IT's been more than 20 years in the making, but Hunter electrician Wayne Callen believes his company's electrical safety product will revolutionise global markets.
Mr Callen and his business partners Robert Zullo and Allan Edwards are the brains trust behind World Wide Electrical Safety Technology Pty Ltd, specialising in the research and development of electrical safety devices.
A decade ago, WWEST began exploring Residual Voltage Technology (RVT), which relies on Residual Current Devices (RCDs), or the safety switches designed to prevent a fatal electric shock if you touch something live.
"Electricity is made up of voltage and currents and RCDs work on currents, however I had found that voltage was easier to control and also able to detect far greater fault levels in areas the RCD does not work in," Mr Callen says.
Climate change has given birth to alternative power supplies that Mr Callen says regular "class one" RCDs are unable to accommodate.
"Governments are not building power stations and encouraging everyone to go solar but the industry is saying where is the safety protection?" he says. "Everyone thinks RCDs are the best things since sliced bread ... but they don't work in many existing applications and new areas we are getting into. Infrastructure is old and then we are putting in new technologies and expecting them to handle it."
WWEST'S device, the RVT-VMD, incorporates an RCD but changes the functionality to provide what Mr Callen says is "unprecedented" safety in electrical applications. In early prototypes it was the size of a powerboard but it is now the size of a postal stamp. It can be integrated into commercial and consumer electrical products and help save thousands of lives and improve safety.
"It is a disruptive technology that provides a higher reliability than standard RCDs by duplicating the functional sensing and triggering components," Mr Callen says.
WWEST is seeking an Original Equipment Manufacturer to make the product compatible for broad use in industry and infrastructure. It has already integrated the RVT-VMD for organisations including Sydney Water, which used the technology for power inverters used by their mobile field technicians.
"We want to get it small enough so it can be built into many electrical devices, but we have to get our cost of manufacturing down and we are not there yet," he says.
The bread and butter market will be for powerboards and switchboards but Mr Callen says that the solar market is "crying out" for this to be addressed.
"Every second house has got solar and that's where I recognise that there is an electrical safety issue, so I'd like to be able to work with a solar panel manufacturer in the future to incorporate our product into theirs."
The device has been independently tested by a NATA approved testing agency as a voltage monitoring device and is the only product of its type on market.
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