We are looking at marking up hand operated equipment for our countryside maintenance teams.  We are thinking of using a traffic light system and would be interested to hear, if anyone else is doing this, what m/s2 levels you use to identify the green, amber and red equipment.  Also, have you found any issues with doing it this way.

Where equipment can be used on different substrates (metal, wood, concrete etc.) and with different "bits" it makes a rather complex table to try and place directly on to tooling.

Your other issue is that it is not only the accelaration value (of supposedly well maintained kit, in good condition) but the cumulative individual trigger times from using all the available equipment.

Very difficult to refine such complexity to a single colour attached to any one tool.

The other thing to keep firmly in mind it is about protecting the worker from the effects of hand arm vibration not ranking equipment as being in or out of a limit. I suspect in the countryside this becomes even more difficult as the operator has to twist and turn in order place the equipment to complete the task.

We also provide a tool register. The register lists all power tools within the group, the vibration magnitude, HSE points per hour and dB generated during use.

This is used for planning of routine operations so they can keep below the EAV. Operatives then record as accurately as they can the total trigger time and this is then verified by the Line Manager at the end of the day.

We did look at tagging equipment, but as its been mentioned earlier the magnitude can change significantly if drilling into metal rather than concrete for example. It can become complicated. Our register lists all data provided by the Manufacturer, this may include Drilling into wood, drilling into metal and hammer drilling into concrete.

It isnt the perfect solution, but it is working for us so far.

Originally Posted by: chris42

We did try this at one point and one thing we noticed was that actual trigger time was far less than employees thought. They seemed to start counting just because the equipment was in their hands. We actually got an employee to monitor for a few days what individuals’ actual exposure was, and it turned out significantly less than they thought.

Chris

Yeah, you ask the employee how long they use that particular tool for and thec response is "all day"!