How to Maintain Your Industrial Power System

Maintenance is essential for the continued performance of any large electrical system. This is especially true when it comes to industrial power systems, where high demands are constant, and any downtime can lead to steep costs and safety concerns. Regular industrial power system maintenance ensures the system can operate continuously and safely. Regular maintenance from quality inspection can even extend equipment lifespan.

Blue Runner Switchgear has been providing critical industrial power system maintenance to a wide range of facilities across multiple industries for over twenty-five years. As a NETA-certified electrical maintenance provider, we are here to help you understand how to maintain your industrial power system, keeping your system reliable and running.

Facts About Industrial Power System Maintenance

Industrial power system maintenance ensures that your system and equipment is operating correctly. Inspection should be a regular part of your maintenance plan so that you can detect and identify issues in the system, and complete regular repairs or malfunctions as they become available. Identifying and detecting any problems immediately is essential to ensure the whole system is up to spec. Further specific equipment testing can identify any existing issues.

What Good Industrial Power System Maintenance Looks Like in Practice

Effective industrial power system maintenance is not reactive. It follows a planned cycle that combines inspection, testing, documentation, and corrective action over time. While exact requirements vary by facility, most successful programs share a few common principles:

• Baseline testing to establish normal operating conditions.
• Defined inspection and testing intervals based on equipment criticality, operating environment, and manufacturer guidance.
• Trend analysis to identify deterioration before failure occurs.
• Documented results that support compliance, insurance, and maintenance planning.

This approach allows facility owners to prioritize maintenance activities, budget for repairs, and avoid unplanned outages instead of responding to failures after they occur.

The Importance of Regular Inspections

Scheduled regular inspections of all equipment and connections can catch minor problems before they escalate or identify hidden issues. The exact inspection schedule depends on the industry and type of equipment, but it is part of your regular schedule and sets the foundation for appropriate maintenance of any electrical system.

Thermal Imaging

An excellent add-on to regular inspections, thermal imaging can help to detect issues that would otherwise fly under the radar. Thermal imaging can identify hot spots, loose connections, overloaded components, and other issues, all while the equipment is running. This lets you see how your equipment performs under real operating conditions.

Cyclical Maintenance

Industrial power system maintenance works best as a continuous cycle rather than a single event. Inspections and thermal imaging identify visible or developing issues, while electrical testing confirms whether those issues are affecting performance or safety.

Over time, comparing test results allows maintenance teams to track trends, verify repairs, and determine when corrective action is necessary. This cycle—inspect, test, document, correct, and re-test—is the foundation of a reliable, compliant electrical maintenance program.

Equipment Testing

Beyond visual and thermal inspection of equipment, individual testing ensures your equipment operates efficiently, complies with regulations, and maintains your industrial power system. Blue Runner Switchgear provides NETA-certified electrical maintenance to ensure your equipment continues to meet NETA standards, as well as OSHA, IEEE, and NFPA.

• Switchgear Testing: Switchgear is often the first point of failure in an industrial power system and plays a central role in protecting downstream equipment. Because it controls power distribution and fault isolation, switchgear maintenance directly affects system reliability, safety, and arc flash risk. Regular switchgear testing and maintenance typically includes mechanical inspection, cleaning, lubrication, verification of protective device operation, and circuit breaker timing and performance testing. When breakers fail to operate correctly or protective coordination drifts out of specification, faults can escalate quickly, leading to equipment damage or facility-wide outages.
• Transformer Testing: Transformers are the backbone of any power system. Regular turns ratio, insulation resistance, and winding resistance testing will ensure your industrial power system operates properly. 
• Relay Testing: Relays serve as the ‘brains’ of an electrical system, detecting faults to protect valuable equipment. Testing and inspecting these relays via ground-fault testing, current- and potential-transformer verification, and end-to-end testing ensures they operate properly.
• Substation Testing: Substations manage, transform, and deliver power throughout industrial power systems. Ground resistance testing and infrared scanning ensure that these critical components stay in proper working order. 
  

Who Is Typically Responsible for Industrial Power System Maintenance?

 Responsibility for electrical maintenance often falls across multiple roles, including facility managers, operations teams, and environmental health and safety (EHS) personnel. While day-to-day monitoring may be handled internally, specialized inspection, testing, and documentation are commonly outsourced. 

Blue Runner Switchgear is here to fill those gaps. We are an NETA-certified providers to ensure objectivity, compliance, and technical accuracy. For many facilities, maintenance decisions are driven by a combination of reliability goals, safety requirements, regulatory obligations, and insurance expectations—making our certified testing an essential part of long-term planning rather than a discretionary expense.

NETA Certified Electrical Maintenance from Blue Runner Switchgear

Blue Runner Switchgear has been providing NETA-certified electrical maintenance for over twenty-five years. We offer a complete range of testing services to help you maintain your industrial power system. For more information about our maintenance services, or to set up a maintenance program for your industrial power system, contact us, visit our website, or give us a call to schedule your free consultation.