Energy Reduction through Practical Scheduled Maintenance

Citation

Chimack M, Aardsma J and Novosel D.  2006. Energy Reduction through Practical Scheduled Maintenance, Report NCEMBT-061102.  Alexandria, Virginia: National Center for Energy Management and Building Technologies.

Abstract

The current typical practice for equipment maintenance in commercial building is to perform equipment maintenance as outlined in service manuals and repair or replace failed equipment as needed. Maintenance personnel have excelled at making these reactive repairs to fix failed equipment; however, they often fail to determine the causes of the failure. Instead of this reactive nature, maintenance personnel need to be proactive and plan ahead to be more effective. Less time will be needed to repair equipment if maintenance personnel manage the equipment through a maintenance program and plan their work in advance. Planned maintenance costs three to five times less than unplanned maintenance when considering labor and materials (Burns 1992).

When a scheduled maintenance (SM) program is properly implemented, the aforementioned issues associated with reactive maintenance are addressed. A scheduled maintenance program is able to identify equipment degradation or failure as it begins. Furthermore, building systems are kept in optimal operating conditions when a SM program is followed. SM programs increase building performance while providing indoor air quality and occupant comfort. The increased building performance is evident in the reduction of equipment failure and downtime as well as a reduction in energy use and energy costs. Implementation of an effective SM program can reduce energy bills by five to twenty percent in commercial buildings.

There are barriers that prevent the wide-spread implementation of SM programs, despite the clear advantages that they offer to building owners and managers over traditional maintenance programs. SM programs remain a best practice in the industry, but the extent to which building owners, operators and contractors are using SM programs is not definitively known. The main reason for not implementing a SM program seems to be a lack of knowledge of the benefits and how to implement SM programs in addition to no clear way to identify the resulting cost savings generated by a SM program. More than 55 percent of companies use a reactive maintenance approach, fixing equipment when it breaks, while less than a third have a scheduled maintenance approach implemented (Sullivan et al. 2004). By identifying the barriers and making the economic case for SM programs, substantial operational savings can be achieved.