Underwriters Laboratories, a U.S. nonprofit standards development organization, has published the new UL 3741 safety standard, which is related to the evaluation of PV hazard control functions.
“The standard is specifically intended to establish and expand requirements to help keep firefighters out of hazardous current paths when responding to emergency situations in homes and buildings with PV systems,” Underwriters Laboratories said. “Systems that comply with UL 3741 should also decrease potential hazards for others working in and around the PV array.”
The standard, which has been approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), offers significant consistency in terms of PV hazard control, across both countries and jurisdictions.
“In addition, UL 3741 may reduce potential trade barriers by allowing manufacturers to design and evaluate products for both countries,” Underwriters Laboratories explained.
UL 3741 is the result of a decade of research conducted by the UL Firefighter Safety Research Institute, in cooperation with Sandia National Laboratories. Their work included research into electric shock parameters for ungrounded and grounded PV arrays, hazard-controlled states for PV system operation under emergency conditions, body impedance models, and corresponding shock thresholds for male and female firefighters with personal protective equipment.
*The article was amended on December 12 to specify the Underwriters Laboratories is a U.S. nonprofit standards development organization.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
2 comments
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.