🚀 go-pugleaf

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I have a question about the calibration of test equipment.  Any feedback
would be greatly appreciated.  The situation is this:  we calibrate all of
the test equipment that we use for formal acceptance testing.  Most of this
equipment we own, but some of it we rent or lease.  On the equipment we own,
we keep track of what equipment is used on a specific test.  So if, when get
that piece of equipment re-calibrated, we find that is was out of
calibration, we can trace back to the tests we performed and determine how or
if they were affected by the out of calibration condition.

On the rental and lease equipment, we ask for the equipment to be calibrated
before it is sent to us and require certificates of calibration to accompany
the equipment.  So far so good.  But, when we are done with the rental
equipment we send it back and if that equipment happened to go out of
calibration while we were using it we have no way of finding out.  The rental
agency does not calibrate the equipment when we return it, they calibrate it
when they send it out and only if a customer asks them to.  The piece of
equipment we used may not get calibrated for a long time or maybe even never
again. So we can't just ask them to let us know if it is found to be out of
calibration.  The only solution we can think of is that we ask for it to be
calibrated when they send it to us and then again when they receive it back
from us.  Obviously this is cost prohibitive.  Any ideas?  How have other
companies dealt with this?  Our goal is to meet ISO-9001 and ISO 10012-1, and
more importantly reduce our risk of using out of calibration equipment for
testing.

Thanks

Darren Kent
Ph: 306-931-3425
Fx:  306-933-1486
Inet: Kent@SEDSystems.ca