What You Should Know About Electrical Maintenance in Malaysia?

Electrical maintenance is the process of inspecting and monitoring electrical systems and making replacements to required electrical parts. It’s also to make sure the electrical systems and machines work efficiently without any issues.

In another context, electrical maintenance is defined as the upkeep and preservation of equipment and systems that supply electricity to residential, industrial or commercial buildings.

The maintenance is often performed by a maintenance team within an organization or outsourced to outside electrical contractors.

So, what you should know about electrical maintenance in Malaysia?

Electrical maintenance has always been overlooked by companies in Malaysia until they face electric breakdowns that cost them a lot. That’s why it’s important to always keep your electrical systems and equipment in check. You will save a lot of money when you perform electrical maintenance consistently.

Let’s get to know more about Electrical Maintenance in Malaysia and why you should not neglect it.

Why is electrical maintenance important?

Did you know that performing regular electrical maintenance can increase the overall efficiencies of your electrical systems and equipment?

These are some of the top reasons why you should perform regular electrical maintenance:

• Improves the reliability and longevity of electrical equipment
• Reduces the budget spent on major repairs and corrective maintenance tasks
• Improves uptime and reduces downtime to save loss of overall productivity
• Scheduled or planned maintenance allows the maintenance team to stay prepared with required spare parts, tools and workforce
• Increase electrical systems efficiency
• Improve safety at the workplace, Avoid unwanted injuries and hazards with routine maintenance.

As we have mentioned earlier, it is always essential to have electrical maintenance work scheduled to avoid the sudden breakdown of equipment and electrical systems. Preventive maintenance is the way to go to control your time and money.

Before jumping on to the types of electrical maintenance strategies, let’s take a quick look at some of the important tools required to perform electrical maintenance.

What are the main tools required to perform electrical maintenance?

Electrical maintenance tools are required to perform the maintenance efficiently and safely. You don’t want to simply try doing maintenance without the right tool sets.

These are some of the most common electrical maintenance tools used by electrical maintenance providers in Malaysia:

• Hand Tools: Cable cutter, insulated screwdriver, spanners, hammers, wire stripper. Insulated pliers, hacksaw and many more.
• Testing Tools: Insulation testers, digital earth testers, transformer testing instruments, high voltage detectors, and contact resistance meters.
• Measurement Tools: AVO meter, grounding resistance meter, and insulation resistance tester.
• Maintenance software: MAXIMO and ORACLE

At STK Dynamic Engineering we use all these maintenance tools to perform our electrical maintenance projects. As each maintenance task has its requirements, it’s important to have all the necessary tools to provide the best maintenance service.

Now that we know why electrical maintenance is required and the types of tools to perform the maintenance, let’s take a look at the different types of electrical maintenance strategies involved.

Types of electrical maintenance strategies

There are three types of common electrical maintenance strategies:

1. Corrective maintenance
2. Predictive maintenance
3. Preventive maintenance

We will discuss these maintenance strategies one by one to give you a better understanding.

Corrective maintenance

One of the most common types of maintenance strategies. It is the maintenance method used to identify the fault and make the necessary repair to the fault.

This method is best to use only when the electrical maintenance costs are lower to fix the fault in the equipment compared to the cost required to make complete maintenance.

This maintenance strategy can be adapted only if it is cost-effective. Electrical maintenance service providers tend to avoid offering this maintenance and opt for other strategies because it’s cost-effective and less time-consuming.

Predictive maintenance

Predictive maintenance is the method that determines the condition of equipment rather than looking at its expected lifetime statistics.

This method involves the monitoring of machines and equipment during normal operations and predicting the failure before it happens. It’s more like forecasting when the event will occur.

When predictive maintenance is used, a planned repair can be executed at the time to minimize the negative impact on production.

There are various technologies used for predictive maintenance. Infrared and thermal imaging is the most common nondestructive testing technologies for predictive maintenance. Other technologies include vibration analysis, sound measurement, electrical transformer oil analysis and partial discharge.

Preventive maintenance

Preventive maintenance is one of the best electrical maintenance strategies recommended by most electrical maintenance contractors not only in Malaysia but worldwide.

It is also referred to as, PM, planned maintenance. Maintenance that takes place regularly can avoid breakdowns of machines that lead to a loss in production. Just think about how you service your car when it reaches specific mileage.

The main objective of preventive maintenance is to reduce the failure rate of equipment and machines while increasing the lifetime of their usage.

How is it determined whether the machines or equipment need maintenance?

Well, the maintenance is triggered by time, meter and events. Although the trigger points are mainly based on assumptions, it takes common historic data of the equipment and machines. The parts or components that are most likely to fail are replaced, removed or completely rebuilt.

Although the preventive maintenance strategy looks easier to be adapted and offers huge benefits for companies, there are some disadvantages too.

These are some of the disadvantages of preventive maintenance that you should know:

• The cost of preventive maintenance is slightly higher compared to others
• You need a skilled workforce to perform scheduled maintenance that requires more money
• As an organization, you need to invest more in training and building your maintenance team due to routine maintenance work
• Need to focus more on training people about workplace safety

It clearly shows that preventive maintenance requires more money. However, when we look at the long run it is worth it to invest more in keeping your machines and equipment in good condition as it will provide higher production efficiency. You spend money to make more money. And that’s how businesses work.

Rather than stopping your production due to failures in your machines, it’s a better choice to pay more for the employees and other resources. With zero downtime, the business will grow.

What are the main differences between preventive and predictive maintenance?

Both maintenance strategies require maintenance software to track and schedule maintenance and other attributes. Following are the top software for electrical maintenance available in the market:

• MAXIMO Computer Maintenance Management System
• ORACLE Maintenance Management System

Conclusion

Electrical maintenance is not something you should ever overlook if your company relies heavily on electrical systems and machines. You can always build a maintenance team to completely manage the electrical maintenance or hire a reputable and experienced electrical maintenance service provider like STK Dynamic Engineering.

Last but not least, you can control the time and cost. Rather than waiting for your electrical systems and equipment to fail, it’s better to constantly maintain and avoid unwanted expenses and negative impacts on productivity.