Electrical Preventive Maintenance is the single most respective program that you can institute within your organization to ensure the safety or your employees.  Electrical Preventive Maintenance program will ensure the reliability of your equipment and the piece of mind knowing that your electrical equipment is being maintained.

What is Electrical Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive Maintenance (PM) has the following meanings:

1. The care and servicing by personnel for the purpose of maintaining equipment and facilities in satisfactory operating condition by providing for systematic inspection, detection, and correction of incipient failures either before they occur or before they develop into major defects.
2. Maintenance, including tests, measurements, adjustments, and parts replacement, performed specifically to prevent faults from occurring.

Why an Electrical Preventive Maintenance Program (EPM) pays dividends.

Why and EPM?

1. Deterioration of electrical equipment  is normal, but equipment failure in not inevitable.  As soon as new equipment in installed, a process of normal deterioration begins.  Unchecked, the deterioration process can cause malfunctions or complete failure. Deterioration can be accelerated by factors such as a hostile environment, overload, or severe duty cycle.  An effective EPM program identifies and recognized these factors and provides measures for coping with them.
2. In addition to normal deterioration, other potential causes of equipment failure can be detected and corrected through an EPM program.  Among these are load changes or additions, circuit alterations, improperly set or improperly selected protective devices, and changing voltage conditions.
3. Without an EPM program, management assumes an increased risk of a serious electrical failure and its consequences.

Value and Benefits of a Properly Administered EPM Program;

1. A well administered EPM program reduces the chance of accidents, can save lives, and minimizes costly breakdowns and unplanned shut downs of equipment.  Impending troubles can be identified – and solutions applied – before they become problems requiring more expensive, time-consuming solutions.
2. Benefits of an effective EPM program fall into two general categories.
   1. Direct, measurable economic benefits are derived from reduced cost of repairs and reduced equipment downtime.
   2. Less measurable but very real benefits result from improved safety. To understand fully how personnel and equipment safety are served by an EPM program, the mechanics of the program — inspection, testing, and repair procedures — should be understood.

Note;  Such an understanding explains other intangible benefits such as improved employee morale, better workmanship and increased productivity, reduced absenteeism, reduced interruption of production, and improved insurance considerations. Improved morale comes with employee awareness of a conscious management effort to promote safety by reducing the likelihood of electrical injuries or fatalities, electrical explosions, and fires. Reduced personnel injuries and property loss claims can help keep insurance premiums at favourable rates.

Although the benefits that result from improved safety are difficult to measure, direct, measurable economic benefits can be documented by equipment repair cost and equipment downtime records after an EPM program has been implemented.

Dependability can be engineered and built into equipment, but effective maintenance is required to keep it dependable.  Experience shows that equipment lasts longer and performs better when it is covered by an EPM program. In many cases, the investment in EPM is small compared with the cost of equipment repair and the production losses associated with an unexpected equipment shutdown.

Careful planning is the key to the economic success of an EPM program. With proper planning, maintenance costs can be held to a practical minimum, while production is maintained at a practical maximum.

An EPM program requires the support of top management, because top management provides the funds that are required to initiate and maintain the program. The maintenance of industrial electrical equipment is essentially a matter of business economics. Maintenance costs can be placed in either of two basic categories: preventive maintenance or breakdown repairs.  The money spent for preventive maintenance will be reflected as less money required for breakdown repairs. An effective EPM program holds the sum of these two expenditures to a minimum. Figure 4.2.6 is a typical curve illustrating this principle.According to this curve, as the interval of time between EPM inspections increases, the cost of the EPM diminishes and the cost of breakdown repairs and replacement of failed equipment increases.  The lowest total annual expense is realized by maintaining an inspection frequency that keeps the sum of repair/replacement and EPM costs at a minimum.

An EPM program is a form of protection against accidents, lost production, and loss of profit. An EPM program enables management to place a dollar value on the cost of such protection. An effective EPM program satisfies an important part of management’s responsibility for keeping cost  down and production up.

Insurance statistics document the high cost of inadequate electrical maintenance

EPM and Energy Conservation

1. Energy conservation is one of the worthwhile benefits associated with an EPM program, saving dollars and vital resources. Equipment that is well maintained operates more efficiently and utilizes less energy.

Case History

1. In one industrial plant, the failure of a transformer caused a total plant shutdown. Contamination of the transformer’s insulating oil caused the failure. The contamination went undetected because the oil had not been tested for several years. Fire damage and equipment replacement costs amounted to $50,000, exclusive of the cost of plant downtime.  This amount would have paid for the cost of operating an EPM program covering the entire plant’s electrical distribution system for several years.
2. In another industrial plant, damage amounting to $100,000 was attributed to the failure of the main switchgear.  Fouling by dirt, gummy deposits, and iron filings caused the failure. The cost of this failure would have supported a comprehensive EPM program covering all of the plant’s electrical distribution system for several years.
3. McCormick Place, a large exhibition hall in Chicago, was destroyed by a fire believed to have been started because of a defective extension cord serving a display booth. Direct property loss was $60 million, and loss of the facility cost an additional $100 million to the economy in the Chicago area.  This fire might have been prevented if a program had been in effect to ensure that worn cords were replaced, that only heavy-duty cords were used, and that cords and their supply circuits were not overloaded.
4. The failure of a large motor shut down an entire industrial plant for 12 days. The cause of the failure was overheating resulting from dust-plugged cooling ducts.  An EPM inspection would have detected the clogged ducts and averted the failure and accompanying plant outage.

Why do Electrical Preventive Maintenance Programs Fail?

Failure of an electrical preventive maintenance program usually falls into one of two categories or both; lack of funding, and lack of resources.

1. Lack of Funding is a typical culprit for the failure of an electrical preventive maintenance program.  Lack of funding can become a deterrent from the beginning.  Costly, over expensive software.  Computerized maintenance management software packages can be thousands of dollars to buy.
2. Lack of Resources from a time management perspective is another reason for the failure of an electrical preventive maintenance program.  After your initial purchase of the software you will need to dedicate someone to the task of learning the software.  This task can take up many hours of a persons time not to mention the cost of training.  Next is the time required to develop the data base of equipment that needs to be maintained, develop the task frequency and task procedures, input the data into the software program, schedule the work, prepare the reports, issue the work orders, tracking the progress, ensure the work has been completed, close the work orders with recommendations and provide upkeep to the EPM program and Maintenance procedures.  This task is usually dedicated to a single employee in the organization.  The employee will need to be able to understand the use of the software, have knowledge of the equipment, have access to the regulations and standards required to develop an effective program and the time to do the work.

Our experienced staff will help you;