in this video we're going to answer the question are electrician's arms calibrated for talk i
don't know why but it seems it's a contentious issue in the electrical industry isn't it Gordon
it certainly is Gary but let's just think of the bigger world Gary i'd like to think yeah
imagine this you're off on holiday yeah they're all ready the plane's revving at the end of the
runway ready to take off there's a few nervous people on the plane next year you'd like to think
that when Boeing built the plane and when it's been subsequently maintained in service that the
people doing that followed the manufacturer's instructions particularly with regards to talk
so we're suggesting that the person that comes in on a Friday afternoon offers up their engineering
judgment maybe for those connections of the wing to the actual body of the aeroplane has
made the same decision maybe as a person on a Monday morning yeah or the guy who goes to the
gym he's not making the decision up at what point the torque on the wheels is where it
should be compared to the person who's possibly just started that Monday and has never seen an
airplane before in their life i think we can agree that talk is important and we can't necessarily
pick and choose when we want that talk to actually be in place so we started off that question didn't
we are electrician's arms calibrated and we're going to prove it in this video and in order to
do so we had to build the rig behind us didn't we sir they did should always check those shouldn't
you have to took a tug test it's what you call strength have you got a truck driver do they
use them at college have they got one at college have you ever seen anybody with one at college
so welcome to eFIXX talk the talk the game show where we check whether electrician's arms are in
fact calibrated what have you got on the wall behind us this week Gary i've got the loot and
consumer unit and i've got the main double pole switch with its torque setting of 2.5 newton
meters i've got individual RCBO's and we're doing the connections on the top side of those also at
2.5 newton meters of torque we've got the surge introduced keeping up with the latest regulations
and the torque setting of that drops down to 1.5 newton meters and when we look at the earth and
neutral bars when we're connecting into those it's another one we're at two newton meters of
torque for those well that's a right mixed bag of torque settings i've got another one here
you'd think when it comes to three fares when it comes to isolators that can switch a significant
amount of current you'd immediately think higher levels of torque setting but in fact this one
behind us has a torque setting of 0.8 newton meters wow is that it in at 0.8 newton meters for
all of the connections all the connections now a lot of it comes down how that connection has been
designed so this is cage clamp style some of the ones on the consumer looked at before traditional
screw in a hole does that make a difference does it make a difference to how the terminals feel
does it make a difference when it comes to what our contestants actually achieve in
this talk the talk challenge and for our third electrical enclosure we have the mystery box
wow the mystery box it may be for a lot of electricians if you're new to installing EV
charge points there's Easee base here has a beefy five newton meters of torque and a hex bit will
that confuse the contestants as it squeaks its way up to five newton meters let's find out in eFIXX
talk the torque before we meet today's contestants if this is the first time you've heard of the term
talk or you don't understand the principles of it we've made a free cpd training package i'll
leave a link for that in the description below and i recommend you go over and check that out so it's
time to meet this week's contestants well we've got a diverse bunch this week Gary starting with
matt and Marcus former college lecturer has gone back out onto the tools to see if they've
still got it in them well will their practice what they're formally preached next up we've
got Richard who's an adult retrainer okay so not necessarily familiar with all the practices but
should be learning the best practices whilst he's at college and we've got young Sophie who's
training to be an electrician at college okay so our first and only female contestant in
this week's challenge from across the border in Lancashire we've got Lewis who is also a retained
firefighter and he would have seen in his time many electrical fires and a frequent visit of
the channel we've got Ross Sands from the spa town of Harrogate rocket Ross is often bathing glory as
he's our fastest electrician but this time it's about precision has he got it in him from across
the border in Hebdon bridge we've got Glenn and we will hold that against him as well during the
challenge your friend Gary from just down the road we've got Adam Adam possibly the easiest of all
our contestants on the old eye making a return we previously saw him in the MK base rewire install
it is will almost the same height as you Gary yeah me being six foot four is a fraction taller than
me which is always disappointing when i meet him we've got a young apprentice Lewis who's currently
works in the new build housing market it'd be interesting to see if he's ever seen a torque
screwdriver before and rounding up this week's contestants is graham who has recently retired
it'd be interesting to see which edition of the warren regulations graham was trained to the
addition of regulations was the 14th edition when i started with the 14th edition i found them over
the month at home orange so our contestants offer up a wide range of ages abilities and experiences
in the electrical industry but what was the first thing we asked them to do well in round one
i've talked the torque we are not going to tell any of our contestants the torque settings that
the equipment behind us requires and in the case of where they may have been able to pick
up a hint because it was actually printed on the front of it we have a blanked that out
so imagine that typical scenario find on site as well it is often difficult to find out those
top values because the manufacturer has not put it on the device or perhaps it's printed on the
side of the device which is then hidden when it's installed or perhaps the original instructions
have been thrown away so we're asking the electrician to take their pre-calibrated
arm and their engineering judgment in order to do up all the terminations behind us but how are we
