Portable Appliance Test Record

This record is one step in a larger programme, and specifically a scheduled test, not an approval to do something unusual. Confusing it with the electrical safety instruments around it produces gaps in both.

PAT testing as a named practice is largely a UK institution, resting on a general maintenance duty rather than a prescriptive standard, which is why interval and method are set by guidance and risk, not a fixed legal table.

The duty to maintain electrical equipment is close to universal, but formal, interval-based PAT testing as a distinct named activity is far more established in some regimes than others.

Most of this record fills itself in from the test instrument's readout. The judgement calls sit in the interval, the untested items, and what happens to something that fails.

Findings on this record are rarely about the test method itself. They concern the interval chosen, what happened after a fail, and whether the round reconciled against the register.

A dairy processing site ran all portable equipment, hand tools included, on a single annual interval, set up when the register was first created for the offices. Two years later a portable light in the pasteurising area gave a mild shock to an operator standing in standing water. The unit had passed its last annual test eleven months earlier.

The investigation found moisture ingress through a cable gland degraded well within the twelve-month window, a failure mode the IET Code of Practice tables address by recommending three to six month testing for wash-down environments. Office equipment on the same register had never failed on the same interval, since it never faced the same conditions. The fix was using the Environment field the form already carried and had never been acted on.

The test itself takes minutes per item. What slips is the reconciliation against the register: items never found, items found but never registered, and failures never fed back into the interval.

KnowSafe

Holds the test library against the equipment register, flags overdue rounds, and tracks failure rate by environment to catch an interval that no longer fits.

KnowMaintain

Reconciles items not found and unregistered items discovered mid-round back into the asset population so the next round starts accurate.

KnowContractor

Extends the same test and interval discipline to contractor-owned equipment brought on site, so it does not sit outside the register.

Ella

Watches the common failure mode field across rounds for a pattern by environment, and raises an interval review before it shows up as an incident.

PAT

Portable appliance testing: visual inspection plus electrical testing applied to portable and movable electrical equipment at an interval set by environment and duty.

Class I / Class II equipment

Class I relies on a protective earth for safety; Class II is double insulated and does not depend on an earth connection, which changes which tests apply.

Earth continuity test

A test confirming a low-resistance path between the exposed metal parts of Class I equipment and the earth pin, so a fault current trips protection rather than energising the case.

Insulation resistance test

A test confirming insulation between live conductors and earth or accessible parts is high enough to prevent leakage current under normal use.

In-service inspection interval

The recommended gap between tests for a given equipment class and environment, set by guidance such as the IET Code of Practice rather than a fixed legal figure.