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What To Do If The Fire Marshal Visits Some Facilities Managers have been lucky enough to have never experienced a surprise inspection. But the odds aren’t always on your side: code regulations in the San Francisco Bay Area allow the fire marshal to perform a drop-in inspection every year. Is your business ready for a surprise inspection? And what happens

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What Facility Managers Need To Know About Fire Pump Engine Maintenance The fire sprinkler system protecting your property is one of the most critical safety features of your building. Most facilities managers know that fire protection is required by most building codes and must pass city or county inspection before a building can be occupied. However, there is one piece

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NFPA 110 Compliance: Your Check-Up List With a new year upon us, most facilities managers are going to test their critical systems to make sure they’re up to operational standards. But your emergency power system (EPS) has a whole other test it needs to pass: one with legal ramifications to your business. Each year, the fire marshal schedules a visit

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Annual Maintenance Requirements For Your Commercial Generator It’s a new year, which means new budgets for Facilities Engineers and Property Managers. It’s also the season for new regulations to kick in, and to revisit the maintenance tasks you deferred throughout the year. This means it’s time to take another look at your commercial generator and make sure you’ve addressed the

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Insulation Resistance Testing: How To Prevent Catastrophe In Your Emergency Power System Insulation Resistance Testing: How To Prevent Catastrophe In Your Emergency Power System Insulation resistance testing is one of the most misunderstood elements in commercial generator maintenance. Why? Blame it on that old saying, “out of sight, out of mind.” If the winding on the insulation is worn or

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The Five Questions You Must Answer To Ensure NFPA 110 Compliance Planned maintenance is a critical part of any backup power system. Regular verification that an installed system is functional is necessary to ensure that standby power will be available when primary power is lost.  NFPA 110 requires that the Emergency Power Supply System (EPSS), including components like generator sets,

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The last thing a property owner or manager wants is an empty building. A commercial building without tenants is no longer generating revenue, but still incurring most of the costs associated with ownership: loan payments, taxes, insurance, utilities, and maintenance costs. This is not an ideal situation.

Don’t Ignore These 2 to 5-Year Generator Maintenance Events Don’t Ignore These 2 to 5-Year Generator Maintenance Events Properly maintained, your standby generator should last from 10,000 to 30,000 hours. But what if your generator is only running 50 hours or less a year? Will it last for 20 years, 30 years or more, even if it’s not running regularly?

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Annual Load Bank Testing Could Be The Most Critical Maintenance For Your Generator There’s a saying in the generator servicing business that goes like this: the best generator is the one you never use. In other words, a generator is the kind of asset you’re required to have but hope you never need.  This saying underlies a potentially costly and

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Generator Maintenance on a Budget: How to Downsize the Smart Way We once received a call from a company that had just purchased a commercial building with a large 1500KW generator in the basement. The generator seemed to be working fine during some initial tests, but then suddenly shut off. They couldn’t figure out why. We sent out a technician,

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