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Electrical Power Distribution Services
Preventative Maintenance

American Power Grid, LLC provides high quality Preventative Maintenance services on all types and brands of breakers, OCB's, medium or high voltage breakers and switches, protective relays, and switchgear.  Preventative maintenance includes infrared scanning, primary and secondary injection testing, the cleansing of breakers and searching for breakers in need of repair or replacement.  In addition to offering on-site repair, we specialize in providing the most advanced switchgear products.  Our quality replacement parts are available quickly for any emergency.

Why have preventative maintenance?

A well organized and implemented program minimizes accidents, reduces unplanned shutdowns, and lengthens the average time between failures of Electrical Systems.  Benefits of electrical Preventative Maintenance can be categorized as direct and indirect.  Direct benefits are derived from reduced cost of repairs, reduced downtime of equipment, and improved morale of employees resulting in better workmanship, increased productivity, and the discovery of deficiencies in the system that were either designed into the original system or caused by later changes made to the system. 

American power grid implements the theory of 4's:

The 4 rules:

  • Keep it dry
  • Keep it cool
  • Keep it clean
  • Keep it tight

The 4 approaches:

  • Run to failure.
    Degraded equipment is only repaired or replaced when the effect of the degradation on process output becomes unacceptable.  Because of the generally high reliability of electrical power systems installed in a benign environment, the " to failure" approach often provides satisfactory power reliability and availability in non-critical applications.  Small organizations which lack dedicated maintenance staffs often utilize the approach by default, and larger more sophisticated organizations in the manufacturing sector also frequently apply it to non-critical equipment.
  • Inspect and service as necessary.
    This approach is an advanced beyond run to failure, wherein plant operating or maintenance personnel inspect electrical equipment on a more or less regular schedule.  Under this approach, incipient failures are usually corrected before they become catastrophes, especially if the impact of failure is considered unacceptable, and there is often some informal monitoring of performance to predict future failures.  Many industrial manufacturing plants use this approach and find it satisfactory.
  • Scheduled preventative maintenance (EPM).
    In this approach, established Electrical Preventative Maintenance activities are performed at fixed intervals of calendar time, operating hours, or operating cycles.  Both procedures and schedules are usually based on manufacturer's recommendations or industry standards.  While the scheduled EPM approach ensures that equipment gets periodic attention.  It does not necessarily prioritize EPM according to safety or productivity significance.  Nor, does it optimize the application of limited EPM resources or take advantage of lessons learned form plant and industry experience.  Scheduled EPM currently is the predominant approach among relatively sophisticated operators of plants where productivity and safety is a serious concern.
  • Reliability centered maintenance (RCM).
    RCM involves specifying and scheduling EPM activities in accordance with the statistical failure rate and/ or life expectancy of the equipment being maintained and its criticality and productivity, and continually updating EPM procedures and schedules to reflect actual maintenance experience in the plant.  RCM is the most cost-effective of the alternative approaches because it improves plant safety, reliability, and availability while reducing maintenance costs by concentrating limited maintenance resources on items which are the most important and/or troublesome, and reducing or eliminating unnecessary maintenance on items which are of little significance and/or highly reliable.  A comprehensive RCM program also incorporates structured provisions for failure root cause investigation and correction and for performance monitoring to predict failures.  RCM is used extensively in the military and is gaining acceptance among Nuclear utilities and manufacturing plant operators as its advantages are increasingly recognized.
Department of Energy United States Air Force Air Force Reserve Command Federal Aviation Administration United States Army United States Navy US Army Corps of Engineers United States Coast Guard United States Department of Veterans Affairs