are involved in the development and implementation of the program. Sometimes very important aspects of an electrical system can be overlooked by someone who is not intimately familiar with the finer details and inner workings of the electrical system. If you know someone with more technical or practical experience than you or your team have, it is always a good idea to consult them before implementing a new safety program.
Another thing that roles and responsibilities needs to explain is the role of managerial and executive staff in the creation of the electrical safety program. It is very important that management be made aware of the risks involved in working with any energized equipment at your workplace so that they can make informed decisions about any jobs taking place.
Next, roles and responsibilities should make it abundantly clear that all persons involved in the operation of the facility should have the self-discipline to follow the electrical safety program.
The roles and responsibilities should clearly outline who is and who is not qualified to work a specific job. A qualified worker is someone who has sufficient up-to-date training in the particular job, understands the risks involved and knows how to best protect themselves.

An obvious example of unqualified persons.
An obvious example of unqualified persons.

After getting the general OHS completed, you’re ready to take the plunge into one of the really big sections of your electrical safety plan: the Planning section, coming next week!

This is part of our Electrical Safety Program Series.

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Your Electrical Safety Program: Document Housekeeping

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Once you have all of the necessary data in one spot for the electrical safety program, you will have to start organizing the binder, or electronic file for the document itself. Let’s start with the document housekeeping, this will give you a visual checklist of all the sections that need to be addressed..
The first tasks that need to be covered are what I call the “general housekeeping” portions of the document. In order, these include the Table of Contents and List of Figures, the Scope, Reference Publications, and Definitions.

It may not be glamorous, but these are some things that every safety document should have.

Table of Contents and List of Figures

The Table of Contents and List of Figures are easy: they’re a list at the beginning of your program that lists all of the main items and where to find them. These will usually be created last even though they’re the first thing a reader will see. You can look to any book, text, or standard for examples of the Table of Contents and List of Figures. These are important so that you can quickly find any information in your electrical safety program.
Use this section of the document to list out the sections, tables, etc that you want to include in the electrical safety program.

Scope and Reference Publications

Next, let’s talk about the Scope for your electrical safety program.
The scope should include some general information about your program including; what kind of business or facility the program is for and what kinds of accidents the program is trying to prevent. It should state where the electrical safety program can be applied, who is responsible for following the electrical safety program, and what situations the electrical safety program can be used for. It can also include what measurement units are used (as a Canadian I prefer SI units). Any terminology that could be confusing (due to words having multiple meanings) can also be described here.
Reference Publications include any material you may have used when designing your electrical safety program – including SparkyResource. This section describes the sources of information including internal documents, national and international standards, technical papers, etc.

Definitions

Definitions are the big brother to the terminology section in the scope. The definitions section of your safety program serves to clearly explain any words that might not be familiar to new employees, or even to veteran employees who have new responsibilities and have limited experience with a particular topic.
The definitions section helps avoid confusing jargon by defining the exact meanings of words as related to the electrical safety program. Check out our article on the misuse of jargon before you go on to the next section, Jeff explains the importance of having definitions for the commonly used terms in your workplace.
As far as the less exciting (but still important) stuff is concerned, that’s it! Next week, we’ll get started with the real meat and potatoes of your electrical safety program: The General Occupational Health and Safety System.

This is part of our Electrical Safety Program Series.

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