Calibrate.co.uk Dont know what ukas or ISO 17025 is ???

[dimlow]

My first post here, and i didn't want it to be a negative one, but with the experience i just got from calibrate.co.uk i thought i have to tell. Anyway,  some may know me from EEVBlog forums. I have been a member their since the beginning, and if you watch Daves video blog you would have seen my work on most of his video's. I made the the Sparking EEVBlog Logo at the end of all of them. Contact me Martin if you want Something like that. Now anyway, to the point of the post...

Now that Martin is sponsored by Calibrate.co.uk i thought i would give them a call to see if they could calibrate my Solartron 7150, that i just got from ebay. So i thought i give them a call and see what they could do for me.

I called their 0845 3653930 number and got an option to speak to the calibration workshop or the sales team. I picked the workshop. I got a quick answer, that was a good sign. So i thought i would ask a simple question that any UK (Im in the UK BTW) calibrator would know the answer to. "Do you have ukas accreditation?" the answer i got was "err sorry sir what is ukas , hang on i will ask".

Not a good sign, all UK calibrators should at least know what ukas is. If you dont know, here is a extract from their web site

"The United Kingdom Accreditation Service is the sole national accreditation body recognised by government to assess, against internationally agreed standards, organisations that provide certification, testing, inspection and calibration services."

That says it all.

Anyway, I got put through to a young lady. I asked her the same question, she did not know the answer and said she would have to ask. I waited, she came back and admitted no, they do not have ukas accreditation. OK still maybe they have ISO 17025 accreditation  , so i asked if their calibrations are done in accordance with ISO 17025, i got a long pause, then she explained to me that the tests are done with ISO 9002, WTF ? I know as an ex Quality manager that ISO 9002 has nothing to do with Calibration. In fact ISO 9002 is not worth the paper its written on. I could go on in great detail about that but i wont. To continue i then i got put on hold. This is when i hung up.

Really, they should have known the answers to these simple questions. I wont be sending my meter to them.

Anyone else used them? What service did you get ? Did i just get unlucky speaking to these people or do they really not know what they are doing ? I don't know what to think.

Oh and if you think because something has ISO 9002 written on, it means its a Quality Product. Don't fool yourself. All ISO 9002 means is that the company will write a manual and operating instructions on how they manufacture the product and monitor the quality of it. In that manual they can basically state the there is no quality testing and they can still get ISO 9002 Accreditation, I know i have done it. Rant over!

Oh, and why the Verification when sending a post, its a pain in the.....

[dimlow]

Today the meter is going off for calibration. They will do ukas for £40 and non ukas testing for £30. So going for the non ukas unless they convince me otherwise. They will Also adjust if its out of calibration. Cheaper than calibrate.co.uk

[dr_p]

Oh, and why the Verification when sending a post, its a pain in the.....

You are a new user here, and I think it will go away soon

Today the meter is going off for calibration. They will do ukas for £40 and non ukas testing for £30. So going for the non ukas unless they convince me otherwise. They will Also adjust if its out of calibration. Cheaper than calibrate.co.uk

So where did you send it? It's not clear.

[iloveelectronics]

On the calibrate.co.uk website there is a link on the top navigation that says UKAS. It seems like if you do require UKAS they will send it to the qualified labs for that service.

[dimlow]

So where did you send it? It's not clear.

I did put a link in my post, seems it didn't appear, will try again, it has now gone here. Yep worked this time!

The price i quoted above was wrong it is in fact costing £65, Made a post on EEVBlog about it here

On the calibrate.co.uk website there is a link on the top navigation that says UKAS. It seems like if you do require UKAS they will send it to the qualified labs for that service.

Yes i saw that, but they don't make it clear in their advertising that THEY are not ukas, that's why i asked about it. Maybe i just spoke to two numtys that just answer the phones. I have no idea what their service is like, maybe they are good, that's why i asked. Also i don't have any real experience with calibration so I'm no person to judge them. It was just the impression i got from them on the phone today that made me go somewhere else.

[Majes]

Interesting, in my experience you are correct about the 9000 series of ISO accreditation, it's not what you'd expect from a lab with higher standards than a container shipper.

Since Martin has pretty much shown his dissatisfaction with Fluke due to no response on the 287 issues, I'd think this a great opportunity for calibrate.co.uk to post here and explain exactly what they do and what they are capable of.

Then we can all confidently support them as they do us.

Just my thoughts on the matter, I don't blame you for sending it elsewhere.

[dimlow]

I'm not aware of the problems he has been having with fluke. i only watch his video's. Its it something to with the fluke with the light problem ? Hey maybe i should get off my ass and search the forum.

 

[Majes]

Newbie!!

 

I was referring to Fluke's "Listening to the Customer" Reputation.

Seems like the more people look into things the more questions arise that really should be answered by representatives rather than the customers having to speculate.

[dimlow]

 
I watched that one, but i think i must have been sleeping at the time.

