Electrical Troubleshooting Quiz — December 2, 2025

You are the work analyst for a 45-person maintenance department at a manufacturing plant. One of your jobs is to review work requests and create a proper work order as needed. An operations supervisor, who is responsible for a high revenue production line, submitted a work request to bypass a specific “nuisance e-Stop.”

In the comments field of the work request, the supervisor noted this switch frequently interrupts production and several orders have shipped late. He noted that he fixed this previously with a bypass jumper, but the maintenance people keep removing it. He suggested that if the maintenance department is low on jumpers, they should order their own and quit stealing from production.

How should you write up the work order?

Answer to Quiz

One thing you absolutely cannot do is wire a bypass onto an e-Stop. Nor can you cover it or disable it in any way. There are multiple reasons for this prohibition, including the fact that an employee might attempt to use that switch to prevent another employee from losing an arm.

What about replacing that switch? e-Stops don’t go bad and then sporadically open on their own. Nor do they wear out and “go soft.” They are good for 100,000 cycles. If an operator pressed it twice a day, every day of the year, yes it would eventually wear out. After 1,370 years. This switch is not that old.

Keep in mind it is not a momentary contact switch. When it’s depressed, it stays depressed until reset. It is hard to imagine how a switch can depress itself. For these types of switches, a small mechanical distance must be covered to move it to the locked-out position. Which raises the question, “Is this actually an e-Stop or some other kind of switch?” If it’s being used as an e-Stop, ensure that’s what it is. If it’s not, then replace it with an e-Stop.

If it is an e-Stop, you will need to prove the switch works and is properly connected. So write the work order for that and nothing else. If you can slap the mushroom and open the switch, then release the mechanism and close the switch, you have a good switch. Verify that the connections to it are secure. Then you will have eliminated the switch itself as being the source of the shutdowns.

Perhaps that e-Stop is located such that operators inadvertently bump it hard with a hip. Maybe it’s not needed in that location due to a configuration change. But the maintenance department can’t simply move or remove the switch. Such a decision needs to be made by the systems engineer who is responsible for that line. But this is not the person you bring this issue to. After proving the switch works, you should escalate this issue to the plant engineer. Why the escalation? Any supervisor who would take it upon himself to bypass this safety device is a danger to the people under his supervision. It may take someone at the level of the plant engineer to address that issue within the company.

On a related note, any time a maintenance person discovers any tampering with an e-Stop that individual is (by most company policies) automatically granted permission to shut down the line and restore the functionality. Your maintenance people seem to be aware of this fact, which is good.

A plant in central Tennessee had repeated issues with this kind of tampering, and woman eventually got her head caught in the machine and lost three fingers in addition to sustaining a serious injury to her neck. The e-Stop was easily within reach for her, but it had been disabled. Maintenance electricians had removed a jumper multiple times and reported the incident to the production supervisor, but nothing was done. No training session, no cameras, no additional supervision. In hindsight, it was determined that the switch, which had exposed contacts on the back, should have been replaced with a tamperproof one. Too late for the injured woman.