Predictive IR Scanning Keeps a Major Sawmill Running

612Assets Tracked

A multi-year electrical infrared program across a major Canadian forest-products operator — every panel, drive, and connection catalogued, graded, and trended so failures became scheduled maintenance instead of emergencies.

Traffic-Light Severity Grading

The challenge

A high-output sawmill runs its electrical infrastructure hard. Motor drives, distribution panels, and hundreds of bolted connections all carry heavy, continuous load — and when one fails without warning, the whole line stops. Before this program, the operator had no asset-level visibility into electrical condition. Problems showed up as breakdowns, not warnings, and every emergency repair meant unplanned downtime and overtime.

Our approach

We built a structured, repeatable infrared program rather than a one-off scan. Every inspectable asset — panels, disconnects, drives, transformers, and connections — was given a unique identifier and catalogued into a tracked inventory of 612 assets.

• Each asset scanned under genuine operating load by a Level II Thermographer
• Every anomaly logged with a thermal and visual image, temperature rise (ΔT), and a severity grade
• A three-tier traffic-light grading system — green, amber, red — so priorities are obvious at a glance
• Findings trended year over year to catch slow-developing degradation

What we found

Across the program we surfaced high-resistance connections, overloaded and imbalanced circuits, and failing terminations running hot well before any visible sign. Each was documented with a clear corrective action and priority, letting the maintenance team fix the worst offenders during planned windows.

Why It Works Heat is the earliest visible symptom of an electrical fault. A connection runs hot for weeks or months before it fails — tracking that trend turns an invisible risk into a line item on a maintenance schedule.

The outcome

By cataloguing and trending the full asset base, electrical failures shifted from emergencies to scheduled maintenance. The operator gained a living record of electrical health they could plan around, budget against, and hand to their insurer as proof of due diligence — and the line keeps running.

Turn failures into scheduled work

See what a tracked, trended infrared program would surface in your facility before it becomes downtime.