Charging laptops / ipads

[wayne]

hi all we have had our health & safety inspection and one of the recommendations was "Use timers to charge electronic devices when people are present in the building, this will enable a phone call to be made to the fire brigade in the event of a incident." i understand the thought behind this process but they are used most of the day so when would they charge. thoughts please.

[Andrew]

We had a similar thing recently when we had a Fire Service RA done and they also recommended not to charge overnight, due to the lithium batteries, but we have the same thing as used during the day.
I told the staff this was the recommendation and in the RA but was met with "well when are we supposed to charge them?" I just told them this is what your supposed to do but what you actually do is up to you. Not a lot else I can do unfortunately.

[Vera]

Just pass the recommendation up the food chain and keep the emails as evidence of doing due diligence.

It would require a different way of working for the CO's so will need to be managed by the head or deputy.

[Nedge]

Same here, we charge through the night. We did have one incident where a charger burnt out and left a plastic smell for days in the room, I wasn't on site and the fire brigade got called out. I also found that there was 47 chargers all working from 1 single socket(extension plugged into extesion plugged into extension and so on ). To say i wasnt happy is an understatement.

[Dunroamin]

Same as most of you, ours are charged overnight. We have a number of laptop/iPad charging trolleys, and following advice from a H&S visit, each now has a plug through RCD (numbered and paired with that trolley). In theory, they’ll cut the power if there’s an issue with the trolley. Each member of staff was informed of their implementation, how to test and reset the RCD before every use, and physically shown the process. It was also mentioned during a fire extinguisher that it’s a good idea to have a Lith-ex extinguisher with each iPad charging trolley in case of fire

[stunnn]

Interesting recommendation and I can see where they are coming from but how is this practical?
I am guessing the person that recommended this saw an iPad charging rack and thought a simple time would help.. which I guess it would..

But...
Any member of staff can plug something in to charge in any socket.. So how would you police that?
You could potentially put timers on the plug circuits so that they come on at 6am and stay on until midnight? (Trying to think through all the after school hirers / cleaners work times / catering early starts).
You'd need NON-timed circuits for any fridges (in an SEN school there can be a few of them)...
(Servers, Alarms etc should all be on separate circuits but often aren't so you'd need to check that)
You'd also need to have some sort of override for when the timer breaks..
You'd also need to check in with IT to make sure they sent a kill command network wide to PC's and any projectors (if you still have them) HATE just being turned off at the mains - They need to power down and make sure their bulbs cool properly.

Not sure what the costing on that would be but on the plus side it would help with the Carbon Footprint.

[Gazza]

We had a similar thing recently when we had a Fire Service RA done and they also recommended not to charge overnight, due to the lithium batteries, but we have the same thing as used during the day.
I told the staff this was the recommendation and in the RA but was met with "well when are we supposed to charge them?" I just told them this is what your supposed to do but what you actually do is up to you. Not a lot else I can do unfortunately.

And here lies OUR problem as Premises managers and caretakers..... THE INDUSTY HAS NO UNIFORMED RESPONSE TO THIS ISSUE......

I had a fire safety officer from Surrey attend site last July and when he looked at this issue, his reccomendation was ONLY TO CHARGE OVERNIGHT and not during the day......

His thought process was that should these batteries catch fire at night, there would be no risk to life as opposed to if they caught fire during the day

[MrMatt]

We were told by our computer guy that they only need a few hours to charge up fully so shouldn't be charged all night as it ruins the batteries. We now have ours on a timer charge from 6.00 am - 9-00 am, they are usually all charged and ready to go for when the children come into school, we've been doing this for the last two months and the laptops etc are lasting the day easily.

[Keyolder]

We were told by our computer guy that they only need a few hours to charge up fully so shouldn't be charged all night as it ruins the batteries.

That is a good point, although modern tablets/laptops have thermal sensors to identify overheating and maybe cutouts, its still a worry if they are charging all weekend.