Find Electrical Problems Before They Find You.
Infrared thermography or thermal imaging allows early identification of electrical issues before they lead to bigger problems. Make your electrical system safer, more reliable, and compliant with current standards.
Benefits of Infrared Thermography
Requires No Downtime
Electrical surveys are performed during normal operations with no interruption to your electrical service.
Enhanced Safety
Your employees and customers deserve a safe environment. You deserve the peace-of-mind that comes from providing it.
Proactive vs Reactive
Identify potential electrical issues before they escalate into costly repairs or safety hazards.
Cost Savings
A single untimely equipment failure will likely result in the cost of several years’ worth of IR surveys.
Compliance With Current Standards
The NFPA 70B requires IR thermography to be performed yearly for most electrical equipment and every 6 months for critical safety systems.
Increased System Reliability
Enhance the performance and longevity of your electrical distribution system with regular inspections.
Cost Savings
Maintenance costs are reduced because you can use your IR survey results to focus your maintenance efforts and target problem areas. Fewer emergency repairs means a reduction in downtime, saving both time and money.
Require No Downtime
To provide the most reliable data, IR thermography should be done under normal operating conditions. The morning of your IR Survey day(s), your thermographer will hold a kickoff meeting. There’s typically several people there but we request at least one person from operations and at least one person maintenance attend the meeting. Ops attend the meeting for a couple reasons. They can tell us which equipment we can view during the course of normal operations that day and help us plan for other equipment (i.e. put tanks in recirc, run idled equipment for our readings).
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NFPA 70B requires IR Thermography to be done under normal circuit loading…with a minimum of 40% loading.
Wanna look like a real hero?
Schedule your IR Survey a week or two before your planned downtime. This allows you the time to investigate any findings and make routine repairs during planned downtime.
NFPA 70B
We dislike changing standards and additional regulations as much as anyone. In this case though, it really seems like the NFPA is trying to protect people from themselves.
This is stuff most Maintenance Managers already know we should be doing.
70B became a standard because not everyone was taking care of their equipment. Widely varying maintenance practices yield widely varying equipment conditions. Our electrical safety standards must assume a certain degree of equipment maintenance. Without standardization, the material conditions are allowed to vary so widely that we cannot account for every possible scenario.
Increased System Reliability
Infrared thermography can be used as a PdM tool in that it can trend changes over time and help you anticipate equipment’s end of service life, thus allowing replacement prior to failure.
Thermal imaging is also an extremely effective way to improve a facility’s preventive maintenance programs. Monitoring your electrical system and performing maintenance based on material conditions prevents wasted maintenance efforts.
For example: We perform thermography on a motor that’s in service and find no significant anomalies. This information is still very valuable as it can be revisited on subsequent IR surveys. If we notice an increase in temperature on a survey (with no increase in speed or loading), we may recommend increasing the lubrication frequency. If the bearing happened to have been greased since the previous survey, it’s possible that too much grease or the wrong grease/grease that’s incompatible with previously used grease…etc. We can help you work through the issue and if identified early enough, the problem can be corrected before more damage occurs.
Eventually, we may see the bearing temperature increase gradually over time and despite corrective efforts, it continues to get worse. You can use the thermograph, along with your understanding of your equipment and process, to determine your next course of action.
Avoiding downtime is great but we understand some equipment just gets run to failure too. At least if you anticipate the issue, you can prepare for it.
Enhanced Safety
According to the NFPA, approximately 24% of structure fires in industrial settings are caused by electrical issues. The leading causes are overloaded circuits and faulty wiring. Thermal imaging is optimal for identifying both of those issues. The safety of your electrical distribution system will improve with thermography.
Early detection provides a reduction in equipment failures. We all know, if you reduce the number of upset conditions, the safety of your facility improves drastically.
Thermal Imaging is a great tool because it’s safe to perform. It’s non-contact and non-invasive, allowing observation from a safe distance (following all NFPA 70E requirements).
Proactive Maintenance is always preferred.
Most electrical faults are apparent long before they actually cause failures. IR Thermography allows us to identify issues in the very early stages which, in turn, allows repairs to be made before equipment failures occur.
Some facilities don’t keep as many spare parts on the shelf as others. Give yourself some peace-of-mind by doing thermography. If an issue is identified, at least you’ve given yourself a fighting chance to get spare parts before the equipment fails.
The Process is Simple.
One of our field engineers will meet with you at your site. He or she will ask some questions about your electrical distribution system and walk the plant with a member of your team. He/she will take plenty of notes and may ask to take a few pictures. We’ll use this information to provide a quote for your IR survey.
Upon quote approval, a certified Field Engineer will come to your site during normal operations. They will work with a member of your maintenance team to safely access your facility’s electrical equipment and take images using one of our state-of-the-art thermographic cameras.
If any urgent or emergency issues are identified, they will be reported immediately. After your survey, the field engineer will compile the data and we will analyze every image. Each anomaly is assigned a severity rating based upon established severity criteria and the field engineer’s insight. A comprehensive report detailing all survey findings will be provided following the survey.
Why We Do Thermography
