acquiring UL and CSA docs without spending $1000000000

Non-profit ? That's a good one. In order to make your machine/device having a change passing UL, you can only use UL approved materials. But since UL is not necessarily UL, meaning there are plenty of rules to be fullfilled, you need an expensive audit by a specialist to start with.

Rene

Nonsense. It just makes it easier.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Getting the CE specs is as bad, or worse. It's hard to figure out which is applicable, they're expensive, they're hard to read, and each one references about a half dozen others, in a basically infinite chain.

So a lot of people just buy a spool of CE stickers, which is cheaper and a lot easier.

John

Until your best customer, who has already purchased 1000 units and is also amongst those who you would name as a good friend, calls and needs a hard copy of the test report.

This did happen to me. I did have the test report because I paid the $7000 or so to have the tests run by an independent lab.

It's simple for me. Either I pay the dollars and join the club or say "sorry, we don't have a CE version, but we'll do the tests if you are willing to pay for them."

Nope.

Somebody has to pay for all those guys sitting at desks, and that's not "profit".

Last time I needed that sort of thing I just popped over to the CSA library and read what I needed (and took notes). No photocopying allowed, obviously. I think my University library has most of them too, but that would have taken another 10 minutes or more to get to, and I'd have had to pay for parking.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

What I find unacceptable is that the CE specs are effectively the

*law*. We (Europeans) have to *pay* to find out the laws we are supposed to live under. If anything should be state funded, it is this.

I think this is different from the UL case, in that UL may be required for insurance purposes, but it is not the "law of the land" that everything sold must be UL (but I could be wrong here).

--

John Devereux

Many states require that consumer goods be UL certified, which laws are routinely ignored. The UL specs used to be the private property of UL, but (for reasons of liability, I understand) they transferred ownership to ANSI, at which time other labs began to furnish test certification services, notably ETL.

ANSI is still a private non-profit corporation, so is not actually government. Most of the ANSI standards can be downloaded for roughly $10 to $50; some are $0 and some are over $100. Some of the standards "packages" get expensive.

Some of our gear has gone through UL, and it wasn't really bad, just some picky things about wire colors and fuze sizes and such. I have some paper copies of relevant UL specs, and as I recall they were cheap.

FCC is different - that's the government. You still have to pay for the specs, I think. Our stuff has always passed FCC, and we've never seen a copy of any of those specs.

Ignore DonkeyBreath. He will selectively search for anything that bashes the USA. I assume he does engineering the same way, based on prejudices and not facts.

John

I wish I had a CSA library in my town ;) I already checked the public and university library, no luck for specific documents, but they have some more generic CSA ones.

Next step is to ask an electrical engineering prof at the university..

cheers, Jamie

Contacted

they have a 3yr subscription to access all of the UL documents via html for $1223. Anyone use this service, does it work well and/or is there a cheaper option anywhere?

cheers, Jamie