The 3 Best Electrical Maintenance Practices

You’ve invested some significant amount of your money on your electrical system and devices and so, it’s important that you get maximum value for the investment. Unfortunately, lack of proper maintenance triples the failure rate of your electrical components and increases their maintenance costs by almost the same magnitude. You might be tempted to think that electrical services  are costly, but when that idea crosses your mind, just imagine the risk you are putting yourself and other people into and the high costs that you are likely to incur as a result of having poorly maintained electrical equipment or system.  If you want to get maximum value from your electrical equipment, you can’t afford to ignore the following three best electrical maintenance practices.

  • Maintenance planning

Corrective and preventive maintenances should be carried out in an organized way to ensure that the desired outcomes are achieved. Primarily, as you do the planning, you should create a work order system including the maintenance service to be done, the people who’ll be doing it, when it’s expected to be done and the reasons of the service. Also, you or the person undertaking the maintenance service should write down the procedure for the work and when the time for the execution comes, the plan should be followed strictly. This documentation helps the electricians involved to focus precisely on the service needed and paid for, and in the identification of the personnel assigned to a specific task for responsible reporting. Most importantly, the written down plan will help you to get an accurate estimate of the labor, materials, and the time that the maintenance practice is expected to need for its comprehensive implementation.

  1. Preventive maintenance

The main aim of an electrical preventive maintenance program is to minimize down-time of a system or device and maintain its safety to an acceptable and manageable level. Essentially, an effective electrical preventive maintenance program includes cleaning, inspection and lubrication as well as regular performance and integrity testing of electrical equipment or system. Since some of the activities of preventive maintenance can be invasive to the production process of a business or organization, it’s advisable to have the maintenance done when equipment is de-energized or not running. During the maintenance process, the persons in charge of it should identify the equipment which has the most influence on the production or safety of the environment and give it most of their attention. As such, they need to be familiar with the operation and technical risks of the equipment and how to fix it in case of an issue.

  1. Predictive maintenance

Predictive electrical maintenance involves non-invasive activities that are performed as electrical equipment or system is running. This maintenance aims at discovering potential failure modes that the system or equipment is experiencing to predict the ultimate failure should the failure modes be ignored. Some of the activities involved in this kind of maintenance are insulating oil sample analysis, partial discharge testing, walk-through inspections and infrared thermographic surveys.

The best way to minimize downtime and maintenance expenses of your electrical devices or systems is to ensure that proactive measures are taken to avert their possible issues and to fix problems as soon as they arise. Besides, this will help you to optimize the lifespan of the devices and reduce related safety risks.

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