TEST & MEASUREMENT
How testing equipment is evolving to make the installers’ job easier Mark Johnson, Marketing Consultant to Metrel UK, discusses the evolution of testing equipment amidst a challenging economic backdrop. ust recently the economic news has not been great. Consumer inflation in the UK has risen to its highest level in 40 years. The pound has dropped in the last six years making any commercial transactions, such as buying oil, about a third more expensive. Then there is the impact of Covid, exacerbating the shortage of various manufactured items such as silicon chips. This has meant that manufacturers are competing with different industries to grab a supply of components simply so they can build their testers. At the start of 2019 copper was $27,218 per ton, three short years later it was 63% higher. And that’s not all, as we can also add President Putin’s war to all of this.
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24 Electrical Review | July / August 2022
Taken altogether, the bottom line of the situation is that we will all feel the pinch in the coming weeks and months ahead. Thankfully, the positive is that we are working in the construction industry, the industry that our governments see as the driver for economic development and as the tangible proof of their ‘levelling up agenda’, whether it is great infrastructure projects like HS2, large housing estates or converting buildings into decent accommodation. There is money to invest and money to be made in our industry. However ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’ philosophy of British Cycling’s Sir Dave Brailsford applied to our processes is no longer enough in a world of big cost increases. The test equipment sector has been through a torrid time, with a chipset shortage. A fire in an American factory limited the supply for some major manufacturers’ multifunction testers. In an effort to circumnavigate this shortage, one manufacturer changed components, however reports suggested that it compromised their testers’ quality. Meanwhile, all manufacturers are now fighting for supplies in the
