As time passes, your chemical controls and onsite equipment can lose its effectiveness due to age or damage. Therefore, it’s essential to have a preventative maintenance schedule in place to ensure that your onsite chemicals remain controlled. Without the maintenance of your chemical controls, hazards can occur that may affect workers, property or the environment. To help you develop a preventative maintenance strategy, we’ll be highlighting some areas in your workplace that require inspections and audits, as well as a routine preventative maintenance to ensure health and safety.
Preventive maintenance refers to regular maintenance activities that can prevent any unexpected failures in equipment. Preventative maintenance may be performed on machinery, tools, equipment, chemical storage equipment, handling aids and other mechanisms to prevent any unexpected failures from occurring.
“A person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) must ensure that a system used at their workplace for the use, handling or storage of hazardous chemicals is used only for the purpose for which it was designed, manufactured, modified, installed or supplied.”
Safe Work Australia
Creating a preventative maintenance strategy is more than just planning on carrying out regular repair work. It’s about programming a series of regular site inspections and safety audits to assess the integrity of things like chemical containers, safety equipment and storage facilities, while ensuring everything is being used correctly.
Your preventative maintenance strategy may include a range of inspections and audits, as well as a plan for scheduled maintenance.
Your maintenance plan would include three different types of inspections:
At most basic level, ongoing inspections consist of spot-checks in work areas. They are normally part of a leading hand or supervisor’s daily responsibilities. Your preventative maintenance schedule might also include daily pre-shift inspections to ensure the operational integrity and safety of equipment before workers commence their shift (ie. is the ventilation system working correctly?)
When new equipment or machinery is introduced to the worksite, a handover inspection is required. Maybe you’ve installed a new flammable liquids store or decanting station, the handover inspection would ensure that there are no leaks and the equipment operates seamlessly (ie. are those self-closing doors closing automatically without jamming?).
Scheduled audits usually occur at programmed intervals. They can bey carried out by an appointed in-house team or by external safety auditors and professional consultants. This type of audit is more objective than daily inspections, which very often become a mere ‘tick-and-flick’ exercise if production is running behind schedule.
Most preventative maintenance plans have an Inspection Checklist prepared for each location on the job site. We’ve listed here some of the things to check in each of 3 common areas.
Check the walls of under-pallet bunds for cracks and any other wear and tear that could cause the bunding to fail.
For preventative maintenance with equipment for Gas 2 storage and handling, such as gas bottle cages, gas cylinder storage, gas bottle trolleys and racking, the first step is to check for any gas leakage.
You can check for visible signs of damage of leakage by being aware of any hissing sounds, strange odours or damaged gas cylinder mechanisms.
If a full cylinder is lighter than expected, this may also be a sign that it has been leaking gas.
For gas handling and storage equipment, we recommend that you:
Some general housekeeping checks for your gas storage equipment may include:
Gas stores must have safety straps that keep the cylinders secure during storage.
Why is preventive maintenance important in the laboratory?
Due to the multiple classes of chemicals required for laboratory operations, as well as the interior location requiring indoor chemical storage, preventative maintenance is essential to ensure that all controls and equipment are ensuring a reduction of risk. Lab equipment including chemical containers, storage, ventilation systems and PPE must remain in good condition to reduce the hazards associated with laboratory chemicals.
Some general housekeeping tasks for your laboratory chemical storage may include ensuring that:
To ensure that chemical hazards are controlled, make sure you include the following in your preventative maintenance checklist for your lab equipment and apparatus:
Need a safety cabinet checklist?
Safety audits and inspections are of no use if action is not taken when a fault or hazard is discovered. When you create a preventative maintenance plan, you’ll need clear procedures, so staff know how to respond.
These corrective procedures might include:
Your maintenance program should be well documented and subject to regular review. You’ll also need to adapt and update your program whenever you start using new chemicals, introduce new equipment or machinery, or when the job site experiences major change.
Preventative maintenance is an essential step in a compliant risk management plan. To learn how to develop a comprehensive risk management plan and achieve compliance, download our free eBook How to manage the risk of Hazardous Chemicals in the workplace. It’s easy to read and contains the tools and templates you need to get started. Plus, this helpful resource is free.