How to Create A Safe and Effective Electrical Maintenance Program

Are you tired of dealing with unexpected electrical system failures and costly repairs?

Learn how creating a comprehensive electrical maintenance program can help you ensure the safety and reliability of your electrical systems while saving you time and money in the long run.

Electrical control and distribution systems look complicated. Additionally, their expensive outlook makes them one of the assets that require periodic maintenance. When you effectively maintain the electrical control and distribution systems, you help them perform optimally throughout their serviceable life. Besides, electrical maintenance is imperative for NFPA compliance.

However, when it comes to managing and maintaining electrical control and distribution systems, the task looks quite daunting, as it requires vigorous efforts. In this scenario, you can go ahead and develop an effective electrical maintenance program and get the job done in a more organized and simplified manner.

What is an electrical maintenance program?

You can describe an electrical maintenance program as a scheduled periodic electrical maintenance testing work. It also involves collecting data related to the essential electrical assets, which aids in evaluating the health of the said assets.

When you perform random evaluations and keep the data updated, it drastically helps pinpoint the assets that have already started showing indications of degradation. When you manage to identify an asset with potential failure risks, performing preventive maintenance comes in handy.

Creating a secure and efficient maintenance program – The know-how

The action plan to identify the measures needed to prepare a functional and effective electrical maintenance program includes the following objectives.

• Get into a detailed analysis to manage to pinpoint the essential assets whose breakdown may turn out to be catastrophic to the organization’s operation
• Evaluate the commercial technologies offered for inspection and collection of surveillance data to determine the condition of your assets. The most used technology is infrared, thermography, or thermal imaging
• Consulting with a service provider specializing in Electrical Maintenance Safety Devices to get the job done
• Figuring out the return against your investment by comparing the costs of different technologies
• Scheduling product installation and arranging training sessions for the internal team.

Adopting a condition-based maintenance program with the help of EMSDs comes under the NFPA echelons of risk control methods. Typically, the inspections of the electrical assets are required to be performed under full load.

In actuality, these EMSDs are updated products that are designed keeping the safety parameters in mind. They aid safe electrical inspections that can be performed under average load. Electrical workers can execute the inspection without the necessity of opening the equipment’s covers. This eliminates the minimum risks of any unfortunate event. These products have simply redefined the inspection process, making them the ideal and logical pick for moving ahead with an electrical maintenance program.

Factors to consider while preparing an electrical maintenance program

While developing an excellent electrical program, you need to take care of certain factors and consider them. They include the following.

• Do you have enough electrical planners?
• Have you followed the standard for electrical drawings?
• Do you have enough technical information handy?
• Have you thought about the further plan related to the operational security of the equipment?
• Have you included the schedule for training your team so that they can understand the technology better?
• Have you kept the down days and shutdowns out of your production schedule?

Finding out the correct answers to the said questions accordingly will allow you to design a maintenance program that’s at a time safe and efficient.

Keeping the people and the practical issues in consideration will help you to make your plan sustainable enough. What issues do people encounter? What practical issues frequently pop up? Well, the next section deals with the people issues as well as the practical issues.

The people issues

• Understand your current situation

You need to figure out where you are in terms of electrical planning assistance. It’s impossible to design and implement an optimal and safe electrical maintenance program all alone. You may need help, and if required, you should not deny seeking help.

• Fixing a vision is imperative

It’s quite an important task to set up a vision for your electrical maintenance program. As an example, you can hire an electrical planner on a contractual basis who will develop the maintenance strategies for the entire year, identify the systems that need to be upgraded, manage the electrical drawings, and train fellow workers so that they can adopt the technological nitty-gritty.

• The electrical workgroup of your organization can help

While creating an electrical program, you can discuss it with the organization’s electrical workgroup. Let’s face it; they have more knowledge and expertise about the plant. Asking them for ideas can help you give the program the desired touch of perfection.

• Ask for support from the managers

When you are done with the documentation of the entire program, don’t forget to present it to the management of the organizations, highlighting every little benefit and prospective gain supported by your ideas. A robust approval can make your job easy.

Practical issues

• Resources are vital

When it comes to talking about the significant improvements that you’re mentioning in your electrical maintenance program, it indicates that you will need more resources. So don’t forget to mention the significance of employing internal workers or hiring temporary contractors so that you face no difficulty while implementing the program.

• Know the failure history

Not all electrical maintenance works render successful results, specifically the ones that are more critical. So, while collecting the data for preparing a good electrical maintenance program, don’t miss to check the history of failures related to electrical maintenance in your organization. Understanding these failures will help you to develop a result-oriented maintenance strategy.

• Preventing maintenance inspections must be included

While creating an electrical maintenance program, it’s more than important to include preventive maintenance inspections. You can do it easily by checking the latest documents that talk about the performance of your electrical assets. When you wrap this up perfectly, you leave no chance of leaving any of your assets unmaintained.

Final words

Hope this post has helped you in developing a better understanding of creating a safe and effective electrical maintenance program. Therefore, get your hands dirty with the same, and don’t overlook the importance of getting in touch with an equipped vendor providing technology-supported electrical inspection and data collection services.