Maintain Your Equipment; Reduce Your Risk, Part 4 of 6
Dave Smith has been an Industrial Maintenance Electrician since 1975. He has taught maintenance, troubleshooting and safety courses to thousands of electricians in mines, mills, refineries, factories, plants, power stations and offshore platforms throughout North America and the Middle East. Dave is a hands-on guy and teache...
At the beginning of this series I explained the rationale for an overview of maintenance, since studies indicate that 66% of unsafe incidents can be attributed to maintenance-related issues. The field is so large I have divided it into this series aimed at managers new to electrical maintenance.
In my first article, I referenced the work myself and other maintenance specialists are providing to CSA in the development of a national maintenance standard entitled CSA Z463, Guideline on Maintenance of Electrical Systems.
The next two articles referenced maintenance standards developed by IEEE and NFPA. In this article I will reference PEARL, a less commonly known organization yet still a key component of our industry.
PEARL is the Professional Electrical Apparatus Recyclers League whose member companies sell surplus and remanufactured electrical equipment. Most of their members are in the United States, but there are some in Canada as well.
PEARL (www.pearl1.org) is like many professional organizations; they are focused on servicing their members by distinguishing their services from those of non-members by creating a marketable distinction in quality, safety and integrity for members in the eyes of their customers.
Small plants can judiciously extend their capital budget with surplus or remanufactured products, so buying from a PEARL member can be judicious for both cost and reliability standpoints.
To differentiate their members from other surplus suppliers, PEARL has developed standards that ensure their members meet strict technical, safety and other requirements. To achieve this goal, PEARL has developed two standards.
The first set of standards are the PEARL Reconditioning Standards, which provide inspection, cleaning, reconditioning, testing and documentation instructions for an extensive range of electrical apparatus and equipment. The intent is for qualified technicians to be able to return electrical devices to “as good as new” condition without compromise, thereby enabling purchasers to benefit from extended service life and reliability.
PEARL has created a blue PEARL Reconditioned Seal that the technician affixes to the equipment after it has been rebuilt to these standards. (Non-PEARL companies can certainly rebuild to the same level of quality but, if they claim to, then they should be willing to share their standard with you as does PEARL.)
The second set of PEARL standards are the Inspect and Test Standards, which provide inspection, cleaning, testing and documentation instructions and guidelines for the same range of equipment.
These standards can be used by your plant technicians to determine whether an electrical device is free from flaws or faults and whether the equipment would be suitable for full reconditioning by proving that the equipment shows no indication of damage and tests satisfactory to manufacturer or industry operational specifications.
It doesn’t matter whether the equipment is new, surplus or has been in service and, in fact, can even be applied to equipment purchased from non-PEARL suppliers.
For companies that have no shop or field inspection guideline, it can be used to predict and avert future failures by calling attention to elements of the equipment or device that fail during testing.
PEARL has created a green PEARL Inspected & Tested Seal that the technician affixes to equipment that has passed the PEARL Inspect and Test Standards.
The league becomes especially valuable in a world of counterfeit and fraudulent electrical equipment; these knockoff items are rampant, hard to identify and particularly malicious when they happen to be protective devices that will never respond properly to a fault.
For any organization working within a restricted budget, there is good news regarding these standards: PEARL allows them both to be downloaded free of charge. There is no sense reinventing the wheel; PEARL members have obviously invested thousands of hours developing them, and they should be part of every maintenance manager’s library.
These are both excellent standards and their proper use is guaranteed to reduce those 66% of safety incidents attributed to maintenance-related issues.
Until next time, be ready, be careful and be safe.©
