Portable Appliance Testers

Portable Appliance Testers

PATs start in price from around $1000 but these will be PATs that can only test the earth at 200 milliamps – legal but not, in our opinion, designed for ‘safety’ rather just for ‘compliance’. To get a PAT that checks for compliance and safety, which will test the protective earth at 10 Amp or 10,000 milliamps, you will likely need to spend around $1700. The expensive PATs will normally be a complete system and can cost as much as $8500.

Here is something you need to know; just because you spend $8500 does not mean you get a PAT that tests for compliance and safety – there is one with a camera built in where the system costs around $8500 which still only tests at 200 milliamps for the protective earth.

Most people will likely, if interested in safety, need to spend somewhere between $1700 and $6000 on a tester.

Many PATs have an on-board memory and now commonly can print tough tags directly from the PAT memory via a suitable label/tag printer.

Memory Capacity of a PAT

Many advanced PATs have an onboard memory ranging from being able to save 1,000 items to 1,000,000 items – most PATs now will save around 10,000 to 50,000 items.

Memory size is not critical in most situations as PATs should have data transferred regularly in case of loss or theft. Various options are available on PATs for downloading test results including via USB and memory sticks, WIFI and direct WIFI. There are also Apps available for direct communication from your smartphone to the tester for saving results where a tester does not have an internal memory.