Yearly maintenance will benefit your generator by routinely running the system, checking for proper operation, and identifying potential issues like worn belts and hoses.
During a typical routine inspection and evaluation of your generator equipment, the prudent maintenance technician will often make recommendations to update or replace various components. All of this is in an effort to ensure the generator will run properly when needed.
For instance, the starting battery could be more than 4 years old. Although it might work well during the inspection and test run, conventional wisdom would dictate that a battery this old could fail at any time and without notice. The recommendation to replace it now is not an opportunity to up-sell a customer, but more likely the sound advice of a service provider that is looking out for your business. After all, isn’t that why you are paying for professional maintenance and service in the first place – to ensure the safe and reliable operation of your generator equipment?
A dead battery could be more than an inconvenience as it does more than simply start the generator. Today’s generators are complete electrical systems designed to run efficiently and with precision. To do this they require
computer electronics and circuit boards. These circuit boards must be kept ‘alive’ with a constant power supply. Loss of power to these boards for an extended period of time will result in permanent damage and could require replacement.
Take for example a brand new school that was built less than six years ago. Proper thought was put into the building design to include the installation of an emergency generator system for peace-of-mind insurance in the event of a power failure. Unfortunately, no provision was made for routine maintenance and inspection of this back-up system and the overlooked batteries eventually failed. The dead batteries consequently caused the control panel boards to lose all pre-programmed memory and they also needed to be replaced. To make matters worse, often multiple boards are involved in these failures, and in these cases, the only way to find the faulty board is to replace them, board after board.
Be aware that an automatic battery charging system will keep a good battery charged for an extended time, but only to a point. Eventually the battery cells will deteriorate to where they will no longer take a charge. This is what happened in this example. A battery approaching 4 years old is certainly reaching the end of its working lifespan and should be replaced.
For the price of routine inspection and the cost of a battery this facility could have saved over a thousand dollars, the cost of replacing the failed circuit boards.
