If you use equipment designed to measure or manufacture various parts and materials with high precision, you want it to be as accurate as possible. Ensuring your equipment’s accuracy often comes down to calibrating it at the right intervals. As a result, many companies develop a calibration schedule for the various instruments they use for their work.
To ensure your equipment is always accurate, you may want to learn more about the necessity of a calibration schedule and how to set the calibration frequency for your equipment.
Understanding calibration frequency starts with recognizing how crucial it is to calibrate your equipment. When you calibrate your equipment properly, you ensure its measurements are within a predetermined range. If the measurements fall out of an acceptable range, you can typically adjust the equipment, adjusting its measuring system to ensure its results fall into the known value’s acceptable range. By calibrating the equipment regularly, you can maintain greater accuracy.
Various factors can affect your instrument’s measurements, causing them to drift or fall out of the appropriate range. For example, workplace error, improper handling, operator error and huge temperature swings can all affect an instrument’s accuracy. Inaccurate readings can cause you to discard acceptable parts, run unnecessary tests and perform other production inefficiencies.
Since most equipment requires routine calibration to ensure it delivers accurate measurements, you need to understand how often you should calibrate your equipment. As you develop a routine calibration schedule, you’ll find that different instruments and machinery will have different equipment calibration frequency requirements. By developing a calibration schedule based on your equipment’s unique needs, you can keep it in the best condition possible.
A calibration interval is the duration between calibration cycles, which involve measuring an instrument or piece of equipment. Establishing a defined interval between each measurement is key in ensuring equipment performs within its specified parameters. Significant deviations from one calibration cycle to the next may warrant an increase or decrease in calibration frequency.
Different industries have different calibration frequency guidelines. There are no specific regulations defining what an interval should look like for an organization. As such, every industry can choose suitable calibration intervals so long as the results are acceptable to the regulatory bodies.
For example, calibration frequency as per ISO 17025 is that laboratories shall establish their own calibration programs and have measures to ensure the validity of results.
Since calibrating your equipment on a particular schedule is crucial to your success, you’ll want to understand the main times you may need to calibrate your equipment. For example, creating a calibration schedule based on a manufacturer’s recommended calibration intervals or after a predetermined number of uses can help you develop a schedule that keeps your equipment calibrated properly without wasting time recalibrating unnecessarily.
Here are eight times you’ll want to calibrate your equipment:
When you want to know how often to calibrate instruments, it’s best to start with the manufacturer’s calibration frequency standards. Usually, a manufacturer will specify the calibration frequency of their instruments in the owner’s manual. These specifications will tell users how to calibrate their equipment at the right intervals.
However, manufacturer-recommended calibration intervals may not be enough for certain applications. Some equipment may need to be recalibrated more or less frequently based on use or industry standards, so it’s crucial to adjust your calibration schedule as necessary based on the application. Some industry standards that may apply to your equipment include ISO 9001 Registered by NQA and ISO/IEC 17025 and ANSI/NCSL Z540-1-1994 Accredited by ANAB.
When your equipment experiences a potentially harmful event, such as an object hitting it, the equipment may no longer function properly. If you want to ensure your equipment works correctly, you can calibrate the equipment to check its integrity.
Even if the event didn’t cause a visible physical defect, such as a damaged connector, scratch or dent, it’s still essential to calibrate the equipment. While physical defects might not be present, the equipment’s functionality could have been affected. By calibrating the equipment, you can verify that nonvisible internal components are working appropriately.
Many companies choose to calibrate their equipment on a particular schedule, such as monthly, quarterly or semiannually. Some companies wait even longer, only calibrating their equipment annually or biannually. As you decide how often to calibrate your instruments and machinery, you may want to consider how often you use your equipment and how important its accuracy is when selecting the right equipment calibration frequency.
Here are some of the most common routine calibration periods and information on why companies choose these schedules:
When you’re preparing for a major project, you should recalibrate the instruments you’ll use for the project. Before the project, send the instruments to a lab or bring in a trained calibration technician to ensure your equipment is calibrated to the project’s needs. After you receive the results, you can be certain your instruments will perform at the optimal level.
