The Preventative Maintenance Concept

I want to post some infor­ma­tion about cer­tain things to look for around the house that can become poten­tial prob­lems if they are not taken care of. But before I get into the spe­cific areas of these issues I decided that it would be best to talk about the con­cept of pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance and why it is so important.

One cau­tion that I must put forth is that work­ing on or tear­ing into things that you do not under­stand can cause more prob­lems or poten­tially cause bod­ily harm to your­self and oth­ers. Pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance does not mean that you have to do all of the inspec­tions and ser­vice your­self (and for some sit­u­a­tions you absolutely should not). Many ser­vice providers will offer inspec­tions and rou­tine ser­vice. Some will also offer sched­ul­ing and reminders on rec­om­mended inspec­tions and service.

I am a big believer in pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance. Pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance means tak­ing care of issues before they ever become prob­lems. It is an exer­cise in plan­ning, aware­ness and dis­ci­pline. That may sound a lit­tle daunt­ing but it’s really not that complicated.

A pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance pro­gram can be applied to just about any struc­ture or mechan­i­cal sys­tem such as oil­ing hinges and replac­ing fur­nace fil­ters in your house­hold or chang­ing the oil or greas­ing joints in your car, and these are just a cou­ple of small examples.

In order to have an effec­tive Pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance pro­gram for any appli­ca­tion it helps to have a good work­ing knowl­edge of the sub­ject of the pro­gram (but it’s not entirely nec­es­sary), aware­ness of any sub­tle changes in the sub­ject and most impor­tantly, tak­ing the ini­tia­tive to repair or replace any poten­tial prob­lems as soon as they are detected instead of wait­ing until the unit actu­ally fails completely.

The ben­e­fits of a pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance pro­gram include:

• • Reduced repair cost
  • Less down time, incon­ve­nience and stress
  • Less sur­prises from com­po­nent failure
  • Less dam­age result­ing from com­po­nent failure
  • And for busi­ness appli­ca­tions, Increased pro­duc­tion as a result of the above

Prob­a­bly one of the most impor­tant tools of a pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance pro­gram is to cre­ate a sim­ple check­list of items to inspect and ser­vice on a reg­u­lar basis.  (When I used to work main­te­nance for the hotel we had an entire wall of clip boards with inspec­tion list for the day, week or month)

Besides mak­ing a list of things to inspect it is also very help­ful to keep a sched­ule on a cal­en­dar of when the inspec­tions are due. A cal­en­dar on a com­puter or even most cell phones these days have reminder fea­tures and are a great way to keep track of find­ings from inspections.

Some inspec­tions around the house will need to be done at dif­fer­ent fre­quen­cies; daily, weekly, monthly, quar­terly and yearly for exam­ple. It all depends on the indi­vid­ual situation.

For most house­hold inspec­tions a list of only a page or two is usu­ally all you will end up with and the actual inspec­tion should only take an hour or two to complete.

The fre­quency of the inspec­tions depends largely on how often the unit you are inspect­ing requires ser­vice.  For exam­ple: If you are inspect­ing and ser­vic­ing your fil­ters in your fur­nace your inspec­tions will vary depend­ing on whether or not your fur­nace is equipped with a cen­tral air unit. If you do not have a cen­tral air unit then your fur­nace does not oper­ate dur­ing the sum­mer months and there is no need to inspect the fil­ters. But if you do have a cen­tral air unit the fan for the fur­nace is used as well as the fil­ters. There­fore the fil­ters should be inspected even dur­ing the summer.

How fast a fil­ter in a fur­nace will become packed with dust depends on how often and how long the fur­nace is run­ning in order to keep the house at the set tem­per­a­ture, this will change depend­ing on how extreme the weather is. Also, fil­ter replace­ment depends on other vari­ables such as the amount of dust that is present in the house or whether or not there are pets inside the house.

So for deter­min­ing the fre­quency of the inspec­tion and ser­vic­ing of this exam­ple I would start by inspect­ing once a month dur­ing the period that the unit is going to be used, (fall and win­ter for a fur­nace only, year round for cen­tral air and fur­nace.) If I only find the fil­ter to need atten­tion every other month I may spread out the fre­quency of the inspec­tion to every other month. (Just as exam­ple: If I were to find that the fil­ter was extremely dirty every month, I may begin inspect­ing the fil­ter every cou­ple of weeks.)

This same prin­ci­ple applies to most sit­u­a­tions as far as deter­min­ing the best fre­quency of an inspec­tion. I pre­fer to start with inspec­tions that are more fre­quent than wait too long to inspect and find that the unit needed atten­tion a long time ago.

The prob­lems that can come from not hav­ing a pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance pro­gram or putting off repairs and inspec­tions can be a night­mare. I’ll use the fur­nace for an exam­ple again:

You begin to notice that your fur­nace is mak­ing more noise than usual or it started mak­ing a new noise that is uncom­mon when it starts up but you don’t pay much atten­tion to it. Instead you merely turn up the vol­ume on your TV and ignore the change. This may go on for a few days or more until you wake up one morn­ing to a house that is freez­ing cold because your fur­nace quit dur­ing the night.

What hap­pened?!

What do you do now?

Well, you will prob­a­bly have to call a ser­vice pro­fes­sional to come out and repair the unit. But you will also have to hope that they are not so busy that they can’t make it out to your house for a day or two and then you have to hope that what­ever went wrong with the unit will not require parts to be ordered result­ing in more down time while you try to fig­ure out how to keep your house warm.

Now, what would have hap­pened if you had imme­di­ately inspected the unit once you heard the noise or, if you are not com­fort­able with or qual­i­fied to do an inspec­tion, you had called a ser­vice pro­fes­sional right away to have them per­form the inspection?

It’s very pos­si­ble that you or the ser­vice­man may have found that it was only the fan becom­ing packed with dirt and needed cleaned in order to keep the bal­ance of the fan from destroy­ing the bear­ings. Or if the prob­lem required a new part that does need to be ordered you may have been able to get the part deliv­ered and installed before the unit failed.

Now to be fair, there are always things that come as a sur­prise despite our best efforts to avoid them or to see them com­ing. But the amount of stress and incon­ve­nience can be greatly reduced the more you keep on top of the inspec­tions rou­tine service.

Please feel free to com­ment on this post or ask a question.