Safety switch research project

Many of Australia’s domestic residences are protected by safety switches of various designs and some are now several decades old.

The Electrical Safety Office is undertaking a project to examine the physical, environmental and engineering factors that determine the useful life of a safety switch in Queensland.

The aim of the project is to gather data from field testing and from recorded outcomes of ‘in-service testing’ of a large number of domestic and industrial safety switch installations.

This will provide improved electrical safety advice to electricity consumers, device manufacturers, installers
and regulators and will help ensure safety switches continue to provide the significant electrical safety benefits we have come to expect.

While confidence in, and reliance on safety switches is high, their protective or useful life is not known because a number of factors play a part in determining their longevity.

A safety switch is only useful in protecting people if it operates virtually instantly when an electrical fault
occurs.

Safety switches can fail and get stuck in the ‘always on’ position and will not operate when an electrical fault occurs.

This failure may go undetected for some time. Failure to test the switch regularly means you don’t know if it still
works or not. So the best course of action is to ensure you test your safety switch every three months.

While some international information on safety switch reliability indicates that the failure rate is low, little is known of the factors that impact the protective life of safety switches in Australia.

What is known is testing will tell you whether your safety switch is working or not.

Existing research also shows that safety switches that are maintained by user testing are less likely to fail.

Testing is simply carried out by pressing the test button on the switch – the switch should immediately move to the ‘off’ position, confirming it is operating correctly.