Would you believe it if you were told that about 61% of mining, oil, and gas workers have been exposed to hazardous noise on the job (NIOSH, 2019)? The oil and gas industry is especially a high-risk working environment, where workers are exposed to various hazards daily, including constant exposure to extreme noise. More often than not, oil and gas workers aren't adequately protected. As such, the need for effective intrinsically safe communication and hearing protection devices in the oil and gas industry that support worker compliance cannot be overemphasized.

Sensear’s all-new SP1R is a revolution in lightweight hearing protection technology. The SP1R delivers Sensear’s exceptional Speech Enhancement and Noise Suppression Technology (SENS®) into the most compact hearing protection and communication solution in the industry. Built specifically to enable two-way radio communications in high-noise environments, the SP1R is powered by your two-way radio, so it never needs charging. How can the SP1R benefit your industry?

In the previous two blogs, we gave a brief introduction to the world of intrinsic safety and dug into the different intrinsic safety classifications and explosive protection classification systems. We unpacked all the technicalities behind intrinsically safe headsets and may have left you more overwhelmed with information. Well, today we will give an overview of intrinsic safety that will serve as a summarization of this complex topic and be a starting point for beginners.

In the previous blog, we discussed how to know whether your industrial headsets are intrinsically safe, and we briefly introduced what it means to be intrinsically safe. As we learned, intrinsically safe products, or headsets, in this case, are meant to keep the user safe when in explosive or hazardous environments. In this blog, we will dive deeper into what these hazardous environments look like and how they are systematically classified into different classes, divisions, zones, etc.

When working in the oil & gas or mining industries, there are certain safety requirements that must be met to use the equipment. These work environments are explosive atmospheres where products need to be something called “intrinsically safe” or IS for short. What does this mean, and are products such as two-way radios intrinsically safe because they have IS batteries?