NFPA 70B shifted from “recommended practice” to a mandatory electrical maintenance standard, requiring thermographic inspections for all electrical equipment and even more frequent scans for “Condition 3” assets. Annual IR scans only validate your system for a single day, leaving a 364‑day window where loose connections, thermal runaways, or phase imbalance can develop unnoticed. Manual inspection also forces technicians into energized gear and arc‑flash zones, demands >40% load at the time of the scan, and often requires costly shutdowns or IR window installations that still don’t provide real‑time visibility.
Manual IR scanning happens once or twice a year. What happens between those days is a liability
If you don't have IR windows in your equipment your shutting down to perform testing leading to downtime
If the system is not at greater than 40% load or lacks direct line‑of‑sight, the inspection may not even count toward compliance.
You are on the hook for paying for this testing into perpetuity.
By replacing recurring manual IR scans with automated SwitchMon monitoring, most facilities can convert a recurring 5k–20k annual Opex line item into a one‑time Capex project with minimal ongoing support costs. Catching just one impending failure before it cascades into an outage can avoid hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime, equipment, and lost‑production impacts – while improving uptime reliability and limiting risk by having a constant handle on your operating conditions.
Consistently monitors phase‑to‑phase and ambient ΔT every minute, with notifications on abnormal temperature rise situations as well as thermal runaway, while providing a defensible record for NFPA 70B inspections, audit responses, and insurance reviews.
Multiple thermography sensors fit your need, let you right‑size coverage and resolution per asset criticality. A simple 'single cable to each sensor supplies data and power making installation quick and simple. Additionally other sensors can be added such as temperature, humidity, particle matter, optical dust particle, atmospheric corrosion, water detection, shock/vibration, and more.
Patented IR window mounting sensors retrofit onto existing windows; no outage, no re‑engineering. For equipment without IR windows, internal sensors can be installed once, and allow zero-downtime, continuous scanning after easy installation.
SwitchMon° can easily run on its own through a easy to use interface allow ∆T to be monitored and alarms setup to alert of abnormal conditions. APT also supports connecting SwitchMon° with Schneider PME, your SCADA system, or any other Energy System to allow data to be stored for compliance and auditing as well as long-term reporting.
Prefer to talk now? Call APT at (408) 342‑0790 or email sales@apt4power.com to discuss how SwitchMon® can lighten your worries about NFPA 70B compliance!
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