Aging Electrical Equipment

Mike Holt Enterprises Electrical News Source

I wanted to pass along to you information from reports written about aging electrical equipment. I hope you find it has value.

The Residential Electrical System Aging Research Project is a Fire Protection Research Foundation study published by UL. It is limited to aging electrical equipment in dwelling units and shows, in general, that the electrical system ages well. There were issues with the tripping of breakers that had been exposed to wet or damp locations where the trip mechanism had corroded to the point that the breaker did not trip. In some cases repeated manual operation restored the function. Click here or on the image to read the report.

The State of North Carolina has published a document on the Hidden Risks of Aging Electrical Systems. Page 7 of that report has a table from the IEEE Gold Book, (Recommended Practice for the Design of Reliable Industrial and Commercial Power Systems) that shows the typical electrical equipment life expectancies. Click here to read or download that PDF.

Consulting-Specifying Engineering magazine has a slightly different table as to the equipment life expectancy. Click here to access that online report.

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Comments

I recently retired after 50 years as a sparky in commercial work. I often recommended that buildings get their old switchgear and circuit breakers replaced. Always comes down to money and do not want to shut down. IR scans should be performed every year. At a large newspaper that I was working at years ago while they will still in great financial shape they would only let a company come in to perform IR scans starting at 6 AM Sunday morning when the energy management system had all the AC units shut down and no equipment running. I was the only person that told them they were doing it at the worst time. Yep can't fix stupidity.

Tom Garbo November 4 2020, 12:21 am EST
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This is an excellent presentation. All of the content is very applicable to the subject aging equipment. People should share this presentation with others.

Gabe Paoletti August 30 2019, 3:18 am EDT
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Very interesting as I have lived in Southeast Texas and was surprised when I moved here 4 years ago and found the Service breaker box located on the outside the home this is the norm not the exception. I have often wondered about the problems that could arise from the breakers being basically outside. Summer here is 80 percent humidity and 100 degree days.

Thomas Martin August 29 2019, 11:29 pm EDT
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Reply from: Tom Horne October 5 2019, 7:32 pm EDT
The Southern Building Code used to require that the Service Disconnecting Means be outside the building. I'm guessing that was to facilitate control of the electrical power by responding firefighters but I emphasize that it is literally a guess. It has been decades since I worked in the South doing disaster recovery rewiring of flooded homes through my church. I have no idea whether the Southern Building Code is still used or even still exists.

-- Tom Horne
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