Breaking Through the Breaker Negligence Barrier

Let’s start with a short quiz. Just answer true or false.

“A circuit breaker that isn’t nuisance tripping is working just fine.”

Probably 98% of electrical workers will answer "false" and 98% of non-electrical workers will answer "true." This creates some friction when a decision-maker is in that last 98% and the maintenance department wants to schedule a shutdown that includes testing of all the feeder breakers in the plant. Or when a maintenance planner is trying to schedule a time when an electrician can “exercise” all of the 20A molded case circuit breakers in all of the 120V panels in a building. Hey, if it aint broke don’t fix it!

You know that you don’t know if the breakers are working or not. They think they know that the breakers are working just fine because those breakers are not interrupting the power. You know the job of a breaker is to break the circuit in case of a fault. They think the job of a breaker is to stay closed unless it goes bad in which case it will open.

There’s no way of knowing if a breaker will open on fault or, if it does, open quickly enough to protect the circuit, without testing that breaker. This concept sometimes does not enter into the thinking of decision-makers, a problem that is common in older plants that have been bought by firms seeking to squeeze the last bit of life out of the equipment. This is what you have to overcome. If you’re lucky, you can overcome it by sharing some industry standards and references with them. If you’re typical, you’ll have to do more than that. Because mostly, they want to save money and there you are with yet another way to spend it.

Failing to test your service (e.g. main) breakers and feeder breakers is a great way to save money, especially if you would have been paying a qualified testing firm to perform the testing. In the case of small molded case breakers, the energy level is low enough that these usually just get exercised every X months and replaced every Y years; but even that seems excessive to the “save money at all costs” crowd. By skipping the testing and the scheduled replacements, you save money by also skipping the downtime. Until, oops, no idea why but half the plant caught on fire and it won’t be running again for at least three weeks.

Breaker testing (which should be done in conjunction with other infrastructure work such as cable testing) is cheap compared to the losses that are likely to occur when a breaker fails to clear a fault in time. It’s not just the cost of replacing melted feeder cables that is being risked. It’s also such things as the loss of life that could occur from this negligence, the civil lawsuits that such negligence makes possible to win, the loss of production time, and the loss of a customer or contract upon which meeting production goals was contingent.

Merely claiming those harms on a capital request while also disclosing the cost of testing and the need for a full day of downtime to perform it isn’t likely to win approval. Especially since that capital request should have verbiage identifying the possibility of needing another capital request and more downtime to replace cables and breakers.

The IEEE has a standard on the recommended testing for electrical infrastructure (IEEE 493-2007), plus other resources touching this topic. What if you quote those? They will help. Let’s look at how in just a moment.

If the company is hyper-focused on quarterly profits, the decision-makers prefer to defer. They don’t understand that deferred testing simply means hidden risk that doesn’t get addressed. They are, in a sense, setting up their own IEDs and hoping their Humvee zips past them all. “If things can just last until I get hired on at the next job, it’ll all work out.”

Your plant’s insurer doesn’t feel the same way. They actually want to mitigate risk, not gamble with it. Somewhere in the policy there should be verbiage that will force the issue in your favor. If you’re the plant electrical engineer, all you have to do is contact the insurer and say you’re trying to make sure the plant is complying with the insurer’s requirements regarding the electrical system. Ask that those be sent to you. Then repeat this process with the local fire marshal. Photocopy the relevant text, highlight the appropriate sections, then add those plus a list of the IEEE references (and relevant excerpts) to your capital request.

In your capital request, outline the testing that is to be done and state that per the insurer, the fire marshal, and industry standards it’s not optional. Refer to your attachments immediately after, for example “(see attached ABC document from our insurer ACME Insurance and attached requirements from the office of Roger G. Peabody III, Fire Marshal of Noflameshere, WI where the plant is located).”