We hear “Safety first” so much, we can mistakenly put safety activities in the wrong place in the work flow.
Let’s say you are performing the quarterly preventive maintenance procedure on an important motor. Among the tasks required are insulation resistance testing, motor lubrication, and measuring the motor starter contact resistance. You need to perform lockout/tagout for these tasks. Safety first, so you do that before doing anything else, right?
What happens next? You go to the shop and get a motor lube grease gun, and then lubricate the motor. Back to the shop for the IR tester. While the disconnect is still locked out, you measure the supply voltages. Then you continue on down through the procedure.
What’s wrong is that so many activities do not require the motor to be out of service. Before de-energizing, you should get your grease gun, IR tester, and anything else that you will need for performing the tasks that require de-energization. You want that “de-energized” window to be as small as practicable.
Ensure your PMs are organized around this principle. Split them into two sections (energized and de-energized) with all the prep for de-energized being in the energized portion. The energized work gets done before lockout/tagout, and cleanup gets done after power is restored.
