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The short version: “Energy management software” is not one category, and the biggest mistake industrial buyers make is comparing tools that solve different problems. The right choice depends on the job you are actually trying to do. For electrical power system operations at a power-intensive plant, ETAP is the deepest option, since it ties energy The post Best Energy Management Software for Industrial Facilities appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: Choosing a rugged device for a maintenance and reliability team is a fit decision, not a horse race. The right device depends on where the work happens and what the technician does with it. For teams that scan assets and parts and want a choice of Android or Windows, the Zebra ET60/ET65 The post Best Rugged Tablets and Handhelds for Industrial Maintenance appeared first on Reliable.

Capacitors are devices commonly found in AC electrical distribution systems where power factor correction is required. Like any electrical component, capacitors need to be regularly checked for proper operation.

The post Chemical Plant Walking Surfaces: The Hazard That Hides in Plain Sight appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: The widely cited deferred maintenance backlog figures come from federal watchdog reporting and one higher-education benchmarking dataset. GAO reported that federal building deferred maintenance and repair backlogs (Department of Defense plus civilian agencies) more than doubled from $171 billion to $370 billion between FY2017 and FY2024. DoD alone reported a $181.1 billion The post Deferred Maintenance Backlog Statistics: Federal and Higher-Ed Data appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: There is no universal horsepower at which a failed motor stops being worth repairing. The number most plants are looking for is a calculated output, not a published constant: DOE and Advanced Energy both frame it as a horsepower breakpoint derived from your electric rate, annual run hours, payback requirement, motor load, The post Motor Repair vs. Replace: Horsepower Breakpoints and Decision Factors appeared first on Reliable.

Search “reactive maintenance cost” and you’ll hit the same sentence over and over. Reactive maintenance costs three to five times more than preventive maintenance, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. It shows up in CMMS marketing, consulting decks, conference slides, and trade articles. The attribution is always the same and always vague: the DOE. The post Reactive Maintenance Costs 3 to 5x More: Tracing the DOE Claim appeared first on Reliable.

Turn your Android smartphone into a compact thermal imaging camera. Discover the NEW FOTRIC TP320A for home inspection, electrical troubleshooting, HVAC diagnostics, and everyday exploration.

Editor’s note: The API inspection standards are revised on multi-year cycles, with periodic addenda and errata, and specific provisions can change between editions. The governing edition for any given asset is the one adopted by your jurisdiction and written into your owner-user inspection program. Editions, addenda, and errata are updated on independent schedules; verify the The post API 510, 570, and 653 Inspection Intervals: Vessels, Piping, and Tanks appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: Three staffing ratios circulate constantly in maintenance justification decks, and they are not equally well-founded. The planner-to-technician ratio, commonly cited as one planner per 20 to 30 technicians, is the best-documented rule of thumb in the field, traceable to Doc Palmer’s Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook and stated with specific assumptions. The The post Maintenance Staffing Ratios: Planner, Supervisor, and Technician Benchmarks appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: Plant Engineering’s recurring maintenance surveys, produced with sponsorship from Advanced Technology Services (ATS), are one of the most consistent publicly available benchmarks for how plants manage maintenance. Across directly comparable editions from 2016 through 2020, roughly 45 to 55 percent of respondents reported using in-house spreadsheets or schedules, roughly 39 to 46 The post CMMS Adoption Statistics: What Plant Surveys Actually Show appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: OSHA’s Lockout/Tagout standard, 29 CFR 1910.147, requires employers to control hazardous energy during servicing and maintenance so that machines cannot unexpectedly start up, energize, or release stored energy while a worker is exposed. The core of the standard is paragraph (c), the energy control program: documented energy control procedures, employee training, and The post Lockout/Tagout Reference: 29 CFR 1910.147 and Its Most-Cited Provisions appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: This is a reference for the core maintenance and reliability KPIs: what each one measures, how it is calculated, and where it sits in two major maintenance KPI references, SMRP’s five-pillar metrics set and the European standard EN 15341:2019+A1:2022. On benchmarks, we take a deliberately conservative line. Many “world-class” target numbers circulate The post Maintenance and Reliability KPI Reference: Formulas, Benchmarks, Standards appeared first on Reliable.

