5 Ways to Leverage Your Inspection Data for Greater Impact

New builds get a lot of attention, but it’s ongoing maintenance that keeps the lights on. If we want to protect the grid, we need to find ways to get the most value out of our maintenance work, like pole inspections. 

Pole inspections help us identify and combat rot, bugs, pole strikes, weather, and other threats to infrastructure to make sure communities get the services they need. They aren’t just a regulatory requirement or an administrative task to avoid lawsuits. 

The pole inspections process and results from inspections can be used to inform other work as well. Here are five ways you can leverage pole inspections to get the most out of your maintenance dollars.

1) Selecting Inspection Locations Using Permitting Data

Utilities have to inspect a certain number of poles every year, but which poles they choose to inspect matters. Random sampling helps give a broad snapshot but it doesn’t consider other incoming data to make informed decisions about the best locations to inspect. 

But, if we account for and consider the permitting process and make ready applications when picking pole inspection locations, we can stretch dollars and data farther to get a bigger picture of the grid. 

If a feeder is selected for inspection, but 75% of that feeder was recently collected for a new attachment application, why not select a different area to inspect? After all, you’re already going to get the attacher’s data and your own subs’ data on those assets. Instead of getting a third dataset, shift the inspection plan to an area where you’re lacking recent records. This lets you optimize data intake so you can get a more holistic view of your footprint and grid health. 

2) Double Wood Resolution

Pole inspections directly affect double wood conditions. When a pole fails inspection and needs to be replaced, it triggers the attachment transfer process, which, when it lags, creates double wood conditions that further jeopardize the grid. 

Better management and oversight from inspection to replacement to stub pole removal helps avoid double wood by speeding up the entire process. 

Pole inspections can also help address the backlog of double wood conditions and stubs by providing 1) critical data of where it already exists to help resolve it, and 2) by helping predict where it will occur to make sure the process is initiated smoothly. 

3) Hardening the Grid 

Just because a pole isn’t failing inspection doesn’t mean that we should ignore it for the next ten years (or until it gets inspected again). Inspection data can identify poles that could create issues or are located in critical areas and will need to be monitored by noting vulnerabilities from flooding, winds, or vegetation. 

4) Emergency Response 

That same info is incredibly helpful for emergency response in the aftermath of storms. We can deploy crews faster when we’re aware of potential vulnerabilities, even if the pole wasn’t failing inspection. Accurate, detailed, and up-to-date records can improve emergency response measures to get the lights back on faster. 

5) Identifying Areas for Upgrades 

Inspections (and recent data from the field in general!) help identify places in need of upgrades where dollars can have the greatest impact. Reliability efforts benefit from inspection results, location data, customer demands, community development, and other data points.

As we build a more robust grid that handles greater loads, it’s incredibly helpful to understand what areas are in jeopardy, not just which poles are failing. This, plus projected needs, age of equipment, and more, can help teams be proactive in improving the grid. 

When we see data as a one-and-done resource, we miss its full potential. The sooner we start reusing and repurposing data, the more we can do with it.

Find out how Katapult Pro can help you get more out of your data!

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