Europe is an important and growing part of our business but we were surprised by reports of some companies placing a low priority on compliance with the RoHS directive, because they anticipated delays (like with EMC), writes Kevin Beavan. We’ve been supplying the European market for 8 years we’ve been committed to every directive that’s been thrown our way. In the US, where much of Powervar’s manufacturing takes place, we’ve been working on a steady program of compliance for over 18 months. This is now complete with all non-compliant product out of the supply chain.
The RoHS directive and regulations defines electronic and electrical equipment (EEE) as dependent on electric currents or electromagnetic fields in order to work properly and equipment for the generation, transfer and measurement of such currents, most of our products fall squarely in to the ‘transfer’ category. Battery and system-power related products contain more than their fair share of the metals and compounds covered by the directive, also the total weight of some UPS products (with batteries) makes some of the rules harder to apply but we’re confident all requirements have been covered. Some suppliers will tell you that the medical and UPS market, representing two segments of our business, have some ‘possible’ RoHS exceptions – however we’ve invested a lot in ensuring that anything we ship to European customers now will stand up to the scrutiny of the NWML inspectors.
As a part of the RoHS re-engineering, some product improvements have also occurred. Among the most important are the addition of a USB port for use with the UPM communications software. Users will now have their choice of either serial port or USB connectivity for the purposes of monitoring system information such as input/output voltage, frequency and battery state. The software can also automatically notify user contacts in the event of a power failure and safely shut down the system, too.
We’ll be interested to see how vigorously the RoHS rules are applied in European member countries compared with those applied to imports from US and Asia. Time will show whether the UK and other European governments are doing enough to inform customers what they should be looking for from electrical and electronic product suppliers.
Kevin Beavan is MD of Powervar, Swindon