It’s hard to beat years of experience. Wisdom, patience, understanding, and insight are just a few of the qualities that come with it. Companies that shed older, higher-paid workers nearly always shoot themselves in the foot for this reason. This, of course, makes no sense.
Yet these same companies will hang on to old, outdated equipment as if that somehow makes sense. Some equipment just needs to be replaced after so many years. Period. We can't know all the variables about condition, but we can know when something's been in service well past the time the plant or company got its money's worth out of the purchase.
You can replace connections, rebuild breakers, and do other things to extend the life of equipment. There’s a realistic limit to how long that extension can be. And then there are all the things we don’t or can’t do to keep equipment in new condition. So after 30 years, that switchgear or transformer may actually be a time bomb.
Assess the ages of in-service equipment and develop a plan for catastrophe-preventive replacement.
