Preventative Maintenance:
Everything You Need to Know

Preventative Maintenance Defined

At Rasmussen Mechanical Services, the question of “What is preventative maintenance?”, and more importantly, Why is preventative maintenance critical?” often pops up.

Preventative maintenance is proactively planned maintenance based on the general lifespan of your equipment. The goal of this preventative maintenance is to eliminate issues before they emerge. By doing so, your facility can keep your mechanical equipment running efficiently, reduce the amount of unscheduled downtime, and cut out the expensive costs of last-minute repairs, which are often associated with reactive maintenance.

Point being: Preventative maintenance is an essential part of your overall maintenance plan to keep your facility’s mechanical systems operational and efficient.

Preventative Maintenance Quiz:

In addition to saving you money, preventative maintenance will ultimately reduce stress on you and your company. See how you could be saving by taking this short quiz.

Other Types of Maintenance

  • Predictive Maintenance: Similar to preventative maintenance, predictive maintenance, attempts to identify when a system is close to failure. Instead of looking at the lifespan of a system as preventative maintenance often does, predictive maintenance looks at how the equipment is operating to predict failure.
  • Conditional Maintenance: Reactive maintenance refers to dependent maintenance. Maintenance is typically performed retroactively after a problem has come to the surface.
  • Combination Maintenance: Using a combination of all three types of maintenance – preventative, predictive (when possible), and conditional (when necessary) – is often the best choice for your facility.

The Crucial Impact of Preventative Maintenance

From saving on expenses to extending the longevity of your equipment, the crucial impact preventative maintenance can have on your facility’s equipment is noteworthy. Dive deep into the benefits of a preventative maintenance strategy.

  • Efficiency – Scheduling routine maintenance such as general inspections, oil, and fluid changes, or part replacements will keep your equipment running flawlessly.
  • Cost Reduction – A proactive strategy eliminates most issues before they emerge, which results in long term equipment reliability at a drastically decreased price.
  • Reliability – Keeping things maintained regularly to ensure you deliver a consistent product.
  • Conservation – Equipment treated with routine maintenance will have a longer service life and will provide increased profit.

Create A Preventative Maintenance Plan

To stay ahead of mechanical failures, repairs, or lengthy maintenance projects, you should come up with a preventative maintenance program to keep your facility up-to-date.

  • Get Your Team On Board: One of the first steps to building your preventative maintenance program is getting your team on board. If you don’t have their buy-in, the plan will not be successful. However, when your team is aligned, maintenance issues will be handled more efficiently – saving your company time, money, and resources. Review your preventative maintenance program thoroughly with your team to ensure they understand how to use it and how it will benefit the facility.
  • Determine Potential Issues: Next, figure out what areas will require scheduled attention. Start by evaluating the performance of larger, more expensive systems within your facility. Currently, are there any problems you know of that need to be addressed? Can you make any logical assumptions of issues which will appear soon? Be sure to tackle those items in your preventative maintenance strategy.
  • Plan Your Schedule: From the last step, plan everything from routine maintenance to upgrades into your calendar for the upcoming year. Be sure to take your facility’s uses and occupants into account as you schedule out loud or invasive tasks. For example, equipment upgrades in an educational facility are better planned into lengthy breaks to avoid stirring dust in the air and disruptions to the learning environment. Similarly, HVAC tune-ups for a healthcare facility are best made at night when occupants are at the lowest level.

Maintenance Quick Tip:

Here are a few questions you must ask when dealing with your mechanical services provider.

Preventative Maintenance by the Seasons

The most common method of preventative maintenance is maintenance by the season. Seasonal maintenance is often considered less rigorous than others, yet covers the bases to keep your facility up-and-running. To help you get started on this preventative maintenance method, we’ve provided maintenance tasks to complete as the season’s change.

Download our checklist to start evaluating your equipment seasonally and ensure your facility is running as efficiently as possible.

The Breakdown: Preventative Maintenance by Mechanical System and Industry

Preventative maintenance spans across many industries and mechanical systems. Check out a variety of articles and resources in the verticals we service: