MINIMISING RISK

You’re no doubt aware that trips, falls and ergonomic injuries are common in even the most strictly regulated work environments. Workplaces use hoses and cables for all manner of applications, each one carrying potential safety risks such as trips and falls, ergonomic and manual handling injuries, and slipping injuries when improperly managed hoses create wet areas.

So how can you minimise the risk in your workplace? Managing hoses effectively depends on the size of your organisation and the application for which hoses are being used, however, use of a hose reel will almost certainly be a positive addition to your workplace.

WORKING TOWARDS A NATIONAL WORKPLACE HEALTH & SAFETY STRATEGY

Safe Work Australia’s Principles of Safe Design is a best-practice guideline for manufacturers and designers of plant, equipment and buildings for workplaces, and has been developed with the goal of eliminating hazards from a product, from the initial design stages right through a product’s life cycle. The Safe Design guidelines have recently come to the fore as part of the national harmonisation of workplace health and safety legislation, although designing for safety is something we’ve been doing here for years.

ADDRESSING THE HAZARDS

Some of the ways we have addressed identified hazards include:

• Gear guards on steel reels to cover moving parts and pinch points
• Pin locks to prevent unexpected movement during transit
• Reinforced frames and wrap spreaders when a reel is built for a high pressure application
• Rewind speeds calculated to maintain a safe and controlled rewinding motion
• Polypropylene engineered with anti-static properties to minimise sparking hazards
• Thermal overload switches on polypropylene electrical cable reels, enabling the power to cut out automatically if heat build up in the reel reaches an unsafe level
• Operation methods grounded in good ergonomic principles, such as reels with extremely low torque speeds, making for near-effortless operation
• Direct drive motors eliminating the need for chain and sprocket maintenance

ReCoila hose reels have always been a safety solution for workplaces - and Safe Work Australia's standardised framework provides further guidance enabling our design team to engineer out identified hazards. Through our attention to detail in the design process, we have greatly reduced the potential hazards present in our locally made hose reels, consequently minimising the risks for operators.

We're pleased to see safe design getting more media attention, and as Australia's premier hose reel manufacturer we are committed to constantly improving our reels to provide the safest possible solution for our customers.