Salisbury Arc Flash Suit: Standard vs Lightweight?

[akimbojimbo]

Hi ladies and gents,

In the next month or so I'll need to purchase a 40cal/cm2 arc flash suit, and have settled on Salisbury as the manufacturer. My question is: is there a noticeable/significant difference in comfort or ease of use between the standard suit offered vs their "premium lightweight" offerings? This will be my first arc flash suit, and I've heard that they can be basically a glorified sweat suit so if the cooling is noticeable I'd purchase the lightweight version. My reason for asking is the price is almost double for lightweight versions, so I was wondering if someone had experience that would justify the purchase. Also of note, I work outdoors on the Gulf coast of Florida in direct sunlight, as most work is on emergency generators. Air conditioned rooms are a special kind of rarity in this field 😁

As far as the discussion of how my employer should be paying for the suit, that's a story for another time... We were only issued unrated Chinese gloves after a couple months of pestering. My main concern is going home in one piece.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated, and as always I look forward to chatting with y'all.

Thanks!

[coppercone2]

Man that sounds really bad, I have a feeling that they might try to screw you over in court over injury fees and stuff like that if they don't wanna buy a suit when you are doing work that requires a suit. What I am saying is that this employer sounds like its liable to screw you over in another way even if you get your own suit (this seems like the tip of an iceberg)

I don't know anything about the suits (I never worked on stuff that dangerous), but I think you should look for another job

And lord knows if it will do anything but you can try to pair it with a personal cooling system.. obviously not with water but IDK if something like a Sony Reon would be compatible/safe with a arc flash suit. If you are light and small, it might help with cooling you down.. I assume you can't have any water on you.

[SeanB]

Lightweight is the way to go, because you will have a lot of heavy suit otherwise for the same protection. Pay the difference, as you will feel the difference when wearing it.

[akimbojimbo]

Man that sounds really bad, I have a feeling that they might try to screw you over in court over injury fees and stuff like that if they don't wanna buy a suit when you are doing work that requires a suit. What I am saying is that this employer sounds like its liable to screw you over in another way even if you get your own suit (this seems like the tip of an iceberg)

I don't know anything about the suits (I never worked on stuff that dangerous), but I think you should look for another job

And lord knows if it will do anything but you can try to pair it with a personal cooling system.. obviously not with water but IDK if something like a Sony Reon would be compatible/safe with a arc flash suit. If you are light and small, it might help with cooling you down.. I assume you can't have any water on you.

Yeah, you're not wrong in that assessment. However I don't plan on staying here long, mainly to get a foot in the door for this industry before going to a better/safer employer. Also, I hope to operate my own consulting business so I would eventually need to own my own PPE. I do appreciate the concern.

[akimbojimbo]

Lightweight is the way to go, because you will have a lot of heavy suit otherwise for the same protection. Pay the difference, as you will feel the difference when wearing it.

Good to know! I've been trying to picture just how heavy one of the coats is if it's 18g/cm2, but I'd imagine similar to a winter barn coat. So almost halving that weight would be a good idea. I'm glad to hear there is a noticeable difference, it looks like lightweight it'll be. Thanks!

[Gregg]

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.

[coppercone2]

yeah and you need to change if you have been working for a while and your sweaty because if there is a explosion and you are drenched its going to burn you with steam. I would say its mandatory to be 'dry' under the clothing for it to give you optimal safety. That makes it extra hard to work in Florida.

[Monkeh]

yeah and you need to change if you have been working for a while and your sweaty because if there is a explosion and you are drenched its going to burn you with steam. I would say its mandatory to be 'dry' under the clothing for it to give you optimal safety. That makes it extra hard to work in Florida.

And the heat would somehow not burn you if you weren't wet? I'm pretty sure that's not how this works.

[coppercone2]

if the interior surface is heated past the boiling point, the water in contact with the material will turn to steam and that has a great thermal conductivity compared to air, plus the expansion of water is 1700x. Steam will pass through all the cloth you are wearing underneath, wheras when dry it will act as additional protective insulation. I imagine some very sweaty bellies if you are wearing a plastic suit in the florida sun. The phase change cooling thing from the water is not going to be helpful when there is a electrical explosion impinging on you.

Then there is also the aspect of being wet if the suit is breached by a high voltage arc, you might have a significantly lower ground isolation because of this.

As a benign example showing that steam can increase thermal transfer:
https://steaminfusion.oalgroup.com/high-speed-cooking

I would think this is like baking a turkey in a bag. If you get a real hot frying pan, you can hold your hand over it, if you hold it just high enough. I would say most people would immediately remove their hand from the nearest tolerable position if they know someone was going to throw a spoon of water in the pan (a small quantity that will vaporize fast without significantly cooling the pan) (ouch)

[akimbojimbo]

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!

[Gregg]

To reduce the sweat factor and increase the safety aspect of working with 400 plus volts high power equipment, you might want to move towards the control, metering and monitoring end of things like transfer switches, UPSs and even things like high impedance grounding systems.  Grounding systems in general can be very perplexing to the uninitiated.  Training in these areas is limited and usually only available through your employer, but being curious and asking experts along the way can help set you on a better paying and hopefully safer career path.