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Electrical Troubleshooting Quiz - June 20, 2017

June 20, 2017
Find out why cable failures are persisting in your plant.

Despite a fairly robust insulation resistance testing program for feeder cables, the plant has experienced several unscheduled shutdowns that resulted from cable failure. Initially, the failed cables were outside the testing program. But as more cables were added to the schedule in response to this now all feeder cables and many important branch circuit cables are now in the program. And several of those have failed.

The failures were attributed to power events occurring between testing cycles. Consequently, a surge protection system was installed at the service. And yet, the failures continued.

The surge protection was upgraded to a multi-tiered system that is distributed throughout the plant to also protect against load-generated power events. Cable failures persist. What is wrong?

No single test can tell you the condition of a given cable; expand your testing program to include a battery of tests. Exactly which tests depends on many factors. Hire an electrical testing firm that has industry-recognized qualifications to advise what’s needed; there’s already been too much guesswork.

Adding cables to your testing program is good, but the problem is you are doing that without baseline data. The cables that were added late in the game might have already been failures waiting to happen.

Protecting against power events was a smart move, but cables fail for other reasons too. So look further in that direction.

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