MattB wrote:
How much do consultants charge for an "electrical safety program"? Is the fee based on the size of the facility, or number of employees, or is it a flat charge regardless?
Hourly, based on how much input the customer desires. I have a small office that accomplishes much with little need for meetings and bureaucracy, however; without customer input on how things are done; any "standard program" can look very foolish.
As an example of how things might differ, a waste water treatment plant might be able to sustain short outages depending on holding pond capacity; so the safety program could be written mostly around LOTO. A refinery can sustain outages on equipment that has "spares", but also cannot sustain outages on certain critical process equipment so the program is split between LOTO (which they teach) and NFPA hot work requirements which we have worked out many details on as a team. A tanker (ship) must have power to critical systems so the hot work requirements have much to do with reducing arc flash energy available, while maintaining power. Any one of these programs would look very stupid to any one of the other agencies; about $10k in fees gets us a long way down the road, but that can grow exponentially if there is much corporate review and input desired.
