Thanks again for your comment, but I completely disagree with just about every part of it. I have read A LOT of relay testing specifications and trained relay testing personnel from all over the world. Most commissioning test specifications:

• State that the relay must be tested
• A smaller subset specify that the enabled elements must be tested
• An even smaller subset specifies that the relay contacts, inputs, and analog I/O must be tested
• An even smaller subset specifies the logic must be tested
• An even smaller subset specifies that you must perform a pickup test and a timing test with more than one timing test on inverse elements.

I have yet to read a single testing specification that gave specific testing instructions beyond this.

In fact, this comment is related to other complaints that other relay testers have about NERC testing like:
• Test reports have to be generated by test-sets and computers
• You have to re-test all your CTs within a certain time frame
• Relay testers have to be certified

None of these statements are true from NERC. I usually ask the person who tells me that something is required (like “I have to test this relay a certain way”) to show me the document where the requirement comes from. I’ve yet to see a single document. Feel free to send me yours. I truly would like to see one of these unicorns if anyone else reading this has a relay testing specification that goes to this level of detail.

Now let’s look at each of your statements in order:

“all east coast utilities require Doble test plans”
I worked for a Doble competitor and we sold, and lost orders to competing test-sets that weren’t Doble, to several east coast utilities. Not everyone uses Doble. In fact, Enoserv/RTS opened the door for competing test sets in many large utilities across North America. If you go even further afield to Europe, they are building universal testing standards in organizations similar to IEEE that only specify dynamic testing.

“and these test plans require passing marks in the test plan, which is impossible without making a pickup a controlled output”
The videos in this seminar show you several ways to perform pickup tests that do not require re-programming outputs, such as:

• Dynamic testing (Con Edison, a NY utility, actually pioneered this style of testing in North America. Their papers around 2007 on the topic allowed me to confidently start applying dynamic testing to everything I did. Before I had justification in these papers, I was afraid of the customer questions (That never occurred) you mentioned in your earlier comment.
• Replacing the contact with your eyes, ears, and hands.
• Manually saving the values (Doble has a great series of macros called creep I, V, F that allow you to do this. We demonstrate how to do it with Manta and Omicron in these videos. Enoserv/RTS has the functionality to add it to any test when the simulate button doesn’t appear automatically)

“Saying “the light was more on than off” is not acceptable”
As I stated before, your test procedure requirements probably don’t have that level of detail. If there are no specifications for things like sense delay, sense duration, debounce, ramp rate, contact programming, relay programming, etc., I can make my test result be anything I want them to be with no-one being the wiser. Don’t like the result you get with the first pulse your automated test set records, add some debounce. Anyone can pencil whip any test regardless of how the test is performed. Adding debounce is probably more accurate because the relay actually doesn’t start timing until the light is more on than off. A manual determination is definitely more accurate.

“utilities require Doble test plans”
In fact, I had a customer who had a requirement similar to your initial complaint. They wanted me to use a Doble test-set to do the maintenance testing on their relays because they would know that “the relay was tested correctly and they’d get a report of the tests” Normally I would have just refused the job, but I was doing a favor for a friend and didn’t want to make waves for him. So I borrowed a Doble test-set and started performing dynamic tests on their generator relays. It turns out I found a whole bunch of problems with the relays they had no idea they had. After several conference calls with the design engineers from the utility and the generator manufacturer, we got all the problems resolved. They asked me why the previous relay testers didn’t find the problems before, and I explained why standard testing doesn’t work. Another maintenance interval came around three years later and they asked me to come back and do the testing. I told them I didn’t want to because of the Doble requirement, and suddenly Doble test-sets were no longer required. I went back there several more times and they would call me before scheduling multi-million dollar maintenance periods to make sure they fit my schedule, as several of my customers did. Why didn’t they require Doble testing after that job? Why didn’t they just hire a local Doble tester who would jump to their schedule instead of jumping through my hoops?

In the end, this seminar is to help relay testers become craftsmen instead of button pushers.

Feel free to contact [email protected] to request a full refund if you don’t think this seminar is right for you.