There is an interesting discussion thread going on at Linked In about whether plant operators should be allowed to adjust or change instrument settings (including calibration).

If you are on Linked In, you can find the discussion here http://bit.ly/1ez5lo. If not, you’ll need to sign up for a free account.

My personal and professional opinion for calibration is a decided NO. Actually, it’s NO, NO, NO, NO!

Inadequate calibration maintenance is already a plague at most process plants and allowing anyone other than a qualified calibration professional with the right tools to make a change that affects calibration is sheer madness and dangerous to boot.

While a little tweak may appear to fix things momentarily, pretty soon it will add up to a huge problem.

I feel qualified to make this statement having worked on both sides of the equation. Operators do need to feel and be empowered, but that should be limited to making setpoint adjustments, which even then may need to be limited. It’s easy to lose the big picture when you’re having a problem in the control room. Setpoints, calibration, etc. all have to come together to make the big picture pretty.

Tags: calibration, traceability

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Calibrators, Martel Electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.