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What IEC 61010-1 Covers and What It Leaves to the Part 2 Standards
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IEC 61010-1 is a horizontal standard: it states general safety requirements for electrical equipment used for measurement, control and laboratory use, and it assumes that a product-specific part 2 standard will add or modify those requirements for the particular kind of equipment. Applying part 1 alone is therefore never a complete assessment, even though part 1 alone is often what a test report cites.
Where the boundary sits
Part 1 covers the risks that every instrument shares: electric shock, fire, mechanical hazards, radiation, liberated gas, and the marking and documentation that tell the user how to stay safe. Part 2 standards, such as those for laboratory centrifuges, for hand-held current clamps, or for in-vitro diagnostic equipment, take those general requirements and specialise them: different test values, additional tests, and sometimes exemptions.
Where equipment falls outside the scope
Household appliances, information technology equipment, medical devices and machinery each have their own standards with their own scope. A product that sits on a laboratory bench is not automatically in scope of 61010; the deciding question is the function the manufacturer claims for it, and how it is described in the instructions and marketing material.
Practical consequence for a test plan
Before writing a test plan, confirm three things: that the equipment is in the scope of part 1, which part 2 applies, and which clauses of part 2 modify the part 1 values. A plan that skips the third step produces results that are internally consistent and wrong.
