No one needs to be told the importance of electricity in our daily lives as individuals, communities and even as a nation. Just image a day without electricity; how would homes run? How would factories be powered? Imagine what will become of workplace productivity. This is one of the reasons, why in Facilities Management, Electricity is regarded and appraised as critical.
What most people ignore however is that the electrical systems responsible for generation, transmission, distribution and utilization have their processes, which are often designed to certain specifications for: installation and commissioning, operation, maintenance and upgrades.
To get the best out of your electricity supply in your home or workplace, these processes must be inspected, analyzed and surveyed to reaffirm that your electrical system is still in consonance with necessary requirements and best practices. This process of reaffirmation is what is technically called Electrical Audit (EA) or Electrical System Audit (ESA).
What this helps you do is detect and help you carry out predictive maintenance, to determine the actual state of your electrical system.
Unfortunately a lot of people ignore or are altogether unaware of the importance of this process, so our concern this week is to discuss the importance of this process as follow:
1. Safety: A faulty electrical system pose a great threat to safety of lives and property of the user in form of shocks, burns, injury, death, fire and explosion. It is common place that most fire outbreaks escalate from mere electrical surges. And when it unfortunately happens close to inflammable materials, the resultant effects have been loss of lives, properties and data.
However, a timely audit can help prevent such scenario by identifying possible electrical hazards and guiding you through correcting the defects.
2. Prevention is Always Better than Cure: Yes! It is always cheaper to prevent the possible outcome of faulty electrical installations than correcting, repairing and procuring new equipment. It’s a myth that electrical audits are expensive and can erode profit. As a matter of fact, it’s a value-driven profit. What is the value of conducting an electrical audit versus losing lives or having to lose all your data in one swoop?
Electrical audits maximize cost savings and guarantees value for money on assets by ensuring functionality through-out its life-span.
3. Compliance Checks: Electrical audit evaluates the statutory and professional compliance level of electrical systems. It gives room to effectively evaluate and improve effectiveness of the entire electrical system and/or processes in place. In addition, it provides a third party assurance to any stakeholder that all stipulated processes are adhered to.
4. Reliability: When periodic and regular audits are carried out of on your electrical systems, they will not just be reliable; they can also put your corporate or domestic spending in view. That is, you know when you need to replace certain systems and can plan for such replacement and the disposal of the old one ahead.
An Electrical audit will expose how reliable any electrical system is, whether their functionality still aligns with the design, installation and commissioning information, as many alterations can happen during operation and maintenance phase. Electrical Audit addresses operational and maintenance error carry-out in the course of day to day activities.
