Product Safety Testing

For the first twenty years or so of our existence, SEL did not have a laboratory of its own, but rather conducted all of the testing on-site at our clients' facilities, with the agency engineers from UL or CSA or TUV present to witness the testing. The idea was to de-mystify the evaluation and testing process, so that our customers would understand what was being done and would design future products with that gained experience and understanding. You can consider that pulling back the curtain in the Wizard of Oz!​ While we have long had a product safety test lab, our goal is the same, to train our clients about the tests and process -- teach you to fish and not just give you a fish.

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Our lab had long been a Certificated Agency -- going on ten years in 2021 -- in what is now called the Data Acceptance Program (or DAP) with UL, along with being a Partner Test Laboratory with TUV for slightly less time. Such accreditation allows our results to be the agencies' formal test data -- not a pretest -- which is a rather big feather in our cap that is not very common out there. This requires annual audits by each to ensure our test equipment and procedures are sufficient for the task and staff are trained in the particular standards of our competencies -- to comply with ISO 17025.

 

We generally can conduct pre-tests in the areas that we identify early as being high risk early in the process, such that we are not crossing our fingers and hoping that we pass late in the process.