going to validate what they got it too well at no expense so actually considerable expense to the
team at eFIXX we've bought this device from Amiga engineering that can measure precisely the amount
of torque that's been put into the screw heads okay so all we need now is a set of results to
see how the calibrated arm was in relationship to the torque required for those terminations
so let's take a flavoring of some of the ranges of torque let's start with the consume unit let's
start with that main switch 2.5 newton meters of torque required by the manufacturer what about the
lowest value we got from yeah the lowest value was O.78 newton meters of torque wow and the highest
and impressive impression of quite how this was achieved 5.38 newton meters well that is a
huge range between where it needs to be so i would suggest we didn't quite get a calibration
right on that so let's stay in there because there is a lot of them in here that require
2.5 newton meters of torque as well being the RCBO's so let's jump straight now to the SPD
oh which is 1.5 newton meters our last setting on that is 0.6 newton meters okay yeah and a maximum
2.75 newton meters okay so a lesser range but obviously we're not correct let's go
for the isolator so this one's tricky isn't it because it is only 0.8 newton meters and we saw
you know people going in trying to really screw these down what we got on our range
so the isolator without knowing the torque settings the lower setting was
0.6 newton okay that's good and the maximum was an impressive 1.62 newton
so double the manufacturer's state torque value there yeah and it's the size of the
screws that you can't actually start getting that to three or four newton meters because it's got a
very small head on the screw i'm sure one of our contestants would have loved to have got it to uh
to that sort of levels Gary but yet right the screw prevented them in this occasion so when
it comes to the easy EV charger it hoodwinked our contestants because when tightening that up
we had a lot of squeaking plastic and a lot of nervous tightening up of those terminations
creaking like Gary's bones that but i had to get it to five newton meters of talk how do they do
well there's only one contestant managed to get that Gary one consistent got the 4.7 newton meters
which is in the plus or minus six percent band that we would put on a torque screwdriver but
the lowest was a 1.06 well there's quite a lot of connections in there did they get them all within
the range or was it just the one termination out of the uh yeah we made them tighten all of them
and yet on that case only one connection was made out of 11 contestants to the required torque
setting so the conclusion from round number one when the electrician didn't know the talk setting
and went in they got nowhere near the required second however i know electricians would read
the instructions they would check the enclosure and work out from that what the torque setting is
required before they calibrate their arm and they go in and that's exactly what happens in round
number two they now know the torque setting so if we go back to that easy EV charger how close are
we to five newton meters of talk second time round well things did in fact improve Gary good and
obviously the contestants knew from round one they had to dig deep to get to that five new meters
and we saw in some instances two hands appearing on the screwdriver so our minimum this time was
2.1 newton meters okay less than half it's required to talk send but but an improvement
and and i'm not quite sure how we managed to achieve this because the screwdriver bit
itself was only rated to 5.5 newton meters i was worried it was going to snap but one contestant
managed to get to a massive 7.21 newton meters of torque okay so did anyone now
knowing it get it correct on some terminals yes and this was the strange thing for some reason
yeah the CPC or the circuit protective conductor yeah actually seven contestants managed to get
that exact okay the one that doesn't carry any current they managed to get it to the required
torque setting and the ones that are carrying current were randomly around at different numbers
not one of them achieved the correct okay so with that in mind we've gone from obviously the big end
to the little end and we come back in now to our isolator with only the 0.8 newton meters
of torque now now know it obviously going in a little bit gingerly how close were we this time
uh didn't really make a huge difference in fact Gary in this case so our minimum torque setting
this time went from 0.34 newton meters oh wow yeah okay up to actually a maximum thought at first the
sun thought the maximum had improved as well but looking at our results here the maximum was a 1.62
newton meters so we had less than half in the first one and then we had again double what we
should be on on the top end yes the contestant who doubled it was a different contestant this time
okay then double default did anyone get it right on this one out of all the terminals actually no
okay so again the electrician knew the torque setting and still didn't get it right and none
of the terminals were correct so now returning to our consumer unit all the electricians that we
spoke to were very familiar with that whether they be training or whether they be contracting sparks
so how did they get on on the second time around maybe on that main switch well things did improve
but we still had a minimum setting of 1.07 newton metres less than half required and a maximum this
time down from 5.38 now down to 3.83 newton meters okay did any of them get it right well in this
instance actually four out of the 11 managed to get a torque setting within the plus or minus six
percent range okay so let's go now to the surge protection device in here because it does jump
down to the 1.5 newton meters of torque what was our range looking like in that one so the range
this time around went from 0.6 newton meters okay up to a maximum of 2.53 okay and did anyone get
it spot on no we posed the question at the start our electrician's arms calibrated for torque and
we categorically proved that the answer is no well perhaps you disagree with our conclusion put some
comments below as to what you think but perhaps you're somebody who doesn't even use a screwdriver
perhaps you're somebody who gets to talk levels unparalleled to anywhere we've been today using
an impact driver to wire up consumers and that's what we're going to look at in the next video