What are IK-, IP-, and Flammability ratings?
Ever wondered what ‘IP67‘ or ‘IK-10‘ means, or felt bewildered about our products’ flammability class or temperature ratings? You can find these terms in our datasheets, but what do they mean and why are they important?
IP (or ingress protection) is commonly called Protection Class in manufacturing. The two digits Idesco products display identifies the nature and amount of protection a product has from liquids and particles like dust or snow granules. Liquids and particles can individually or separately hurt a reader’s performance, even making it fail. Finland’s snowy conditions forced us decades ago to engineer readers with truly robust protection: up to and including IP67. As expected, readers made with extruded cable have higher IP-ratings than those with a connector interface.
IK rating refers to how severe an impact one of our readers can sustain and continue functioning. Whether resisting an accident or intentional vandalism, our engineering designed our products to simply be tough. While Idesco readers possess either IK-10 (20 joule impact resistance) or IK-09 (10 joule) ratings, they really mean the reader can withstand the impact of a five kilo mass being dropped from 20 or even 40 cm – a serious impact.
Indeed, while readers can be found with slightly higher IP class, or slightly higher IK ratings, no one exceeds the combined IP- and IK ratings of Idesco readers.
Their flammability class refers to how flame-resistant the plastic in their housings is when exposed to flame (see UL 94 classes). Our housings’ most common ratings are HB and V-2 because they were explicitly designed to be flame-resistant, meeting the UL 94 standard.
Finally, a temperature rating identifies how cold or hot our readers were tested to maintain faultless functionality. We recently had temperatures here in Finland much lower than -30 °C, yet Idesco reader users don’t worry since all Idesco readers operate flawlessly in temperatures from -30 °C to +55 °C, many of them even amid colder temperatures.