Why the purchase of calibration instruments is more economical after a short time than having sensors calibrated by a service provider.

When sensors need to be calibrated, there are basically two ways to solve this task:

1. You give the sensors to an external calibration service provider who takes over the calibration, or you invest in your own calibration equipment and can carry out the calibrations yourself. But what is the best and most economical option for your individual calibration tasks? We would like to get to the bottom of this question in this blog post.
2. Very superficially, we can say that it makes more economic sense to give sensors to a calibration service provider if you only have a few sensors to calibrate. When we are no longer talking about a few sensors, it very quickly becomes more economical to invest in your own calibration equipment. You can find out how quickly the acquisition of your own calibrator pays off for your individual case in this profitability calculator.

Let's calculate together a simplified example of temperature sensors:

You have ten temperature sensors to calibrate annually. You incur costs of 180.00 € per sensor (~150.00 € for the external calibration + 30.00 € handling costs). This means that you incur costs of approx. 1800.00 € per year.
If you purchase your own temperature calibrator, the acquisition costs in our example are 3500.00 €. We assume the costs per calibration to be 50.00 €.
This results in a saving of ~130,00 € per calibration. In our example, the costs for the calibrator are amortised after ~2.5 years. With a lifetime of the calibrator of ~10 years, there is a massive saving in costs with only ten sensors compared to external calibration.

In addition to the economic advantages, there are other advantages to investing in your own calibration equipment:

The duration of the calibration is limited to the actual calibration plus removal and installation of the sensor. With external calibration, shipping times and waiting times at the service provider are added. The downtime of the sensor to be calibrated is therefore significantly shorter. In addition, calibrations and quick checks can be carried out at short notice.
Some sensors even have to be calibrated in the plant or in the process - so they cannot be completely removed. Here, you can calibrate on site with your own mobile calibrator, whereas a service provider would have to come to the company especially for this.
In practice, it has often been proven that sensors that can be calibrated very easily (temperature sensors, pressure sensors and electrical inputs) are calibrated themselves and sensors that require very special calibration equipment are calibrated externally.
Please use our profitability calculator and be surprised how quickly the purchase of your own calibration equipment pays off.

Further information: www.sika.net