Gadgetory

when I did coverage on my other channel of knocked to his fancy new industrial cooling fans with IP 52 and IP 67 ratings I got a lot of questions from people about those ratings or more specifically I got the same question a lot of times - I see those ratings all the time and I know that they have to do with environmental protection but what the heck do all the individual letters and numbers actually mean let's start with the letters IP stands for ingress protection which basically means something that blocks entry or access to something else but of course depending on the application while sometimes it's important to keep water and tiny dust particles out of something in other cases larger objects are the main concern and that's where the numbers come in usually the IP rating of a device or enclosure has two numbers one to indicate the size of the physical objects that's protected against with a second one to indicate the level of water protection that it provides so for solid objects the lower ratings are designed as more of an indication of how safe personnel working around a piece of equipment will be a first digit of one or two indicates that a worker won't accidentally be able to put an elbow or a finger somewhere that they could be harmed moving up to a three or four means protection against tools falling or even screws or random wires causing problems in the equipment and a first digit of five or six means that even dust cannot enter the enclosure in any way that would interfere with the operation of the device pretty fancy but while dust can cause a slow painful death for electronics it's relatively easy to clean or otherwise deal with so for us gadget geeks the trend towards water resistant electronics is pretty exciting but just like dust the scale ranges from one to two meaning it's being protected from water dripping from above or at a slight angle with four and five promising to keep out water splashed or sprayed from any direction seven and eight indicating that your gear is protected from full submersion at various depths and durations depending on the manufacturers rating and special ratings with K's on the end that indicate high pressure water spray resistance and even close range high pressure high temperature waterproofness but for most consumer grade gear you probably won't see those last two and that's most of the variations on older products you might see a third digit for impact resistance but that has been separated into a separate I care a ting now and sometimes you'll see an ex subbed in for the solid object with only a second digit which just means the first test wasn't performed or was deemed irrelevant for some reason use your common sense it doesn't mean that the enclosure will allow an elbow to enter but can keep out high pressure water although if I could invent such a thing sorry I got distracted there anyway let's just wrap this up by pointing out that while ingress protection is an industry standard rating system it's not the only way of testing a product and just because there's no IP rating doesn't mean that the manufacturer hasn't validated the product GoPros waterproof housing for their cameras for example a fairly well regarded waterproof enclosure has no IP rating it just means they might have used a different methodology speaking of methodologies I'm not sure if I understand the rationale behind fractal designs latest marketing campaign with us instead of getting me to talk about how great their PC fans computer case is power supplies and sexy marketing executives are they insist on punishing me on camera so when they heard about today's topic they kind of went wow great topic Linus let's find out what your IP rating is turns out I'm not that great what a mess anyway oh they want your feedback on this new advertising concept so check out the link in the video description to fill out a very short survey and let them know if they should keep sponsoring tech quickie in this manner thanks for watching guys like or dislike according to how you felt about the video leave a comment with suggestions for future episodes and don't forget to subscribe 7 already you guys use pepper I asked for salt or Oh