Having served in the power industry for almost 3 decades, I have often been asked, “Why does my UPS system need a service plan?”
To people and organizations who have or who were on the verge of losing revenue or risking human life because of a critical power issue or outage; the benefits of a solid UPS service plan are clearly obvious.
But to others, the importance of UPS maintenance becomes apparent when I bring up a similar analogy which relates to their car.
It’s natural to feel optimistic when your car drives smoothly and gets you wherever you want. You may start assuming that nothing wrong will ever happen. Consequently, you’ll overlook its regular maintenance.
But it’ll take just one breakdown due to a component failure to see why proper maintenance was needed in the first place.
The value of a UPS service maintenance plan lies in its potential to really provide an uninterruptible stream of power.
A UPS service plan prevents failures
It protects not only your equipment and your company, but also the trust that your partners, your suppliers, your investors, your customers and other stakeholders have in your business.
Take a common example of an important UPS vulnerability, such as batteries. In fact, up to 20% of UPS failures can be attributed to battery failures. This is a big problem as batteries form a major part of a UPS system.
That’s why Dataglobe puts a lot of emphasis in applying IEEE impedance and/or conductive testing into its regular battery maintenance. So you can be sure that your UPS batteries won’t let you down when you need them the most.
The image below shows how much your battery uptime improves each time there is a maintenance check.
(Image Source : Ponemon Institute Research Report 2010)
Batteries, however, are not the only possible sources of faults. A faulty fan can lead to an inadvertent transfer of your critical load on bypass or an overheating alarm. Likewise, a faulty filter capacitor can lead to significant damage to your critical load. The consequences are just as important to consider on your air filters, power and control connections, relays, contactors, etc.
A qualified service plan will prevent all of these problems and more. Each inspection involves a careful verification by an experienced engineer on Uninterruptible Power Systems.
A UPS service plan maximizes uptime
To make people aware of the impact that a power outage can cause, I am sharing a 2016 link with statistics from the Uptime Institute. The data can be boiled down to one crucial impact: down-time.
Successful firms realize how important it is to provide a product or service at the right time, satisfy client expectations and meet deadlines. That’s why they invest time and money in not only buying and installing mission critical UPS systems, but also maintaining them.
Apart from enhancing uptime and reliability, a high-quality UPS maintenance service program plan can help organizations lower their costs in many ways:
#1. An experienced UPS maintenance service provider is familiar with your UPS equipment thus in a better position to respond and solve problems in emergency situations.
Having an experienced UPS solution provider on your side can help you get your operations back on track fast.
#2. A poorly functioning or ill-suited UPS can cost you thousands in energy waste and loss in revenue. A great UPS maintenance service provider will not just maintain but also offer you an end-to-end solution.
This means that you’ll always be up-to-date on whether your UPS equipment is functioning efficiently and is best suited to your business applications.
Summing up: you need a service plan
As you can see, regularly scheduled maintenance is the best way to keep your UPS system up and running.
Loss of critical loads and sudden power failures are stressful and very expensive. The good health of your mission critical infrastructure can be ensured with reliable UPS equipment and a well-crafted service plan.
To keep your critical 7X24 infrastructure healthy, your best insurance is the acquisition of a reliable UPS system combined with a maintenance plan adapted to your needs.
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