Conveyor Installation and Service Insurance

Investigate any conveyor entrapment and the same fact appears: a guard was not in place when it happened.

Guards are removed to reach a fault, to clear a blockage, to adjust a tracking roller, to inspect a bearing, or because they were awkward and never went back after the last job. Interlocks are bypassed so a machine can run with a panel open for fault finding. Then somebody reaches in, or stands in the wrong place, and the drive does the rest. For an engineer, this is a professional exposure as well as a personal one: a machine returned to service with guarding incomplete or an interlock defeated is a condition the next person inherits without knowing.

So the discipline is that guarding is restored and verified before a machine is handed back, as a procedure rather than an intention. A record per visit of guards removed and refitted, interlocks tested rather than reconnected, nothing bypassed as a temporary measure, and a machine locked out rather than left running if guarding cannot be restored. Where a client presses for a machine to run without a guard because a part is on order, that refusal belongs in writing, because the service record will be read after an injury.

There is one specific moment that accounts for a large share of this trade's serious injuries, and everybody who works on conveyors knows it.

A conveyor jams. Clearing it properly means stopping the machine, isolating it, locking it off, and then reaching in. Clearing it quickly means reaching in with the belt running or on a stop that somebody could release, because the line is down, the plant is waiting, and it will only take a second. The drive then pulls, and a hand goes into a nip or an arm goes round a drum. The outcome is life changing and the time saved was seconds.

So the rule has to be absolute and it has to be supported by whoever is paying. Isolation and lock off before any part of a body goes near a moving part, with the engineer holding their own lock rather than relying on somebody else's isolation, no clearing with a machine on a hold to run or a stop that is not locked, and a culture where stopping a line to do it properly is the expected answer rather than the cautious one. An insurer asks about lock off specifically, and the answer distinguishes a managed operation from a lucky one.

The commercial exposure in this trade is out of all proportion to the equipment, because of where conveyors sit.

A conveyor connects processes. Stop it and the machine before it backs up, the machine after it starves, and in many plants the whole line comes down. In a distribution centre a stopped sorter means parcels not shipped that day. In a quarry it means production halted. In food production it can mean product scrapped. So a failure traced to an installation or a service is not a belt or a bearing: it is however long the line was down, and that figure can be very large for a modest contract.

So two things need checking. Whether the policy reaches consequential loss, because a wording written around property damage will pay for a damaged component and not for the production, and whether the limit reflects the plants you work in rather than your turnover. Practically, this is also why spares and response matter commercially: a service business that can get a line running again quickly is managing its own exposure as well as its client's, and it is worth saying so when presenting the risk.

Conveyor work almost never happens on an empty site, which shapes both the safety case and the liability.

Installation and service happen in factories, quarries, distribution centres and food plants that are running, or that are down for a short shutdown with several contractors working at once. There are forklifts, other conveyors still moving, the client's own operators, product on the floor, and at height work over walkways and over running machines. Dropped tools and components land on other people's equipment. Hot work near a belt is a fire risk in a building full of material.

So the interface with the client's operation is where the control sits. A permit and isolation arrangement agreed with the plant rather than assumed, exclusion of the client's people from the work area rather than a verbal warning, protection or isolation of equipment beneath where work is at height, hot work permits issued by the plant, and a handover at the end of every shift stating what is isolated and what has been returned to service. The last one prevents the night shift starting a machine somebody is still working on.

The stopped line and the guard are the two questions. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.