Electrical Services

Regular Maintenance

Equipment doesn’t last forever. Regular maintenance is one of the major factors that extend both the economic life of equipment and the time between failures of that equipment. The maintenance required for one piece of equipment in one situation can be quite different from another situation.

Modern dairy sheds and irrigation systems are essentially industrial units set in the countryside. They need to be treated as such and given regular maintenance. This sort of programmed maintenance will see fault work diminish either in frequency and or scale.

As the work is planned you will know in advance if and when systems will be down. This gives you the chance to have a planned response (for example a genset may be brought to site or the milking may be delayed or advanced.)

There is a well documented fault performance curve that lots of products follow. The bathtub curve is widely used in reliability engineering.

- The first part is a decreasing failure rate, known as early failures.
- The second part is a constant failure rate, known as random failures.
- The third part is an increasing failure rate, known as wear-out failures.

The name is derived from the cross-sectional shape of a bathtub.

The bathtub curve is created by mapping the 3 curves together: the rate of early “infant mortality” failures when first introduced, the rate of random failures with constant failure rate during its “useful life”, and finally the rate of “wear out” failures as the product exceeds its design lifetime.

Calect has developed electrical maintenance programmes for dairy farms and irrigation systems which are designed to make the systems go better for longer. This sort of programmed maintenance will see repair work diminish. As the work is planned you will know in advance if and when systems will be down. This gives you the chance to have a planned response (for example a genset may be brought to site or the milking may be delayed or advanced.)

It can be the little things like:

- Changing light bulbs (and heat bulbs) before they fail; or bigger things like,
- Cleaning out rodent or bird rubbish from switchboards; or
- Measuring motor vibration to check the wear on bearings; or,
- Checking a pump shed so that frost damage is detected before the irrigation season starts up; or,
- Re-torquing bolts on cable connections; or,
- Replacing flexible conduit and cables on a pivot which stock have chewed on during the winter.

All too often electrical failure brings with it a chance of fire damage.

Fires and unscheduled downtime can cost you hundreds to thousands per hour. Many of these electrical fires could be avoided by correcting poor design, workmanship, and faulty components long before they become a serious problem. Thermal Imaging takes a picture and shows you where the “hot spots” or loose connections are so they can be corrected. These "hot spots" are not visible to the human eye. Thermal Imaging detects hot spots as the temperature caused by these loose connections.