After you have your equipment calibrated, you may want to lock it in storage if you can until you begin using it for a project. By storing the equipment in a safe location, you can ensure the instrument’s accuracy isn’t affected before the major project. When you both test and protect your equipment before a critical project begins, you can be much more confident in the results you receive and take appropriate action based on them.
In addition to calibrating equipment before a critical project, it’s best practice to calibrate your equipment following the project’s completion. Many companies have their equipment calibrated immediately after a project since the calibration results will tell them if they can trust the equipment’s accuracy.
Essentially, a test immediately following a project’s completion can help safeguard you against potentially inaccurate results, even if you were confident in your equipment’s accuracy before the project. Having your equipment calibrated before and after a critical project ensures that no deviations in tolerance occur at any point in the project.
As your equipment gets older, you’re more likely to see its accuracy start to drift faster than it did earlier in its life. You’ll want to monitor it closely, tracking how often your instruments require calibration and taking year-over-year calibration tests. With this data, you can spot when your aging equipment starts to need more frequent calibration.
Once the equipment starts showing more inaccurate results, you’ll likely want to start calibrating it more regularly. Increasing the frequency of your calibration for older instruments can help you catch any performance dips before they start delivering even more inaccurate results.
Some jobs require companies to use certified test equipment that’s been calibrated, no matter the size of the project. The most common requirement for these types of jobs is to have the equipment calibrated annually, meaning that if you had it calibrated within the last year and have the test results, you could likely proceed with the job.
Of course, other jobs have different requirements, so you need to know if you need to take any industry standards or client requests for calibration into account before beginning a job. A job’s unique calibration needs are often affected by quality assurance (QA) requirements, equipment applications and industry regulations. Be sure you take all of these factors into account. By calibrating your equipment on a schedule fitting a job’s needs, you can improve client satisfaction and comply with various regulations and standards.
A mechanical or electrical shock can significantly reduce the accuracy of a piece of equipment. Even if you can’t see any noticeable issues with a shocked instrument, you’ll still want to recalibrate it for accuracy. Microscopic changes can greatly impact an instrument’s efficacy due to the incredibly precise tolerances needed by some types of equipment. When you recalibrate your equipment following a shock, you ensure you can trust the equipment’s accuracy.
With modern technology, you can more easily track how often you’ve used a piece of equipment during a set time. This data can allow you to be much more proactive with your recalibration needs, scheduling calibration tasks after an instrument or machine sees a predetermined number of uses. Instead of calibrating every year or every quarter, you can calibrate based on use, helping you better prevent potential inaccuracies.
Since recalibration often comes down to how many times an instrument or machine has been used rather than how much time has passed since its last calibration, you can more effectively calibrate your equipment. For example, If you were previously calibrating a rarely-used piece of equipment every six months, you might be able to extend that date by paying attention to its use and recalibrating it after a specific number of uses instead.
By recalibrating based on usage, you can potentially extend the time between recalibrations, saving you time and money. Conversely, you can ensure frequently used equipment delivers accurate results by knowing how many times you can use it before it starts delivering inaccurate results. Instead of waiting for a specific amount of time to pass before you recalibrate an instrument, you can set recalibration to occur after a set number of uses, ensuring the instrument’s accuracy doesn’t suffer.
Increasing and decreasing the calibration frequency of instruments when necessary helps ensure accuracy, reliability and compliance with your specific industry standards. Let’s highlight some of the situations that call for an increase or decrease in calibration frequency.
Here are some of the conditions and situations that necessitate adjusting your calibration schedule for instruments:
There are certain cases where you can safely reduce how often you calibrate instruments. Reducing calibration frequency can often be practical and cost-effective, so long as it doesn’t compromise your device’s accuracy. Here are conditions when you may be able to calibrate equipment less often:
Once you determine a routine calibration schedule that works for your company, let Garber Metrology help. We routinely test, calibrate and inspect equipment per industry standards for companies across various industries. When you use our precision calibration services, you can expect your equipment to be ISO 9001 Registered by NQA and ISO/IEC 17025 and ANSI/NCSL Z540-1-1994 Accredited by ANAB.
Since we’re a one-stop shop for calibration, you can also expect a fast, industry-leading turnaround time, meaning your company will have less downtime when your equipment needs calibration.
