Maintain Your Equipment; Reduce Your Risk, Part 6 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...
In previous articles, I described standards developed by NETA (the InterNational Electrical Testing Association) and PEARL (the Professional Electrical Apparatus Recyclers League). One of the great difficulties over the years has been how to record all the information that is collected, and then use it effectively.
“Effectively” means being able to trend over time. With many tests, it is critical to go back historically and compare test results. Trying to access the documentation on a particular piece of apparatus from yearly tests over the previous years is time-consuming with paper-based forms, and it has always been difficult using them for trending and analysis.
ANSI/NETA “Standard for Maintenance Testing Specifications for Electrical Power Distribution Equipment and Systems” (2011) provides forms for recording the data that is gathered during electrical testing. (PEARL has been in the process of developing forms for several years to support its standards but, unfortunately, have not yet made them available.)
The leading edge of electrical maintenance has typically been utilities, but their standards and forms were customized specifically to their own systems and equipment. Many utilities were not willing to share them and, as they were often focused on systems over 69kV, these standards and forms weren’t often a good fit for 5-25kV systems even when they were willing to share. The forms from NETA heralded the first wide-spread availability of generic forms to industry.
It is a little-known fact that, when a company is servicing your electrical maintenance needs, they will offer tests based on the equipment they possess; they may not offer or even mention tests requiring equipment they do not possess. Also, when a company does not have the equipment to do a particular test, they typically avoid creating an area on the form for capturing data they are not gathering… blank spaces would create confusion.
In our training classes, we occasionally hear the response, “Well, we never do that test!”, and then we walk the participants through the process of why they may not be performing a perfectly valid test commonly used other firms.
In addition to NETA’s forms, several vendors provide electronic forms: ePowerForms, for example, offers “a suite of industry standard forms and software tools that speed data collection time, improves data consistency, and simplifies the data review process”. These forms were originally developed by American Electrical Testing, a Canton, MA., NETA firm with numerous satellite offices.
The software was developed in-house at AET in the late 1990s when they discovered a need for electronic forms and, when other companies saw these forms and realized their ease of use, ePowerForms was created to sell product.
Megger, the test equipment manufacturer, also has software available called Power DB-Acceptance & Maintenance Test Data Management Software, which is “used for the collection and reporting of data from maintenance and inspection activities performed on equipment used in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power”. This software is designed to integrate with the Megger family of instruments as well as those from other test equipment manufacturers.
Software is far more effective than paper forms because it gives you automatic electronic capture of the data you’ve gathered plus – and more importantly – the trending, as well as a great deal of other information.
These suites contain forms that are not available in the NETA standards and are also somewhat different from the NETA forms. As you develop your own maintenance program, you will want to refer to both and review what your contractors are using to ensure you are aligned.
Software provides capabilities that are amazing, but remember: once the data is collected, the subjective analysis needs to happen. This is the grey area where expertise and experience can prevent catastrophe.
Until next time, be ready, be careful and be safe.
