It is more important than ever that essential services, such as our hospitals, can rely on a consistent and uninterrupted power source. Maintenance work continues across the country and our UPS engineers recently completed battery and UPS replacements at a private hospital in the North Island.
As a new site for UPS Power Solutions, our team conducted an initial audit of the hospital’s back-up power equipment in December 2019. Visiting to carry-out the work was a very different proposition with the Covid-19 outbreak occurring in March 2020.
In the event of an emergency, all private hospitals can be acquisitioned by the local District Health Board to increase capacity and better serve the local community. As a consequence, the Hospital needed to ensure that the UPS and battery systems protecting its two operating theatres and clinical equipment were reliably functioning.
Our engineering team identified that the UPS system serving one operating theatre was nearing its end-of-life and in need of replacement. The other operating theatre had well-functioning UPSs but load-bank testing had shown that some of the batteries had begun to fail says Sam Lingman, UPS Power Solution’s senior UPS engineer.
“We needed to complete the appropriate paperwork, certifying that the work we were doing fell under the essential works category. We then ensured that our team had the necessary PPE equipment before travelling to the location in separate vehicles,” he says.
These extra steps are crucial in safeguarding the health of the engineers on site and the hospital’s patients and staff. UPS Power Solutions has established a robust strategy for completing essential work during Alert Level 4 and in many cases the need for rapid deployment of new equipment is more necessary than ever.
UPS Engineers Matt Byrne and Josh Hall installed two 40 kVA Eaton 9355 UPSs and CSB long-life batteries at the hospital and found that additional PPE equipment and checks required to conduct the work didn’t impact their work process too much.
“Though there were a few extra steps and considerations, it was good to know that we’re helping essential services to function no matter what happens with the hospital’s power. The healthcare sector needs to have confidence that their facilities and equipment will keep working during power cuts and surges so being on the front line to deliver this is rewarding for our whole team,” says Lingman.
