It is vital to understand the difference between

Bar Gauge and Bar Absolute.

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Bar Gauge
Bar Gauge is open to the atmosphere and uses atmospheric pressure as its base value – your pressure
calibrator is therefore zeroed before testing. ‘Ambient’ will read 0, a vacuum will read as a negative (e.g
-0.5bar), and pressure will read as a positive (e.g. 2.2bar). Recommended TQSoft settings would be a low of
-0.5bar, high of 2.5bar and checkpoint of 2.2bar.

Bar Absolute
Bar Absolute is based on a sealed unit, set to a nominal absolute vacuum. Zero in this case would be a
complete vacuum, and at ‘ambient’ the reading on the display will be a true atmospheric pressure (usually
between 970 and 1020 mb at sea level in the UK). A vacuum will read as e.g. 0.5bar (note this is positive not
negative), and pressure values will read approximately 1 bar higher than bar gauge, as the baseline is
atmospheric pressure rather than zero.

Notes
Although the difference between gauge and absolute readings are approximately 1 bar, you can never simply
add 1 to a gauge reading to get an absolute reading – by doing this you are creating an error due to the
difference between the atmospheric pressure of the day and 1000mb, which could be up to 30mb. If you have
an accurate reading of the daily atmospheric pressure on site, you can use this as an offset to your
calculations although this would not be done through the calibrator (and also outside TQSoft)

Bar Gauge pressure calibrators are set up and calibrated to be zeroed to atmospheric pressure. A bar
Absolute calibrator has internal offsets and is calibrated to be completely independent of atmospheric
pressure, and should normally be locked to prevent the user changing these settings. If the reading is zeroed
so that at ambient the reading is zero, the internal offsets can still remain, and cause inaccuracies as well as
removing all calibration settings. The unit should therefore be viewed as not calibrated, and further
inaccuracies may also have been introduced. The unit should be recalibrated, and locked to prevent changes
 being made.

BarG - (Gauge Pressure) Pressure reading relative to current atmospheric pressure.

BarA - (Absolute Pressure) Pressure reading relative to absolute vacuum.

i.e. If a tank has a positive pressure of 350 mBar and the atmospheric pressure of the day is 1006 mBar
then the readings would be.

BarG = 350 mBarG

BarA = 1356 mBarA

There is no conversion from BarG to BarA as atmospheric pressure changes from day to day but the
range of change is about 50 mBar. If you add 1000 mBar to a BarG reading then it will convert to BarA
but will be +/- 50 mBar.

Bara (Absolute pressure) is a pressure mode where the reference pressure is absolute zero, i.e. not
taking into account atmospheric pressure (which is approx 1 bar), where as Barg (gauge pressure)is
referenced above atmoshperic pressure.

Thus the difference between an absolute pressure value and a gauge pressure value is the variable value
of atmospheric pressure:

Absolute pressure = gauge pressure + atmospheric pressure.