When it comes to lifting and rigging operations, safety of the employees and the facility is always the number one priority. Therefore, it’s vitally important to ensure that the lifting equipment is in perfect working condition before it’s placed into service. To do this, companies need to have a through equipment maintenance and inspection protocol, which includes equipment testing prior to lofting operations.
One vital part of pre-operation preparations is load testing. It’s a critical tool that helps in ensuring overhead crane and hoist safety. As the name implies, load testing is the process of subjecting a crane to a test load and seeing how it responds to it. This helps in determining the real safe lifting capacity of a crane.
Over the course of this blog post, we’ll go over why it’s important to regularly perform load tests for cranes and overhead hoists.
The Reasons Why Companies Perform Load Testing
Firstly, when it comes to cranes and overhead hoists, load testing is not an option; it’s a must. In addition to determining the load capacity of lifting equipment, which we’ve already discussed, load testing is important for the following reasons:
Identifying the bottlenecks in performance and the exact breaking points
Identifying the functional errors that only occur under stress
Mitigating the risk and severity of accidents
OSHA’s Regulations Regarding Load Testing
OSHA also outlined certain load testing standards to ensure that it remains a component of regular maintenance. Some of these standards include:
A designated individual should be appointed by the management to perform the duties of an operator.
Before they’re used in a lifting operation, all overhead cranes and hoists need to be tested to ensure that functions such as hoisting, lowering, travel, trolley, bridge travel, and limit switches are functioning properly. It’s also important to ensure that crane safety instruments, such as load indicator crane, LMI systems, and crane camera system are in perfect working order.
The upper-limit device’s actuating mechanism should be located in a manner that it trips the device quickly enough to prevent the load block from coming in to contact with any part of the crane or the trolley.
Here at Crane Warning Systems Atlanta, we sell technologically advanced crane safety instruments, including crane LMI systems, crane load monitoring systems, and wireless anemometers, that enhance the safety and efficiency of loft operations. Get in touch with us today to learn more.