Are you protected…?

(Video Transcript)

Hi everyone. I’m Nancy Regan. And in this video, we’re going to talk about what a Protective Device is, why Protective Devices are so important, and how to properly take care of them.

A Protective Device is a device or system that is intended to keep us safe or otherwise protect us from other consequences in the event that something else goes wrong.

Now, a common Protective Device is a fire alarm system. And behind me, you see part of our fire alarm system in this building. It is the emergency exit light and the emergency egress lighting that is intended to illuminate when the fire alarm system is activated.

Well, this year when the Bureau of Fire Prevention came to our building to do their yearly inspection, they found that these lights were not working.

In the context of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), that’s called a Failure Finding task. See, to properly care for our Protective Devices, from time to time, we have to go in and test them to see if they’re in a failed state

That’s called a Default Strategy. It’s not Proactive Maintenance because we’re not proactively stopping it from failing. We’re going in to look to see if it is in a failed state.

So when we failed our inspection, we were alerted to the fact that it was failed and we were able to get it fixed. When it comes to our Protective Devices, how often we inspect them depends on a few things. Namely how reliable the system is to begin with, and the kind of risk we’re willing to accept that the Multiple Failure would occur.

In this case, the Multiple Failure would be a fire in the building and the emergency egress lighting doesn’t work. And Reliability Centered Maintenance gives us very powerful tools for determining how often we should check them

So there you have it, Protective Devices are very often our last line of defense when things go wrong. So we have to make sure that we check them often enough so that we get the kind of availability that we need from them.

And Reliability Centered Maintenance gives us very powerful tools for figuring out exactly that. I’m Nancy Regan. Thank you for watching.