Safety boundaries and limitations

Every calculator here issues a planning record: an echo of the figures you entered, the arithmetic or decision rules applied to them (stated in full on the methodology sheet), and the planning figures or ordered actions that follow. That is the whole of it. A record is not a risk assessment, not an exposure measurement, not an equipment selection, not a statement that any arrangement of yours meets any regulation, and not advice about your specific project. The tools do not use the words that would claim otherwise, and neither does any page on this site.

The competent person. Decisions about health-risk control — fume, ventilation, RPE, exposure of people nearby — belong to a risk assessment under COSHH carried out by someone competent to make it, working from HSE guidance ^[S1][S2]. The fume planner’s output is deliberately shaped as a control route to assess: a starting order for that person’s work, never a completed assessment. Where the planner meets an enclosed space or an unresolved location, it stops and says so.

The manufacturer. Ratings live on nameplates, data plates, marked cylinders and manuals. Every tool that touches such a figure — generator loads, duty cycles, plasma ratings, cylinder data — requires you to enter it and treats your entry as the record’s foundation. Wherever an entered figure and the manufacturer’s data disagree, the manufacturer’s data governs, and several tools stamp CHECK NAMEPLATE to say exactly that.

Some situations end a calculation rather than shaping it. On those, the tools show a STOP CONDITION record with no figures at all:

For welding health and safety in the UK, the primary route is HSE’s own guidance — the welding topic pages^[S4], the welding-fume duty and its control measures ^[S1], the control-selection guidance from elimination down to RPE ^[S2], and the LEV topic for buying, commissioning and testing extraction ^[S3]. The desk’s own walk through the hazards and the control order is the welding safety guide; the register below links the originals, which outrank everything written here.

The Weld Fab is not a regulator, a training provider, a consultancy or an emergency resource. If something in your workshop is unsafe now, stop the work and raise it through your organisation’s own safety route.