How to Evaluate Your Need for Electric Motor Field Service, Part 1 – Understand What Work is Covered - HECO

January 25, 2023

When you don’t have the internal staff or expertise needed to handle on-site troubleshooting and inspecting, electric motor field service can provide on-site solutions.

Has one of your motors gone down and you need help ASAP? Do you have planned maintenance coming up that you would like professional help with? Either way, field service might be the answer to your problem. To determine if field service is right for your electric motor systems, HECO suggests beginning by considering why you might need it and what work is typically included.

Situational Needs & Goals

A host of things can lead you to search for a reliable company and experienced field service for the motors, pumps, and rotating equipment your facility depends on.

You may have heard a loud pop from a motor winding, noticed a bearing is way over-temperature, or experienced a catastrophic motor failure that’s brought your electric motor powertrain to a grinding halt.

Maybe you planned for maintenance that your staff just can’t handle right now or need to pull a motor and install a replacement that your team doesn’t have the experience to handle safely and quickly.

Problem-Solving Potential

With field service, the motor repair and maintenance experts come to you. Technicians can address critical areas and solve numerous problems on-site.
The benefits of field service include:

Helping you recover from a breakdown.
Identifying when a breakdown is impending.
Performing preventative maintenance to avoid a breakdown.

Typical Maintenance Tasks

Perhaps you don’t have the staff or time to perform the routine maintenance that is needed to keep your motors, pumps, and rotating equipment running safely and efficiently. Or maybe you’d like to proactively schedule the maintenance you know your motors need.

On-site motor inspections and preventative maintenance offer a number of services and benefits. These most often include:

24-hour emergency service.
Motor and pump removal, repair, and reinstallation.
Troubleshooting.
Electric motor testing such as PdMA or Baker.
Motor alignments.
Dry ice cleaning.
Brush maintenance.
Motor and pump condition inspections.
Lubrication and greasing programs.
Inventory with audits and surveying.
Bearing changes.
Babbitt bearing inspections and repairs.
Motor controls testing and troubleshooting.

Emergency Repairs

Motors, pumps, and other rotating equipment are eventually going to have issues. When that happens, you need emergency repairs.

On-site emergency repairs typically include:

Troubleshooting your motors, pumps, and rotating equipment electrically and mechanically.
Gathering emergency vibration data.
Tracking down the cause of failure.
Recommending a cause-based course of action.
Performing necessary repairs with validation testing.

Most motor repair professionals offer 24/7 emergency repair service and do their best to arrive at your site as soon as possible.

Arrival and repair times may depend on:

The time of contact.
Distance from your site to the repair facility.
Field service technician availability.
Access to on-site repair equipment.

Scheduled Downtime and Turnkey Services

Beyond preventative maintenance, scheduled downtime can also apply to planned repairs, retrofits, rebuilds, and installations.

Some rotating equipment repair shops also offer turnkey services, including:

Pulling a motor or pump for you.
Performing necessary repairs or helping you locate a replacement or retrofit.
Installing the repaired, replacement, or retrofit motor or pump.

If you can find a vendor that performs one of these turnkey services without treating each as a separate service call, all the better.

All Systems Go

HECO technicians have the experience and expertise to identify the root causes of motor failure and can provide the preventive maintenance required to lower failure rates and maintenance costs.

For more information about typical work included in field service, download the Electric Motor Field Service: Is It Right For Your Facility e-book.

The How to Evaluate Your Need for Electric Motor Field Service blog series will continue with Part 2 – Consider Provider Methodology.

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Posted in Field Service