5 Things You Need To Do To Avoid Costly Project Power Outages

Posted by Jack Barry on Tue, Dec 17, 2013

Ensuring that your project's power supply is adequately sourced is critical to the seamless functioning of any large scale project. An outage can spell disaster, resulting in costly knock-on effects such as idle labor, missed deadlines and—perhaps most importantly—lost contracts. Even the most well-planned project can fold under the stress of an unexpected outage, and can ruin your companies reputation as a consistent and trustworthy investment. Given the complexities of large-scale projects, there is no 100% sure way to avoid an outage. However, exercising cautious planning and due diligence by ensuring you have adequate backup systems can take you as far as you can go to preventing an outage. Today we're going to look through five ways to avoid an outage in the first place: 

1. Careful planning is the bedrock of ensuring that you have the right equipment for the job. In an earlier post, we discussed the importance of ensuring that you procure the right generator for the situation, as well as the importance of matching your generator to your project's needs. For example, running your generator either below or beyond its rated output can cause serious maintenance issues. Running your generator too low can result in what's known as 'wet stacking', a condition in which some fuel is left unburned which then passes into the exhaust system, where an oily residue 'stacks' becoming hazardous to the proper functioning of the generator. Conversely, running your generator beyond its rated output can result is serious wear and tear, sometimes becoming critical. 

2. While this suggestion may seem intuitive, it's commonly passed over: ensuring your equipment is in good working order. Recently we discussed five warning signs that your generator might be experiencing an issue, including warning lights on the unit, the unit emitting unusual noises or various colors of smoke -- each indicating that your unit is in need of maintenance. If your generator unit is exhibiting any indicators of a problem, it's important to have a trained professional look it over, otherwise you run the risk of a breakdown. 

3. As mentioned in the first section, ensuring that you have properly planned for enough power sourcing for your project is key. It can be easy to overlook the vast need for capacity that equipment, offices, living quarters etc. can demand. Only too late do managers realize their mistake and find their project ready to begin extraction or production, but delayed due to lack of power capacity. Ensuring that you have adequate power — and just as importantly, back-up power — means taking a thorough and sober stock of all the elements of your project, and then procuring a generator or generators that match that need. 

4. Once you have adequately planned for, procured, received, and installed your generator the key to maintaining a smooth project is making sure that you treat your expensive new equipment with the care it deserves. That means maintaining a regular and appropriate maintenance schedule. In many cases, a generator will not simply 'work' or 'not work', but will exhibit signs of an issue long before a total breakdown. To the more familiar, these signs can be used to diagnose and treat generator issues before they become serious, thereby saving you time, effort, and money in fixing a larger problem that could have been avoided through diligent and regular maintenance. 

5. Regular check-ups, however, are not the be-all-and-end-all of generator maintenance. Ensuring that your staff are trained and familiar with your unit will ensure that human error—one of the most common reasons for a generator breakdown—is minimized. Having a staff that is familiar with generators means that they are more likely to recognize a fault in the unit and are better equipped to handle, and possibly treat the issue before it becomes critical. 

If you find yourself scrambling to get in gear on any of the 5 things we've suggested, don't fret. Check our Buyer's Resources section for information that can help you right now, including our Buyer's Guide download. And get in touch now if you'd like to speak directly with one of our specialists. 

Tags: Planning, backup power

    Subscribe via Email

    New Call-to-action
    New Call-to-action

    Latest Posts

    Follow Depco