Editor’s note: NFPA 70B is revised on a multi-year cycle. The 2023 edition made the pivotal change described here, from recommended practice to standard. The 2026 edition has since superseded it and is the current version. Which edition applies to a given facility depends on what that facility’s authority having jurisdiction, contract, or insurer references, The post NFPA 70B Compliance: What Changed and When It Actually Applies appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: Much of the commonly cited equipment breakdown loss data comes from the insurers who sell the coverage, chiefly FM (through its Boiler Re reinsurance arm) and Hartford Steam Boiler. FM’s current figures put electrical breakdown as the most frequent cause of loss at 52 percent of claims, mechanical second at 36 percent, The post Equipment Breakdown Insurance Loss Statistics: Causes and Cost Shares appeared first on Reliable.

Sixteen thermographers successfully completed Infraspection Institute's Level I Certified Infrared Thermographer training course held last week at Mercer County College.

The post Why Reliability Leaders Never Get the Budget They Want appeared first on Reliable.

The post Conferences Are Investments, Not Field Trips appeared first on Reliable.

The benefits of thermography for condition assessment of insulated roofs are well documented. Performed on a regular basis, infrared thermography can help to extend the overall life of a roofing system when utilized as part of a preventive maintenance program.

FOTRIC launches the TF3 Thermal Imaging Camera, featuring true 320 × 240 resolution, a ceramic-packaged infrared detector, and intuitive performance for reliable everyday thermal inspections.

The post Why Maintenance Transformations Succeed or Fail: The Psychology of Change appeared first on Reliable.

Temperature can be an indicator of the condition of installed electric motors; however, the best location for measuring temperature is often debated. In this Tip we discuss the best location for measuring motor temperatures.

The post The Aging Transformer Fleet: What the 40-Year Claim Really Says appeared first on Reliable.

The post Turnaround Cost Overrun Statistics: Tracing the 80% Claim appeared first on Reliable.

The post Does 80% of Downtime Come From 20% of Assets? Tracing the Claim appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: We could not locate any government agency or standards body that publishes MRO storeroom inventory as a dedicated benchmark category, so the statistics that circulate in this space come from vendor surveys, consultant estimates, and a handful of peer-reviewed studies conducted in retail rather than industrial settings. The best-documented figures: a 2025 The post MRO and Spare Parts Inventory Statistics: Stockouts, Accuracy, Costs appeared first on Reliable.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “You can’t see the forest because of all the trees.” Sometimes thermographers can’t see visible discrepancies for the thermal imagery.

TL;DR: No single database counts every arc flash incident in the United States. The most rigorous compilation to date, a Johns Hopkins University analysis of OSHA and NIOSH investigation reports, identified 1,291 arc flash incident reports covering 1,823 injuries and 277 fatalities from the early 1980s through 2022, and estimated that OSHA and NIOSH investigation The post Arc Flash Statistics: Incident Frequency, Injury Data, and Costs appeared first on Reliable.

Last updated: July 2026 | By the editors at Reliable TL;DR: Heat exchanger fouling is one of the most expensive chronic problems in industry, with total cost penalties estimated at roughly 0.25 percent of the GDP of industrialized countries. The figure is based on national studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s and is repeated The post Heat Exchanger Fouling: Energy Penalty and Cost Statistics appeared first on Reliable.

Electric motors drive somewhere around two-thirds of the electricity used in industrial plants. When one fails without warning, you lose production, you scramble for a spare, and somebody spends the next morning explaining what happened. Most of those failures are preventable. The data on why motors fail has been stable for decades, and it points The post Preventive Maintenance for Electric Motors: What Actually Works appeared first on Reliable.

TL;DR Compressed air leaks waste 20 to 30 percent of a compressor’s output in a poorly maintained plant, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. A well-maintained system holds leakage below 10 percent. Compressed air accounts for about 10 percent of all electricity used in U.S. manufacturing, roughly 91,000 GWh per year in the DOE’s The post Compressed Air Leak and Energy Waste Statistics: What the DOE Data Says appeared first on Reliable.

