It's Not Just The Main Equipment In Your Factory That Needs To Be Calibrated

If you run a factory, you know you have to keep the equipment in top shape, and you know that one of the best ways to do that is to ensure all of the equipment is calibrated properly. But it is not just the factory floor equipment that you need to worry about. There are other items in your company that need calibration, too, and these are often overlooked. The result can include inaccurate documents, personal harm, and faster degradation of the working environment.

Color Monitors

Computer monitors, believe it or not, have to be color calibrated. If they are not color calibrated, meaning that they are not set so that colors show up on the monitor as intended, any graphics you create or any website pages you design for your company could show up completely differently on other monitors. Customers could see badly matched colors on the website, catalogs could end up looking inaccurate, and so on. Calibrating a monitor can be done by someone at the factory with experience, or you can contact a calibration service that also works on monitors.

Sound Level Meters

If the equipment in your factory makes noise, you need to protect your workers from noise-induced hearing loss. As part of that, you have to check ambient noise levels often to see if they are exceeding safe levels and to make sure that people are wearing hearing protection if the noise levels are too high. But sound level meters, which are what you would use, can go out of calibration quickly. If they are off by even a few decibels, that can result in a sneaky increase in noise-induced hearing loss, one that's potentially so gradual you wouldn't notice until it was too late. People could see the faulty readings, think things are OK, and go without hearing protection in that environment. You've got to keep those sound level meters calibrated so that you aren't exposing people to noise that's too loud.

The Factory's HVAC Thermostat

Many pieces of equipment rely on being in a cool environment to help protect them from overheating. If the factory's HVAC thermostat isn't calibrated, you could end up with an ambient temperature that is a little too high and that allows the equipment to get too hot. The excessive temperatures -- and "excessive" can be just a few degrees -- can make equipment wear out faster, especially if the equipment has cooling fans built in. The hotter temps could make the fans overwork.

Contact a calibration company like Washington Calibration Inc. to ask about how wide-ranging their calibration services are. Find out if they work only on certain pieces of equipment, or if they have experienced techs who can handle computers, thermostats, sound level meters, and more.


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