How would you handle this?

We purchased a Resistance tester last year for a specific job.
We used it that one time to check about 300 parts.
We have not used it since.
I have it in our recall system, but am not sure what to do at this point.

How stable are these items in storage?
Should I require recal after so many parts?
Recall before next use?

Just want to see how others handle this. Heck we may never use the thing agian.

James

Hey, James. I have a customer that has four or five of these I have been calibrating for years. There are a couple of different MFG. of the instruments. They have always been repeatable. The only time I have seen these instruments have problems is when the battery starts running down.

Personally, I might have it checked out after the 300 runs. If you have some certified multimeters, you can buy a high voltage Fluke probe for a $100 bucks or so, and do a quick verification of it if you would like. Basically, you could make it a "Calibrate upon use" instrument.

If you feel pretty certain your're not going to use it, I might sell it. It would be better than keeping up with something you are probably not going to use.

If you store it, I would pull the batteries.

You could make it inactive, tag it and store it. Put you a one year note in Outlook. If in one year it's still sitting in the same spot, I would E-Bay it.

There is a wide range of accuracies/stabilities, depending on what particular type you have. Don't know if I am really adding much to the previous reply, as he seemed to cover it pretty well. But for the sake of getting a "post" in, here's my two cents.

How often you should calibrate it depends on the manufacturer's specs. I have a number of mental pictures of what you may have (something like a Universal brand tester, a Biddle Megger, or an Agilent LCR meter, etc...>>NOTE: No recommendation of brands intended; only to show examples).

The baseline should be the manufacturer's recommended interval. For the Biddle or Agilent, that may be 12 months or something like that. For the Universal tester, it may be much shorter.

As one who has managed numerous calibration programs, if it were in my cognizance, I would recommend making it INACTIVE, and clearly labeled as such. If you have quality compliance requirements, you might strongly consider doing a calibration prior to making it INACTIVE (to assure it remained within specs for the entire time you used it to measure product).

Another alternative (if you expect to continue to use it, AND you use it at a particular resistance value) would be to purchase and certify a check (GOLDEN) standard. That is, a highly accurate and stable reference resistor to periodically check it with. If you use a narrow range of resistance values, you could get resistors to cover that range.

Of course, as I said, the previous poster covered very well most options, so I don't want to repeat what has already been said.