about
About ETHIC – Global.
Trace heating (or heat tracing or surface heating) has been employed by industry for many years for maintaining or raising temperatures in piping, vessels and other process plant for freeze protection and process heating.
Early systems predominantly used steam as the heat source. Increasingly, however, electricity became a favoured energy source.
A rapid increase in the number of applications resulted in a proliferation of products available to satisfy these applications. This led to an increase in the number of companies involved in the manufacture, design or installation of electric trace heating applications.
In short, electric trace heating had come of age.
The need had arisen for an organization to represent the industry and promote the correct use of Electric Trace Heating. The organization formed is called ETHIC ‐ the Electric Trace Heating Industry Council.
ETHIC was formed in 1986...
...after some of its members had individually contributed to the development of BS6351: 1983, Electric Surface Heating, the first National Standard to address the needs for trace heating in industrial and hazardous areas.
ETHIC acts in the interests of the Electric Trace Heating Industry and its customers by:-
- Promoting the correct use of approved quality equipment
- Establishing Industry specifications, standards, and codes
- Providing a means of communication between manufacturers, designers and installers of Electric Trace Heating equipment and the specifiers and users of such equipment
- Providing education and training via its E-Academy tutorials to its members and clients in the correct design and installation of electric trace heating
- Providing Ethic accreditation to those achieving the required standards in the E-Academy tutorials
ETHIC's presence and involvement...
...in the development of trace heating standards has continued throughout the past three decades. It was strongly represented in the development and publication of IEC62086: 2000 the first 'world' standard for hazardous location heat tracing. It has since been re-named IEC60079/30 Parts 1 & 2, having been adopted by many countries, including, for example, China and Russia, in addition to European and North American countries. Further, it has been now been harmonized into a dual logo standard with IEEE515, thus forming a bridge between U.S and European Standards approaches.
It is also also intended that the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) will replace its national trace heating standard with IEC60079/30.
Ethic has also been intimately involved in the development of a sister IEC 'world' standard, IEC62395 Parts 1 & 2, covering Industrial heat tracing and tracing for commercial applications, such as roof and gutter de-icing, snow melting, hot water heating, and so on.
Now, this website helps in providing the means of communication between the various parties involved in the Electric Trace Heating Industry.