The dust within this troff is after a major clean-up by the tenent of this building. The dust is from packaging "potato flakes" & refered to as "potato dust"

All the electrical equipment in the area was covered & filled with this.

Comments appreciated!!

My guess is that the electrical room has an exhaust fan, or the production area is under positive pressure.

Is potato dust conductive or flammable?

No exhaust equipment exists. Packaging was pneumatic loaded into railcars. Potato dust, like most if no all grains is hazardous.

They need to pressurize the electrical room and use appropriate wiring methods. I service a plant that moves oat flakes with pneumatics. The fans move a lot of air and create differences in pressure.

I also learned a lesson about baghouses that remove 99.9% of dust. 0.1% of infinity is still infinity.

Do you think this rises to the level of class II div 2?
500(C)(2)(3)

Doesn't it need dustproof equipment? Like Greg said?

I worked in an old bakery years ago and the flour dust was everywhere. Another job I had, the factory used to work with graphite and by the end of the day, we were covered in black graphite powder.

Turns out that in order to comply with ALL codes, this process is being abandoned, and will be removed from the structure.

Engineering ideas ranged from controlled sectioning-off of that area with dust collection; which would place the equip in the pic outside of the dust area. Replaceing the electrical with dust-tite, sealing the conduits, and replaceing the motors, etc is cost prohibitive. Outright dust control/management could not be achieved, per engineers.

All in all, it was correcting a possible bad situation beforehand.

well it might be the right thing to do HotOne, but that double edged sword of bureaucracy cuts both ways too

this gets back to my existing query.

seems a place of business can exist in a state of non compliance for many reasons

there's no annual inspection(s) , like a motor vehicle would have, so they just tick along out there

the powers that be , at least in my experience, usually decend when the biz changes hands.

then the prospective entrepreneurs are confronted by a world of catch up

all fine and well, but it's never apples/apples on state , or even county lines , and gawd forbid the funding exists to move further out into the world arena...

~S~

`s`:
The scenario to this 'find' was an 'open' permit that I gave to my inspector for clean-up of a 480 feeder & panel, xfr, & 120/208 panel. The process machinery was not on the permit. He discovered the situation (3 to 4" of 'dust' on & in the equipment)

A call to the EC of record to get his act together quick, and as that fell on deaf ears...the protocol that I have to follow was initiated.

Without the nitty/gritty, IF the EC would have called for an inspection in a timely manner, as soon as his work was done......he would have been golden & no one would have seen this unless there was a need for emergency response. It's amazing how much 'bad' is tripped upon by people excersizing there rights of stupidity!

I considered writing a book about all this stuff.....but no one would believe...

This is the kind of thing I would expect to be cited by the fire marshal. Usually that is actually a fireman/inspector from the local fire district but virtually all businesses get a spot check now and then. They walk through and check fire extinguishers, exit signs, room load signage, panel accessibility, egress routes and other life safety issues. This should have rung a bell with them.

Greg:

Fire Prevention is responsible for all that you mention above. Recently was 'privitized' to two civilian inspectors, as opposed to the five uniform (Fire Dept) inspectors. The perfect world scenario is minimum once a year inspections. Aparently, this bldg fell thru the cracks, and this 'new' process went unnoticed. Amazing what you find when doing clean-ups of old permits!