Effective protection from Arc Flash incidents comes from not only a protective outer layer but protective mid and base layers too.

In a typical day, it’s not unusual for employees to move from work area to work area that need different levels of flame resistant PPE.

Rather than choosing just one highly-rated piece of arc flash protective clothing to wear all day, your team will benefit from a layering system allowing them to scale up or downgrade their protection levels to suit the task in hand.

The added benefit of ProGARM’s range of safety overalls, polo shirts and garments is that when worn together they increase the level of protection from Arc Flash and flash fire incidents. For instance, layering a ProGARM polo shirt with a ProGARM sweatshirt not only adds the two protection levels together, the air gap between them adds additional insulation and protection.

Although non-melting clothing (such as cotton, wool, silk and leather) may sometimes be allowed as a layer under an outer arc-rated protected garment, this type of clothing offers no protection against ignition and could cause serious burns in a fire or arc flash incident.

Our Arc Flash base layers, including leggings and long-sleeve tops as well as underwear, are designed to contribute to arc flash protection and can be comfortably worn under all our other flame resistant clothing.

You can find more information about the risks of layering with non-rated Arc Flash base layers in our mythbusting blog here.

Our products are listed with open arc ratings so you know exactly what level of protection each garment provides. The ARC incident energy levels are measured in calories per cm² this is referred to as the cal rating. These are then measured into 4 categories with a minimum cal rating per category required.

When you layer up garments you can increase the level of protection. For example, the ProGARM 5280 polo shirt at 7.0 cal/cm2 and the 5630 Sweatshirt at 14.4 cal/cm2 when worn together achieve a cal/cm2 rating of 31.0 cal/cm2.

For full protection from Arc Flash and fire incidents, choose ProGARM garments.

Unfortunately, there are no easy short cuts to working out whether combining garments will result in negligible or substantial improvements to the overall protection level; this can only be determined by rigorously testing the specific garment combinations as a system.

If you need more guidance on layering please contact our sales team.