Wednesday, July 17, 2019

How Would I Perform an Electrical Asset Inspection Using a Custom Maintenance Inspection Window?

As part of the maintenance team at your company, you already know that electrical components and assets need to be inspected regularly while under full load.  Your company’s Condition Based Maintenance procedures call for inspections of the energized electrical assets in a safe and guarded condition using maintenance inspection windows that allow the infrared camera to “see” the potential points of failure inside your electrical equipment.  But, what about targets that are hidden or in hard to reach locations?  Can equipment be modified or replaced with solutions that eliminate the hazards of energized electrical inspections?  The answer is YES!

Any application that has electrical components that are hidden or hard to reach may benefit from a custom window.  In addition, equipment with tight clearances to the panel or door may be better served with a custom panel replacement.  Finally, equipment where standard cut-in windows are simply too large or too many windows would be required to see all of the possible targets will be best dealt with via a custom window or replacement panel.

Customizing Your Safer Solution

Custom maintenance inspection windows or custom panels have identical functionality to standard sized or shaped inspection windows or panels.  Maintenance teams simply use the same inspection process using a custom window or panel as they use for standard windows or panels.  The only difference is that the viewing area is larger or shaped differently so that all of the targets are now visible to the IR camera.   Likewise, if the custom window or panel includes ultrasound testing capability, the maintenance team would perform the same ultrasound procedure as on a regular sized or shape window with ultrasound capability.

A company using custom maintenance inspection windows now has the assurance that all of their critical electrical assets will be inspectable without the risk of an unexpected loss of power.

Conclusion:

Maintenance inspection windows are commercially available in any size and any shape solely to make critical electrical assets visible to inspection devices like IR cameras or ultrasound testers.  Assets that were hidden or in hard to reach locations now are “inspectable”.  Companies will implement these custom windows to allow for routine inspections to detect assets that are deteriorating and schedule a planned maintenance event to repair the fault.  Proactive Condition Based Maintenance procedures prevent unplanned downtime and potential loss of revenue.