COVER STORY
Reduce the cost of periodic inspection and testing with a proven healthcare monitoring system
Gareth Brunton, managing director of Bender UK, explains how the company’s residual current monitoring technology can reduce the need for shutdown and maximise the availability of healthcare facilities.
Electrical installations in UK medical facilities are subject to periodic inspection and testing as required under BS7671 Part 6. This can be costly and intrusive for large group two electrical installations serving critical care facilities or operating theatres. The switch off process can also be extremely difficult to schedule with the risk of unforeseen issues when the system is switched back on and returned to service. Maintenance teams must manage
this issue to complete testing and meet statutory requirements. Failure to do so can result in danger to personnel or patients, punitive action, unplanned outages, and ultimately system failure. The maintenance team are also
Gareth Brunton
Gareth Brunton has been managing director of Bender UK since May 2016. He joined the business as a commissioning engineer in 2004, and has held a succession of roles within the business. Gareth gained an electrical apprenticeship
with VSEL (now BAE Systems) and worked for both British Steel and Kimberly Clark, prior to joining Bender UK. He has a degree in electrical engineering and has been highly involved with the growth of Bender UK’s healthcare portfolio. Gareth has in-depth knowledge of the requirements for critical power systems and recognises the importance of having reliable and resilient safety systems in hospitals. He promotes the application of Bender technology and the benefits it delivers to new and existing customers who cannot afford the power to fail.
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responsible for the power to critical services and are required to deal with emerging maintenance issues and faults. Consideration should be given as to how new technologies can help them deliver the same solution and enable them to identify and action problems before they become critical. Bender has developed a system for
the continuous monitoring of the electrical infrastructure within healthcare facilities that can remove the requirement for the shutdown necessary to carry out statutory safety testing. It can also improve availability and provide early warning of developing issues to enable predictive and preventative maintenance. Residual current monitoring systems (RCMS) also continually monitor the integrity of the electrical system, providing early warning if a problem is detected. Most monitoring systems flag up
faults only down to the standard 30 mA required for personnel protection, but ultra sensitive RCMS are designed to identify faults down to 2 mA. This unique capability alerts maintenance teams at a much earlier stage in their development, giving time to plan an intervention and rectify the fault instead of having to react urgently when it becomes critical. The ability to predict faults and plan preventative maintenance means more effective use of resources and less downtime of vital high value facilities. A TN-S system is the most common type of earthed electrical system (in TN-S, the T stands for earth – the French ‘Terre’ – N for neutral and S denotes that the protective (earth) and neutral conductors are separate). An IT system has no active conductor that is
connected to earth. Due to the lack of a low impedance connection between the transformer star point and protective earth (PE), a high fault current does not flow when a first insulation fault occurs. Consequently, there are no shutdowns and a single fault will not automatically prevent the system from operating. However, it will trigger an alert to signal that a fault has occurred, giving early warning of an issue. In addition, when a first fault occurs within an IT system, hazardous fault currents cannot flow due to the lack of a low impedance connection between N and PE, and therefore, the risk of fire is significantly reduced. IT systems are typically installed only in critical locations such as group two medical locations. The remaining electrical installation across any facility will usually be an earthed TN-S system. Periodic inspection and testing
dictates that the integrity of the insulation must be verified. This cannot be done without interruption to the service. Equipment and/or protective devices must be disconnected prior to insulation resistance measurement because they may not be able to withstand the test voltage used. Often,
IFHE DIGEST 2018
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