TL;DR: The major public motor reliability surveys most often cited since the early 1980s reach the same ranked order: bearings fail most, windings second, rotors a distant third. The percentages differ by study because the studies measured different motor populations. The EPRI utility study found bearings at 41 percent and stator windings at 36 percent. The post Electric Motor Failure Statistics: Causes, Failure Rates, and Survey Data appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: Centrifugal pumps in U.S. refineries and petrochemical plants typically achieve a mean time between failures (MTBF) of roughly 3 to 10 years, according to reliability data compiled by the late Heinz Bloch. Mechanical seals are the component most often recorded in pump failures: a European Sealing Association dataset of 3,500 failures across The post Pump Reliability and MTBF Statistics: Benchmarks, Failure Data, and Costs appeared first on Reliable.

The post How to Kill a Bad PM Without Getting Blamed for the Next Failure appeared first on Reliable.

A marine survey is a formal, credentialed examination of a vessel conducted by a certified or accredited marine surveyor. It is performed for defined professional purposes including prepurchase assessment, insurance underwriting, valuation, damage or casualty investigation, and warranty or legal dispute resolution.

The post How a Neglected MRO Storeroom Drains Reliability One Part at a Time appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: Several of OSHA’s ten most-cited standards are maintenance-relevant, and the clearest one is Lockout/Tagout (Control of Hazardous Energy), which exists specifically to protect workers during servicing and maintenance. It ranked 4th in fiscal year 2025 with 2,562 citations. Machine guarding (often tied to guards removed for servicing and not restored) and powered The post OSHA’s Most-Cited Maintenance-Related Violations appeared first on Reliable.

With Summer upon us, many will return to outdoor cooking on a regular basis. In this Tip we offer important safety considerations for all outdoor chefs.

The post Prescriptive Maintenance: What’s Real and What’s Marketing appeared first on Reliable.

The post Reliability Engineer Salary: Which Number Should You Trust appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: The most-cited figure, from the NACE International IMPACT study (2016), puts the global cost of corrosion at US$2.5 trillion a year, about 3.4% of global GDP. The most comprehensive U.S. study, conducted for the Federal Highway Administration and published in 2002, estimated direct corrosion costs at $276 billion a year, about 3.1% The post The Cost of Corrosion: Industrial Statistics, Global and U.S. Figures appeared first on Reliable.

The short version: In steam systems left unmaintained for three to five years, the U.S. Department of Energy reports that 15–30% of installed steam traps may have failed. In a system under a regular maintenance program, the DOE says leaking traps should stay below 5% of the population. A single failed-open trap on a 150 The post Steam Trap Failure Rate Statistics: Benchmarks, Costs, and What the Data Shows appeared first on Reliable.

The post The Manufacturing Jobs Multiplier: Sorting Real From Hype appeared first on Reliable.

A pump fails. Production stops. Maintenance finds the damage, operations gets questioned and someone writes the conclusion: Root cause: operator should’ve known. Case closed in 30 seconds. Blaming the operator gives the report a clean ending. It also leaves the conditions that shaped the error sitting there, ready for the next shift. That’s one of The post Root Cause Analysis Mistakes: Why Blaming Operators Fails appeared first on Reliable.

The post The Real Cost of a Workplace Injury, and What It Measures appeared first on Reliable.

The post Do 70% of Digital Transformations Fail? Tracing the Number appeared first on Reliable.

The post AI in Manufacturing Adoption Rates: Deploying vs Piloting appeared first on Reliable.

The post Industrial Energy Waste from Poor Maintenance: A Breakdown appeared first on Reliable.

The post Manufacturing Maintenance Skills Gap Statistics: What Holds Up appeared first on Reliable.

Failures don’t wait for an opening on the calendar. A pump seizes, a gearbox grinds, a line drops, and the clock on lost production starts the same second. What the team does next decides whether that same failure comes back around next quarter. Strong root cause analysis meeting best practices for maintenance convert one breakdown The post Root Cause Analysis Meeting Best Practices for Maintenance Teams appeared first on Reliable.

The post Digital Transformation Must Connect Work, Not Reinforce Silos appeared first on Reliable.

Post processing of thermal images is a common practice for many thermographers. While image processing may provide a measure of convenience for some, it can have significant drawbacks.