Construction and maintenance
Construction and maintenance
Maintenance is the process of ensuring that buildings and other assets retain a good appearance and operate at optimum efficiency. Inadequate maintenance can result in decay, degradation and reduced performance and can affect heath and threaten the safety of users, occupants and others in the vicinity.
Depending on its design, quality of materials and workmanship, function and location, buildings deteriorate at different rates and require different levels of attention. No building will ever be maintenance-free, but the quality of the design and workmanship can minimise the level required.
Maintenance can help:
- Prevent the process of decay and degradation.
- Maintain structural stability and safety.
- Prevent unnecessary damage from the weather or from general usage.
- Optimise performance.
- Help inform plans for renovation, refurbishment, retrofitting or new buildings.
- Determine the causes of defects and so help prevent re-occurrence or repetition.
- Ensure continued compliance with statutory requirements.
- For maintenance to be most effective, it should be organised through a programme of cyclical maintenance. At the most basic level, this includes daily routines and works upwards to periodic programmes of weekly, monthly, semi-annual, annual, quinquennial and so on routines.
Maintenance can be classified as:
- Planned maintenance: Carried out on a regular basis, such as servicing boilers.
- Preventive maintenance: Carried out in order to keep something in working order or extend its life, such as replacing cracked roofing tiles before inclement weather.
- Corrective maintenance: This involves repairing something that has broken, such as a window or guttering.
- Front-line maintenance: This involves maintaining something while it is still in use, such as repainting and decorating an occupied building.
- Proactive maintenance: Maintenance work that is undertaken to avoid failures or to identify defects that could lead to failure.
- Reliability centred maintenance: A combination of maintenance strategies used to ensure a physical asset continues to function correctly.
- Scheduled maintenance: Preventive maintenance carried out in accordance with predetermined intervals, number of operations, hours run, and so on.