Design Consulting

One of the biggest complaints generally about agency submissions is that issues -- and often rather larger ones -- tend to often be brought up late in the process, as the agencies look more closely at the products before issuing their final approval. And then some of the testing conducted to date cannot be used and testing needs to be repeated with the new, final compliant construction. ​When the final report is being written, it is noted that the openings are too large and do not comply with the requirements of the standard, so then the temperature testing has to be repeated with the smaller openings, for example. 

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SEL's goal is to provide clear input at the convenient decisions points in the development of the product -- such as on the plastic enclosure selected or the power supply or the stability of the product -- so that when the product arrives at our doorstep for testing, it already complies with the prescriptive requirements of the safety standards, and has considered the tests that are going to be conducted as part of the safety evaluation. This is certainly the preferred route, although we can also operate in "crisis mode" where many decisions were already made without such input and we are looking for the quickest path to success, with least impact.

 

SEL has many resources it has developed over the years about the common challenges in submittals that can be customized to your product and application. From making submittals all of the time to several agencies, we know their different takes on issues in the grey areas where the standards are not necessarily specific, or even when your new technology does not fit nicely into an existing safety standard.