Electronics Protection - Fall 2016 - 14

Feature Why Predictive Maintenance is the Proper Maintenance for UPSs Jason Eichas, Field Service Manager, Uninterruptible Power Supplies Division (UPSD) Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, Inc. (MEPPI) All too many companies focus on what it will take to recover from emergency situations: response time, parts availability and technician coverage when planning maintenance budgets. However, with proper predictive maintenance, trending and analysis, an emergency situation would be avoided all together. Planning for worst-case scenarios should be a priority. More focus applied to predicting failure points and preventing downtime could be a crucial difference between loss of power to your critical load and a scheduled downtime at your convenience. Ideally, this scheduled downtime should occur under controlled circumstances to maintain guaranteed uptimes. The timing and benefits of an organization's maintenance structure can be explained as follows: * * * Predictive maintenance refers to the use of maintenance to track and trend through data collection and analysis to predict the end of life of the critical components Preventive maintenance is defined as the use of the manufacturer's replacement recommended plan to change critical components at the predetermined end of life. Emergency response or time and material maintenance is defined as the reactive or inconvenient response to failures or occasional maintenance at undetermined intervals. Careful consideration should be used when deciding which strategy to use in your maintenance budget and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Predictive maintenance is the data collection and trending of the performance of critical components to predict when in the future a failure of a major component in your UPS or associated critical gear could occur, leading to unplanned downtime. So you may say to yourself, "We already get battery maintenance, what more do I need"? But what do you do with the battery data that is collected? Do you look at the report that is provided? Does the service provider offer an end-of-life expectancy with its report or does s/he tell you that after four years you need to budget for batteries and at five years you need to replace them? What benefit does your company receive with this service that your company couldn't provide on its own? You will know when a battery has prematurely failed and needs to be replaced, of course. Still, with proper trending and data sharing, you could actually run the batteries for six years! In a typical 15-year replacement cycle of the UPS, the batteries only need to be changed twice vs. the alternate of a preventive change cycle, hoping the batteries make the final year or two of the UPS's life cycle. This approach provides no peace of mind that when the UPS goes to battery, the critical load will actually be supported. You can use this approach for the other critical components that the manufacturer is telling you to predictively change, such as capacitors and fans. Most manufacturers recommend changing capacitors at five to seven years. This means if your company follows its preventive maintenance cycle, capacitors are changed two to three times in the life of the UPS, adding thousands of dollars to your company's TCO (total cost of ownership). This also adds to the risk of potential unplanned downtime with premature failure. 14 Fall 2016 * www.ElectronicsProtectionMagazine.com http://www.ElectronicsProtectionMagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Electronics Protection - Fall 2016