Preventive Maintenance Programs Most buildings have some form of preventive maintenance program; ranging from a write-and-wipe board in the maintenance area to an all-encompassing, on-line, cloud-based corporate-structured program. Regardless, at the building level, each of these systems needs to provide specific, correct and up-to-date information to the management staff. Every building, system, structure or device (including humans) requires maintenance. We can consider this maintenance as falling out into three categories: ■ Emergency or Call Maintenance—‘I’ve broken a bone; help me!’ or ‘The toilet in the fourth-floor men’s room is clogged up, please fix.’ ■
Preventive Maintenance—‘It’s my birthday, I need to get a physical.’ or ‘The air filters need changing.’
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Scheduled Maintenance—It’s time for ice cream.’ or ‘The emergency generator tank needs refilling.’
As the audience for this article is people involved in the operations and maintenance of buildings, that’ll be the end of the human references. We are going to focus on an overview of Preventive Maintenance in this article, and as you see from the discussion above, there are inevitable overlaps with both unscheduled repairs and with equipment replacements. An unscheduled repair that happens to overlap a Preventive Maintenance Task can be used to complete the PM Task; a PM Task completed the week prior to an unscheduled repair can’t be used as a reason to not make the repair. A generally accepted definition of Preventive Maintenance (PM) is that it is “the regular and routine maintenance of equipment and assets in order to keep them running and prevent any costly unplanned downtime resulting from unexpected equipment failure.” Unplanned downtime impacts can range from lack of heating/cooling
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calls, through elevator trap calls to police interventions because the parking lot lighting failed and someone was mugged. The process of preventive maintenance is applied in every case where the cost of the maintenance action (including labor, parts, materials, supplies and in a lot of cases, contractor support) both provide for the object to reach normal service life and do not exceed the cost of replacement upon failure, prior to the end of normal service life. Additionally, certain systems require the highest level of care because of liability concerns. Preventive Maintenance MAY NOT extend normal service life. It is clearly documented that a lack of Preventive Maintenance WILL ENSURE the failure to reach normal service life.
Preventive Maintenance MAY NOT extend normal service life. It is clearly documented that a lack of Preventive Maintenance WILL ENSURE the failure to reach normal service life. As an example, it would be normal to consider a preventive maintenance approach for parking lot lighting. It is typically hard to get to, it is a liability concern, and it is very reflective (!?) on the building’s curbside appeal. Even though the individual components are not expensive, the actual installation/maintenance cost is relatively high due to the issue of service access. On the other hand, it would not be normal to consider a preventive maintenance approach for interior lighting as it can be fixed on call and does not typically require extensive preparation and expensive equipment to access and service the light. There are always exceptions to the rule; for example, a two (or more) story atrium will require