[dimlow]

The meter has been calibrated but im note sure if i should be happy with the results. Made a post on EEVblog forum here, with the certification available for download.

[MJLorton]

Thanks to everyone for the posts....I will certainly pick this up with Barry and ask for feedback.

[MJLorton]

My first post here, and i didn't want it to be a negative one, but with the experience i just got from calibrate.co.uk i thought i have to tell. Anyway,  some may know me from EEVBlog forums. I have been a member their since the beginning, and if you watch Daves video blog you would have seen my work on most of his video's. I made the the Sparking EEVBlog Logo at the end of all of them. Contact me Martin if you want Something like that. Now anyway, to the point of the post...

Thanks again for the post and welcome....I may take you up on that offer as soon as things calm down.

Cheers, Martin.

[Pass]

Hi Guys and thanks for your comments.

I'm the MD of PASS Ltd. Martin has let me know about the post on the forum.

Firstly apologies that you did not get the service or the answers that you should have.

Just to clarify things going forward. We are not a UKAS Laboratory and neither are we ISO17025. We are working towards ISO17025 and should have this within the next 2-4 months.

We are ISO9001 registered and i know this has nothing to do with calibration standards but just to emphasise the fact that we are a reputable company. This indicates that we do have quality systems in place as well as a complaints policy which we try our very best to ensure that people dont have to use that often.

As a company we have been in the test equipment business since 2001. As a calibration company we are relatively new in terms of age however we have been calibrating and repairing general electrical test equipment for almost 7 years. We are also an authorised repair centre for Megger and Seaward.

Over the years we have partnered with and used UKAS laboratories which we outsource test equipment calibrations for customers that require UKAS calibrations. When we do this the customer receives the calibration certificate from the UKAS laboratory.

To be perfectly honest not much of our business or customers require UKAS calibrations but again for those that do we outsource these as is stated on the website to the relevant UKAS lab that can carry out the work. Not all can.

Most UKAS Laboratories have particular specialties and you will find that the companies that are UKAS accredited are only accredited to calibrate a few types of instrument under the UKAS banner. Therefore from a business point of view it is not really cost effective to try to gain UKAS accreditation for all of the different instruments that we service and calibrate.

For us being able to offer access to the UKAS centres for our customers is whats important. It means that we can take care of their calibration requirements in one place and manage the process instead of them having to send their different types of test equipment to five different laboratories.

Although we are not UKAS all of our calibration equipment is sent away to each year at expense to be calibrated against a standard to maintain traceability as is the case with many calibration labs in the UK.

We do pride ourselves on our service. We aim to calibrate most test equipment within 3 days and have it back to you unless it involves UKAS or a repair. If you had sent in your test equipment to be calibrated you would have been happy with the certificate, results, traceability and the turnaround time. I guarantee you that.

I am a little confused however about your comment that you spoke to two girls. As we have around 35 employees at PASS there is a chance that the lines in the calibration dept were busy and you were transferred to another department which is the reason that you didnt get the answer you should have.

If you are happy to give me the telephone number that you called in on i will take a listen to the call and get back to you with an explanation as it may have been the new apprentice that picked up the call ? Certainly sounds like it !

If you have any concerns with the service or any other issue then i welcome constructive criticism. Happy customers come back and that is a fact. If someone has a problem then there are probably another 50 people that have a similar issue but dont say anything so we often dont get to hear about it until it appears on a forum or in the way of a complaint.

So i really do appreciate you pointing it out. As i mentioned. if you would like to privately supply the phone number i'll take a look into it for you.

Kind Regards

Barry Atkins

[dimlow]

Hey Barry, thanks for the reply, that was not expected.

As you can see from the posts above i was not expecting a ukas calibration all i was really after was some confidence in the fact that the  company was competent in what they do before i sent me meter off in the post. When i asked the questions i was surprised with the answers i got.

Well in the end i didn't choose your company and well maybe i should have because the calibration i received from Alpha Electronics was not very good. The full story is on the eevblog forum, i linked to it above. suffice to say they calibrated my meter, a 20 ppm meter with a 30 ppm calibrator when it really should have been done with 8 ppm uncertainties. After questioning this they refunded my money. Still I'm looking to get the meter calibrated again so i can be certain that the meter is functioning as it should  and if its not in calibration i would like it to be adjusted. I'm not sure if many calibration companies can do this now as its an old meter so the search goes on.

[Pass]

Hi Again !
Not a problem. I just thought that the title of the post was a little strong. There usually a reason for these things.

Back to the calibration. You have a pretty accurate instrument. Our cal lab also uses a 20ppm unit to calibrate with.

There isnt a great call to calibrate down to that level of accuracy however we do have access to an 8 ppm calibrator so if you would like me to arrange this for you let me know. You can message me though the forum.

I have attached a sample cert with a benchtop of similar spec to the solatron purely to show you the type of cert you receive from our standard bench top multimeters in terms of range of cal points.