Circuit breakers are one of the most useful pieces of electrical equipment that any industrial building can have. They are responsible for protecting existing electrical circuits from any damage that might arise due to short circuiting or current overload. If not for them, electricity would go largely uncontrolled and electrical accidents would occur far more often.
However, they are not cheap pieces of equipment. It can be costly to hire someone to fix them, and even more to so to uninstall a broken one and purchase a new circuit breaker from scratch. In light of this, smart companies have come to the conclusion that preventative maintenance is the key to big savings and recovering potentially lost time.
Preventative maintenance is the act of performing regular inspections on something so that problems can be prevented from happening in the first place and errors can be identified right away. Here’s how this simple act, performed every few months, will add more to your company’s bottom line:
You don’t have to buy new equipment!
Think about the costs that will come with buying a new circuit breaker. There is the price of the breaker itself, along with the shipping and handling that will come with the price. Slap on taxes, and you have a pretty expensive product in your hands.
Then, if you don’t have a licensed electrician on your team, you will have to pay one for their time to manually install the circuit breaker in your building and perform all of the necessary tests. Not only do you lose money through this process, but it can be very lengthy. During this time, electricity in your building needs to be shut down or used very sparingly to avoid any safety accidents.
Preventative maintenance will extend the life of your circuit breaker. What does that mean for your company? It is money that does not have to be wasted. Rather than buy a new circuit breaker every couple of years, you might have to buy one every couple of decades.
You prevent costly hazards.
A malfunctioning circuit breaker is the first step toward an electrical safety accident that can harm or kill several people. Accidents need to be reported and, when the inspector realizes that it was due to a malfunctioning circuit breaker that could have been fixed with preventative maintenance, you will lose a lot of money.
There will be lawsuits filed against you that need to be settled. There will be fines placed on your tab for safety negligence. To get these solved, you will need to pay expensive legal fees. When the entire ordeal is done, and you look back at what you could have done, you will realize that a few hours of maintenance could have prevented everything.
It re-directs focus toward the things that matter.
Every single second you have your workers worried about or handling the circuit breaker is time where they are not helping your company make money. When preventative maintenance measures are put in place, it allows everyone to drop their worries and focus on the activities that truly matter. Even though you are not technically saving money, you are making more money over the long term because your company is more focused on expanding in size and influence.
The reality is that you can only focus on a few key things at a time. Multitasking has been proven time and time again to be a failed option for individuals and companies. The best companies have always thrived when they took a few priorities and applied laser focused towards them. As business expert Jim Collins says, “If you have more than 3 priorities, you don’t have any.”
Preventative maintenance on your industrial circuit breaker is key to big savings for your company in terms of the money and time that you have available to spend. As long as you do it often enough, you will never have to worry about your circuit breaker eating away at your profits because it won’t be replaced that often!
