Electrical preventive maintenance (EPM) is the scheduled care of the plant’s electrical infrastructure, switchgear, transformers, distribution panels, motor control centers, drives, cables, and protective devices, whose failures rarely announce themselves in advance and rarely fail small. Electrical failures combine three unpleasant properties: they are invisible behind closed doors, they take whole sections of a plant down at once, and a share of them start fires.
An annual thermographic scan finds a feeder termination in an MCC running 28 degrees above its neighbors under similar load, a classic deteriorating connection. Repair is scheduled into the next maintenance window: 45 minutes of isolation (LOTO), cleaning, and re-termination. The counterfactual plays out in loss reports everywhere: resistance grows, heat accelerates oxidation, and some months later the connection fails under summer load, taking the MCC section, its production line, and possibly an arc event with it. A day of scanning per year routinely surfaces a handful of such finds; any one of them pays for the program.
Typical skeletons: thermographic scanning annually (semi-annual for heavily loaded or critical gear), breaker exercising and inspection on 1-to-3-year cycles per criticality and duty, protective device testing on a 3-to-6-year cycle per manufacturer and standard guidance, IR testing of critical motors annually, and environment checks quarterly. The exact numbers belong to your standards and insurer requirements; the non-negotiable part is that every asset has a number, and the number lives in a scheduler rather than a spreadsheet.
EPM work sits inside strict boundaries: de-energized work with verified isolation as the default, energized diagnostics like thermography done through appropriate windows or with the required protection and permits, and arc-flash risk respected in every task plan and JSA. A maintenance program that saves downtime by improvising around electrical safety has misunderstood both.
Fabrico runs the EPM machine: the electrical asset register with per-asset task plans and frequencies, scan findings and test values recorded against each asset so trends are visible (this year’s 28-degree lug was last year’s 9-degree note), corrective work generated and prioritized from findings, and the evidence chain, dates, values, certificates, ready for insurers and auditors. Fabrico does not perform thermography or injection testing; qualified people do, on a schedule that no longer depends on memory. EU-built, with EU data residency.
It is the highest-yield single technique for connections, but it only sees what is loaded and line-of-sight during the scan. Breaker mechanisms, protective settings, insulation systems, and lightly loaded circuits need their own tests; the program is a portfolio, not a camera.
By consequence: start with the gear whose failure stops the most production or creates the greatest hazard, main switchboards, critical MCCs, single-point transformers, then work outward. Asset criticality plus failure history, both visible in the maintenance system, beat intuition.
Trendable ones: thermal images with load context, contact resistance and IR values over the years, protective device test results against settings. A pass/fail tick sheet hides exactly the drift that numeric records reveal.
Want every panel, test value, and thermal finding on one asset timeline? Book a Fabrico demo to see electrical maintenance run as a program instead of a rumor.
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