So we calculate the energy to be fairly high, requiring a flash suit, hood, and bulky gloves. The activity is to remove the cover of a panel with some energized components behind. Or they've got the breaker out of a 15 kV metalclad lineup and they're in the cubicle with the bus and adjacent cubicles energized and making adjustments to things. ---- How the heck do people do fiddly work with screws and clips with big bulky gloves on? What is *actually* done? I'm guessing you folks are going to say -- get the bus out?

What about there the panel cover must be removed to do the potential check, so even if they take the outage, it isn't dead until they've checked it, so they still have to get the cover off with gloves on?

Now for low energy, low voltage situations, where they're removing a cover or working on items that are supposed to be dead while there's live bus elsewhere in the panel. So they're not in contact with voltage, but there's an arc flash hazard from dropping/dislodging objects, etc. A colleague of mine said that he was a Mitsubishi plant in Japan where the workers had thin leather gloves, like golf gloves. Is anybody using or investigating very thin gloves for low-energy (say, under 4 cal/cm^2) arc flash protection? Would anybody be interested in testing such a thing with us?

Thanks,

Jody
Hydro One (Ontario)