Five Tips for Electric Room Safety

Date Posted: Oct 17, 2019

This article from the September/October GRAIN JOURNAL is taken from an Interstates Blog on Five Useful Steps to Improve Electric Room Safety.

Is your electric room safe? If you haven’t maintained it and don’t know where to start, check out these five simple tips to improve safety.

Tip 1 – Keep Your Electric Room Clean

• Sweep the floor.

• Remove trash.

• Remove unused equipment.

•Remove non-electrical system equipment.

• Replace light fixture bulbs.

• Seal the room from dust.

Tip 2 – Annual and Preventive Maintenance

• Tighten connections.

• Cycle the breakers.

• Verify all fuses are a matching set.

• Review settings in equipment to match the last coordination/arc flash study that was performed.

• Ask your local electrical supply house to generate a list of spare parts.

• Install spare parts shelving.

• Pressurize the room.

Tip 3 – Proper Signage and Equipment

• Install proper safety signage.

• Ensure PPE and lockout/tagout equipment is readily available.

• Ensure all guards and covers are installed.

• Plug unused holes in equipment.

• Properly secure all enclosures and raceways.

• Install panic hardware on doors and have them swing out of the room.

• Install insulating mats for working clearance issues.

Tip 4 – Proper Documentation

• Redline drawings to match equipment.

• Post base documentation and charts in either paper, poster, or iPad format.

• Create a directory for each motor and its locations in the electric room to facilitate lockout/tagout.

Tip 5 – Label Equipment to Match Documentation

• Switchboards.

• MCCs.

• Panelboards.