Many things we buy, like temperature gauges, fire alarms, vitamin tablets, etc., may not be directly testable for their quality, but we can be pretty sure that they work okay, right? We can trust the regulations to some extent I would hope. The products need to be inspected, tested, then you have the consumer reactions, etc.
However I ordered a €50 radon test a few months ago and just sent it back a few days ago. In a relatively short while, I will get two numbers back for the different parts of the house it was in.
But the thing is: Who is checking these things? Who is ensuring that they’re doing the tests in a valid way? Couldn’t the people just send back random results to people, or (more likely) just be extremely careless and sloppy in how they do it, and who would ever know the difference? This is a small company in the small country of Ireland. I highly doubt the government is sending out people randomly buying so much of this stuff, and then comparing it with other results from a different test. So is there any actual reason to believe the numbers aren’t just made up apart from putting faith in the goodness of humanity? :rolleyes:
I worked in a testing lab for a number of years. We were regularly inspected by government certifying agencies. Our company’s need for a good reputation of professionalism made sure we maintained our quality between inspections.
Many electronic devices are certified by independent companies such as Underwriters Laboratories and are labelled as conforming to various standards such as European Conformity or China Compulsory Certificate. Measuring devices such as temperature gauges might be NISTtraceable; shown to conform the their various standards.
As for vitamin tablets, it is absolutely possible to measure their quality but at present in most of the world there is no requirement for “health products” to be tested to standards as established by the FDA/Health Canada/equivalent in other countries. For the 'health product" types you just have to assume that the manufacturer has some level of integrity and that what they claim to sell you is what you are actually getting. Medical vitamin tablets, sprays and injectables are tested in incredibly rigorous protocols, same as other drugs (I did this sort of testing on a regular basis for 4 years). In most cases it is the manufacturer that is responsible for conducting the testing and documenting it thoroughly and the quality standards are verified regularly through client and government audits.
Just a note mnemosyne, UL and it’s similar agencies do not in any way certify that anything tested actually works. They only make sure that the devices are relatively safe to use.
In the USA, not all measuring devices are NIST certified or traceable, most are not unless there is a requirement for traceability. In consumer relations such as at a market, the scales are regulated by the various boards of weights and measures, and ultimately NIST certified, but not everything must be. In manufacturing, in many cases, the company manufacturing a product determines what must be certified, and at what schedule.
For some industries (Pharma, food, and the like), there are many boards of regulatory agencies which specify levels of contaminants permissible, and measuring / mixing tolerances and measuring calibration intervals.
If you’re in the US, I think this one is the DEP. My mother used to work in an environmental testing laboratory that tested things like radon and water quality for public water supplies, sewage plants, that kind of thing. They would get unknowns from the DEP for various things, then they’d test them and send the results back, and the results had to be close enough to the correct value for them to keep their certification. I can ask her if radon was among the things that were tested that way.