Maximising your asset, minimising the cost

Standby generators are an essential piece of life-critical equipment in every hospital. While acknowledging, however, that the generators represent a large capital investment, and that maintaining them in reliable running order ‘represents a necessary, but significant expense’, Leigh Preece, service director of Power Electrics Generators – one of the UK’s leading names in the supply and maintenance of standby generation equipment – explains that there are ways for users both to amortise their outlay, and, in the process, to cut their overall electricity costs by 15-20%.

There are over 450 NHS Trusts in the UK, between them owning thousands of standby generators. Like many pieces of technical equipment, the tendency may be to only really become aware of them when something goes wrong. This does not happen often, but when a mains power failure occurs, and the standby generator fails to cut in quickly, lives can be put at risk. One of the common reasons for a failure is inadequate maintenance; after all, these are high capacity engineering components that very rarely have the chance to wear out. 

Hospitals generally have a good record of undertaking maintenance programmes. However, when a Trust puts a maintenance contract out to tender, the approaches taken by external maintenance providers can differ markedly. Some, for example, will replicate the manufacturer’s recommendations, others will follow HTM guidance – which is significantly more onerous – and others may well re-use a basic specification from a previous contract, which can sometimes be to a less than ideal standard. The latter approach can make tendering for a contract difficult for any company used to maintaining generators to a standard it believes to be safe.