Producing Defensible Data: The Importance of Keeping Calibration Certificates Up to Date

Accurate measurements are foundational to the quality and safety of the products and services we rely on across all industries – from medical and petrochemical spaces to the scales we use at the supermarket to weigh produce. If one supermarket could guarantee you were getting what you paid for, while another was known for inaccurate measurements, where would you shop?

In the air quality industry, regular calibration ensures the reliability of your monitoring systems. By designing your maintenance program around recommended calibration/servicing intervals, you can be confident of producing good quality data that will enable you to meet regulatory standards, avoid litigation, and preserve trust with external stakeholders and the community.

A calibration certificate is typically issued by either the manufacturer or an accredited third party trained to calibrate instruments to a specific standard. This certificate essentially assures that measurements gathered within the valid calibration period are reliable, trustworthy, and defensible. It enables easy traceability of measurement, allowing the user to look back at which standard the instrument has been referenced against, along with the date of calibration.

This chain of custody is useful for guarding against litigation. A calibration certificate helps provide a strong defense, showing you’ve taken all reasonable measures to produce good quality data. Compared with defending a claim in court or navigating possible site shutdowns, a calibration certificate represents a tiny fraction of the potential cost.

Reputation is everything in business, it can take years to accrue and be gone in an instant. To maintain good business relationships and foster repeat business, it’s vital that potential risks are mitigated early, as the cost for things going wrong can be high. For instance, if you’re running multiple sites for a particular client and questions arise over the validity of the data at one site, it could have a ripple effect across the entire relationship.

Calibration allows you to catch any issues early, preventing reputational damage and loss of business. If anything were to go wrong in the future, you’d be able to confidently point to the data as both accurate and defensible. This trust extends to the community, who need to be reassured that air quality monitoring systems are providing accurate readings and protecting public health.

Maintaining an up-to-date calibration certificate gives you and project stakeholders confidence in the data from the air monitoring instruments. But sending equipment away for calibration can take weeks, which is downtime you can’t afford. Holding spares in reserve is an additional cost and can be a logistical nightmare.

"We recently used this service to swap two modules. It only took about 15 minutes. I’d probably let the customer do the swap next time. Overall, it was a simple process."

- Alycia Murray, Pine Environmental Services Branch Manager

Our Hot-swap Service – launched as part of the Aeroqual Service Center – makes the process of factory calibration easy. When your calibration certificate is nearing its expiry, contact your local supplier, and they will ship you a factory refurbished, freshly calibrated module the next business day. They can also arrange a time to visit the site and swap out the existing module in person.

Currently, the Aeroqual Hot-swap Service covers Profiler and PM Optical Modules (9722-1 and 82850 respectively) for AQM 65, AQS 1, and Dust Sentry products.

Having defensible and reliable data is critical for maintaining the integrity of your operation – whether you’re relying on an air monitoring system to alert you when a dust threshold has been reached, for community monitoring, or another regulatory application.

To learn more about the Aeroqual Hot-swap Service and how we can help you stay up to date with your product certification, please get in touch!