Opinion · archive
The importance of regular maintenance and inspections — archived version
Planned maintenance is the easiest line to cut and the most expensive one to have cut. Here is where the money actually goes.
Every estate eventually runs the same experiment. Planned maintenance is reduced to protect a budget, nothing goes wrong for several months, and the reduction looks vindicated. The costs arrive later, in a different budget line, and are rarely attributed back. This URL is retained from the previous site; the fuller version lives at /post/the-importance-of-regular-maintenance-and-inspections.
What deferring maintenance actually costs
- Reactive call-outs at premium rates, often out of hours, often on the same asset repeatedly
- Shortened asset life — plant that should have reached fifteen years failing at nine
- Business interruption, which is almost never counted against the maintenance budget that caused it
- Compliance exposure, where a missed statutory test becomes an enforcement matter
- Insurance and warranty positions weakened by an absent maintenance record
- Capital surprises: unplanned replacement is the most expensive way to buy plant
Inspection is not the same as maintenance
They are often bundled and they do different jobs. Maintenance is intervention — servicing, replacing, adjusting. Inspection is information — condition, compliance status, remaining life. An estate with good maintenance and poor inspection is well looked after and cannot prove it. An estate with good inspection and poor maintenance knows exactly how bad things are getting.
Setting intervals honestly
Frequencies should come from three inputs: what the law requires, what the recognised standard advises, and what the asset's condition and criticality justify. A rooftop condenser on a coastal site does not belong on the same schedule as one in a sheltered plant room, and a schedule that treats them identically is a template rather than a plan.
How to tell whether a regime is working
- The ratio of planned to reactive spend is moving in the right direction over time
- Repeat failures on the same asset are visible and being escalated, not just repaired
- Statutory tests are being passed first time more often than they were
- Remedial actions have owners and closure dates, and the closure dates are met
- The asset register reflects what is actually installed today
The honest caveat
Planned maintenance does not eliminate failure and any provider who implies otherwise is overselling. Plant fails, sometimes early and sometimes for reasons no schedule would have caught. What a good regime changes is the proportion: fewer surprises, more of the remaining ones caught while they are still cheap, and a record that shows which assets are telling you something.
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