Switchgear Maintenance

Switchboard servicing

During its life cycle, a switchboard’s performance can be effected due to the ageing of its components. This is mainly due to environmental influences and operating conditions, such as surrounding temperature, humidity levels, and dust.

To keep your LV, HV and DC switchgear operating in the best possible condition, we’ve developed an advanced testing and maintenance program that is guaranteed to maximise performance and minimise the risk of asset failure via a rigorous condition assessment.

Standard services include, but are not limited to:

• Visual inspections and cleaning
• Servicing operation and subassembly tests
• Electrical fault finding
• Replacement of faulty accessories
• Comprehensive completion reports and recommendations.

Circuit breaker servicing

To ensure the safe and continued operation of your switchboard, it’s essential for regular testing and maintenance to be carried out on all circuit breakers. A lack of maintenance, gathering of dust, hardened grease or corrosion of parts can ultimately prevent the correct operation of the trip linkage, exposing your infrastructure to dangerous overflows of current.

Our servicing package has been specifically designed to help customers carefully maintain their VCBs, ACBs, MCBs and MCCBs, identifying any potential issues before they become a problem.

Standard services include, but are not limited to:

• Visual inspections, lubrication and cleaning of all contacts, arc shutes, connections and busbars
• Servicing operation and subassembly tests
• Secondary injection testing
• Replacement of faulty accessories

Protection relay testing

Protection relays perform a critical role in detecting abnormal activity or faults within a power system. If detected, the protective device initiates operation of the circuit breaker to isolate the defective element from the rest of the system. Therefore, their reliable operation must be ensured at all times.

R&B Switchgear Group offer an in-depth protection relay testing and maintenance service which contributes to the future reliability of the protection system, by ensuring all devices are functioning correctly. Most importantly, it allows for any issues or service degradation to be identified, so that corrective action can be taken before failure occurs.

Standard services include, but are not limited to:

• Routine Factory Production Tests
• On-site Testing and Commissioning
• Commissioning and Programming
• Periodic Maintenance Tests
• Comprehensive completion reports and recommendations.

Thermographic surveys

Whilst equipment may appear as though it’s operating correctly to the naked eye, the introduction of IR windows and thermal imaging technology has enabled critical industries to carry out non-invasive, thorough and accurate inspections of their electrical infrastructure, revealing any hidden issues that would otherwise go undetected.

Using the latest thermal imaging technology, our thermographic surveys, also known as infrared inspections, can reveal connections defects, system overloads, deteriorated insulation, and other potential problems in electrical components through advanced temperature analysis. Following which our team can provide expert advice and guidance to assist customers in creating an effective predictive maintenance strategy.

Partial discharge surveys

In addition to our temporary and permanent partial discharge (PD) monitoring solutions, we have a team of expertly trained engineers available to carry out handheld instrument surveys, to detect signs of PD activity within your infrastructure.

Preventive maintenance, when planned and executed well, can significantly reduce overall maintenance costs and increase productivity. If not identified and repaired early enough, partial discharge is highly likely to result in catastrophic failure, making it evermore important to ensure our PD monitoring and testing forms part of your preventative maintenance programme.

Following a survey of your chosen assets, our team will provide a detailed report on the condition of your system, any trends or signs of PD activity, along with recommended follow up actions on how best to address the results from your PD survey.

Obsolescence surveys

No greater benefit to a company exists than preventing loss of revenue that could easily be avoided. By planning ahead and incorporating our obsolescence surveys into your maintenance regime, we can help you create an effective obsolescence plan, identifying which assets require replacement well in advance of them reaching their end of life cycle.

Replacing assets and components before they fail or become obsolete is guaranteed to save you time and money in the long run, as advance upgrades prevents the need to source hard-to-come-by or obsolete parts in a downtime emergency. Thereby improving the chances of returning failed equipment to service as quickly as possible.

Not only can our team help you identify which obsolete assets require your attention, they can help you source the best possible replacement or retrofit too, ensuring the overall quality or performance of your systems is not compromised.