Hope Industrial announces that UL has completed testing confirming that its key products – Panel Mount Monitors, Universal Mount Monitors, monitor-mounted KVM products, and keyboards – passed IP66 environmental certification testing.
Although Hope's products had previously passed UL NEMA 4X testing, which demonstrates that IP66 ratings are also met, the supplier wanted to provide its customers with extra assurance that its products meet the stringent IP66 rating by using a trusted outside organization, Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL), to do the testing.
About IP66 Testing
IP ratings (per IEC Standard 60529) cover various levels of water and dust protection, and the IP66 rating indicates a high level of protection against ingress of solid foreign objects or liquids.
The First "6" – Dust Tight
The first number, in this case, the highest rating of a "six," indicates that Hope's products are completely dust-tight. To test for this, the products were placed in a UL-designed dust chamber to simulate very extreme dust conditions. The products were connected to a vacuum pump in the chamber and tested for eight hours, with talcum powder used as the solid foreign object. All tested products fully passed these tests.
The Second "6" – Water Tight (high pressure water jets)
The second "six" indicates the products have passed a spray test and are protected from powerful water jets from any direction. Each product was tested in a UL lab for three minutes with a jet water flow rate of 100 liters per minute (UL took the total seam length and divided by the total time to calculate the rate of speed on each product). The nozzle on the jet was 12.5 millimeters (0.5 inches) wide, and the distance from the nozzle to each product was 2.5 – 3 meters (2.2 – 3.1 yards).
Electronics products and enclosures intended for use in manufacturing environments are typically built rated to IP65, which is similar to IP66 but only protects against low-pressure water (as opposed to high pressure liquids used in many food processing cleaning operations). IP65 requires the product to handle a 12.5 liters (3 gallons) per minute stream of water (roughly the strength of a garden hose), while IP66 certified products must handle a much more powerful 100 liters (26.5 gallons) per minute (more like a fire hose). Even though IP65 is generally accepted as industry standard for protection of equipment that will be used in wash-down manufacturing environments, the supplier has chosen to provide the additional protection of IP66 rating since these conditions often exist in customer facilities.
Self-Certifying vs. Third-Party Testing
NEMA and IP ratings are both "self-certifying," which means that manufacturers can specify that their products meet the standards based on their own interpretation of the ratings without the approval or certification of any outside agency. To give customers an added degree of confidence, Hope Industrial goes a step further for NEMA compliance by putting its products through outside testing, an assurance now offered for IP certification as well.
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