Cable tie on outdoor isolator

[cool hand fluke]

Just a quick one.
Could anyone enlighten me on the regs,
Problem site of little rascles turning off the condensing unit.
Are we allowed to cable tie the isolator in the on position?
Thanks
Bryan

[Brian_UK]

I would suggest a padlock with one key being given to a "responsible" person on site.

[cool hand fluke]

Thanks Bri, I was just worried about breaking any regs on electrics, moving parts ect.

[joe-ice]

I doubt it would be against any regs if its not an emergency isolator but saying that i personally would not cable tie it, these things can turn into a fiasco if something does go wrong.

[still learning]

In the past if its critical equipment,ie. a comms room.
We have used a paddlelock. And the owner had a pair of bolt croppers for the event of lost key.

[install monkey]

as long as you put a warning sticker on the unit saying isolate prior to working on- your covered

[Tycho]

I would think that any regulations would say that it should be locked in the off position when doing work, so as long as it is not an automatic trip switch, you can lock it in whatever position you want, because it's the responsibility of whoever is doing any work on it to turn the switch and lock it in the off position.

here's a story of mine: (http://www.refrigeration-engineer.com/forums/showthread.php?43647-Plants-that-ALWAYS-have-the-same-problem&highlight=)
The machinery room is on the roof of a local fish factory, for some time the compressors would stop every now and then after working hours and everyone had gone home.
over night the alarm history would fill up with high temperature alarms from the storage rooms and it would overwrite the initial alarm that shut the system down.
over time the problem became more and more frequent, however, looking at the temperature log of the storage rooms I could see that it never stopped at the same time and concluded that it wasn't something periodic that happened the same time every evening/night.
The place is just a 5 min drive from where I live, so to get to the bottom of the problem I stopped by every time I drove past in the evening to see if it was running.
after a few days I got there about an hour after it had stopped and the first alarm was the emergency stop.

Interesting.

the emergency stop switches on this system is a "pulse switch", you push it and it goes back to normal state, so while I was there I checked all the connections on the emergency stop circuit and found nothing wrong, so I started the system again and went home.

The next evening it was the same thing, tripped on emergency stop, reset and started it again.

Third evening, again it was tripped on emergency stop, restarted and spent some time checking again, everything was in working order.
The place is right next to a marina, and as I was getting into my car I noticed a group of kids playing around on the pier, crawling onto boats and running around.
I was on my way to the store when I stopped at the place, so about an hour later when I returned, the kids were gone but the system had tripped on the emergency stop again.

1+1=2

The solution: Told the owner to lock the door to the machinery room after working hours, problem solved.