A lot depends on what you will be doing while wearing the arc flash suit. If you only wear it to safe off sections of switchgear and verify that the circuits are not powered, weight probably doesn’t matter as much as if you have to wear it for extended periods and while doing a lot of physical work on live bus bars and very large wire termination.
The available fault current and voltage will play a big part in deciding exactly what is needed. Good gloves are an absolute must have. When I was working with 480 volt systems with tens of thousands of amps available fault, a coworker suggested we get 6KV rated gloves instead of the 1KV rated, but I said we should get the 1KV as they would be thinner and easier for actual work. Sometimes higher rated safety doesn’t equate to greater safety for your situation.
Another reference would be to read what OSHA has written for your situation.
Don’t forget a really good face shield that will stay on if something blows up in your face.
Also don’t wear synthetic clothing under the flash suit that can melt and stick to your skin. Really thin cotton gloves under the high voltage gloves will help mitigate hand sweat and are really cheap.
The majority of the work would be for troubleshooting live transfer switches, and then load banks with exposed bus bars for metering. As for available fault current, my understanding is that it is nominally "low" even on a 3 MW generator vs a utility source of comparable supply. However, the clearing time has been the main issue I can see. Most of the breakers I have encountered on larger generators will still take up to 2 seconds to clear a fault since there's less immediate fault current available, thus greatly increasing the incident energy.
I went for Class 00 gloves as I only currently work on live 480, however when I move onto 4160 units I will invest in Class 1 gloves. I have been going for Type 1 as I don't know what kind of situations would expose me to ozone. I also added in the $3 cotton liners when I ordered my gloves from Salisbury. For protectors, I went with Hi-Line Xtreme grips.
The under layers I'm working on getting sorted. Our issued uniforms are 100% polyester so I've been electing to wear my own 100% cotton clothing (however I don't think it would matter in a 20cal+ exposure). I have an order in with Tyndale for daily wear FR clothing, just waiting for it to arrive.
As for sweat... That's a problem I hadn't even thought of. Especially in the summer here, sweating like a pig is unavoidable, so I will need to increase the amount of spare clothing I keep in the truck.
Thank you for the response!