- Hi, I'm Dave Long from Staticworx.
Today is April 10th, Friday.
My third video this week.
I'm still in lockdown.
Hopefully, by the time some of you watch this,
it'll be a thing of the past.
The purpose of today's video is to explain
meeting standards for mainly government
and safety applications.
When I talk about standards today,
what I'm actually talking about is Motorola R56,
ATIS 0600321, and FAA 019f.
The reason I chose these three standards
is these three standards govern the specifications
that should be written for most applications
for flight towers, server rooms, comm centers,
command centers, 9-1-1 call centers,
and the nice thing about these three standards
is even though they come from three different organizations,
there's definite consensus within them.
So we're going to look at these standards,
and we're going to look at these three carpet tile materials
through the eyes of an ohm meter.
So what this meter does is it measures electrical resistance
in ohms through these two connections
to these two probes.
And these probes, what I'm going to be doing with them
is placing them on these three types of carpet,
which are all connected electrically
through a piece of copper.
So let's start by looking at a material
that has a black back on it.
I'm going to take the probes,
place them on the carpet,
and if you notice, I'm measuring between four and five.
So all these numbers on this ohm meter
are reflecting in order of magnitude.
So when I say four, I'm actually talking
about 10 to the fourth (10E4).
When I say five, I'm talking about 10 to the fifth (10E5).
So this particular piece of carpet
is measuring between 10,000 and 100,000 ohms.
And that's an important number
because those three standards I just told you about,
they're telling you, as a specifier and an end user,
that you want your floor to measure
between 10 to the sixth (10E6) and no more
than 10 to the 10th (10E10).
So 10 to the fourth (10E4) to 10 to the fifth (10E5)
is well under meeting the needs of a particular standard
that you need to be referencing.
So let's test a second piece of carpet.
This piece of carpet has a very light backing,
and I'm going to just explain to you
that there's no carbon in this carpet.
So it's very unlikely that this carpet would ever be used
to meet these standards,
but I want you to see the difference.
So when I put the probes on it
and I measure it,
it's measuring well over 10 to the 10th (10E10).
That means that this piece of carpet is measuring well over
10 billion ohms, almost 100 billion ohms.
And remember, this one was measuring
between 10,000 and 100,000.
So this one was well under acceptable for these standards.
This one is way over the acceptable number
of ohms resistance.
Here's a third piece of carpet.
If you notice, this one has a kind of a dark back compared
to the one I just showed you.
This one has carbon in it.
When I place the two probes on this piece of carpet,
I'm measuring between 10 to the seventh (10E7)
and 10 to the eighth (10E8).
If you recall in the standards,
they want the floor to measure
between six and nine.
It's right in the middle.
For those of you who are Goldilocks fans,
this is the sweet spot.
This is not too hot like this one
and not too cold but just right.
So to recap, if it has a black back,
it's too conductive.
If it has a very light backing,
it's not conductive enough.
If it's got carbon in it
but not as much carbon as this one,
it meets the standard.
And by the way, I'm not asking you
to visually test your floors.
Anytime you write a specification,
you should be referencing these standards,
and you should be asking whoever supplies you
with the floor or whoever installs the floor
to perform this test afterwards.
And this test should be done on the surface of the floor,
on the surface of the floor to ground,
within a tile, across two tiles.
There's a whole series of tests,
and there's a test method for this,
and if you write your specification properly,
you'll actually get what you want
and you'll meet the standards.
So thank you very much.
If you have more questions,
you can go online and you can actually look up
these standards yourself,
Motorola R56, FAA 019f, ATIS 0600321.
You can call Staticworx,
or you can call an engineer who understands the problem
and knows how to write specifications.
Thank you.